Tag: policy

Today’s blacklisted American: UCLA threatens to expell remote student for not revealing his COVID shot status

11:49 am

Dictatorial clowns are running UCLA
Dictatorial clowns are running UCLA.

They’re coming for you next: Christian Walker, an online student who never comes on campus was threatened with expulsion by UCLA if he did not reveal whether he had gotten his COVID shots or not.

“You are calling to tell me you will drop my classes after we’ve already paid $70,000 for the year if I don’t upload something about my vaccine status when all of my classes are online,” Walker is heard saying in his video. A UCLA official responded, “Correct.” “Got it.” responded Walker.

“All of my classes are online. I don’t step onto campus. I’ve already paid. We’re a week into classes. My university just called to tell me they are dropping my classes if I don’t report to them about my vaccination.” Walker commented on Twitter.

You can listen to Walker’s recording of this conversation at the link.
» Read more

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Viewing tonight’s Endurance launch with four astronauts

9:25 am

NASA has published an updated schedule for the launch tonight of four astronauts to ISS in SpaceX’s new Endurance Dragon capsule.

The launch now is targeted for no earlier than 9:03 p.m. EST Wednesday, Nov. 10, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch follows a successful return of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission.

The Crew Dragon Endurance is scheduled to dock to the space station at 7:10 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11. Launch and docking coverage will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.

You can also watch it on SpaceX’s website, as well as the embedded live stream below, which begins around 4 pm (Eastern).

This will be the fourth manned flight SpaceX has launched for NASA, the fifth overall using three spacecraft.
» Read more

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NASA admits manned lunar landing can’t happen before ’25

3:37 pm

NASA administrator Bill Nelson admitted today that the goal of landing Americans back on the Moon by 2024 was impossible, and that the agency has now delayed that target date one year to 2025.

Nelson attempted to blame the delay on Blue Origin’s lawsuit against NASA for its award of the manned lunar lander contract to SpaceX.

He blamed the shifting timeline on a lawsuit over the agency’s moon lander, to be built by SpaceX, and delays with NASA’s Orion capsule, which is to fly astronauts to lunar orbit. “We’ve lost nearly seven months in litigation, and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025,” Mr. Nelson said, adding that NASA will need to have more detailed discussions with SpaceX to set a more specific timeline.

This however is a bald-faced lie. The Trump 2024 deadline was never realistic. Moreover, delays in SLS and Orion have been continuous and ongoing for years, all of which made a ’24 landing quite difficult and if attempted extremely unsafe. Even as it is, trying this mission by ’25 is risky, especially if it depends on SLS. Moreover, as the article notes, how SLS, Orion, and SpaceX’s Starship will team up to get this mission — designed by a committee — to and from the Moon remains exceedingly unclear.

With great confidence I predict that if the lunar mission depends on SLS in any manner, it will not launch in ’25 either.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Hiring white men a sin at major investment firm

11:27 am

Discriminated against in Seattle
Eagerly discriminated against at
State Street Global Advisors

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Not only has the investment firm State Street Global Advisor, one of the largest in the world, decided that white men must be considered last in any hiring decision, the company has installed a race- and sex-based apartheid system designed to favor those groups in all matters.

The company aims to triple the number of Black, Asian and other minority staff in senior positions by 2023, the Sunday Times reported. If executives don’t meet the target, they will face lowered bonuses.

Recruiters will now have to establish panels of four or five employees, including a woman and a person with a minority background, when hiring middle management staff. The firm will still hire white men, [said Jess McNicholas, the bank’s head of inclusion, diversity and corporate citizenship in London,] but recruiters are required to show that women and minority applicants were interviewed by the panels.

The company is pledging to “hold ourselves accountable for strengthening black and Latinx owned businesses.”

The comments to this policy at the link are astonishing in their almost uniform hostility to this discriminatory policy. This is a typical comment:
» Read more

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Japan’s Epsilon rocket launches nine smallsats

9:07 am

Japan today successfully launched nine small satellites into orbit using its smallsat Epsilon rocket.

The article at the link provides a detailed description of all the satellites, which are either testing new technology or were built by college students for educational purposes, including a satellite built by Vietnamese engineers.

Epsilon itself has only flown five times since its first launch in 2013, which suggests its price is high and thus it does not attract many customers.

This was Japan’s second launch in 2021, which means it does not make the leader board. The leaders in the 2021 launch race remains as follows:

41 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

China still leads the U.S. 41 to 36 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: If you are unvaxxed you are banned from hospital care in Colorado

10:55 am

Coming to your town in America soon!
Death camps are coming for the unclean unvaccinated.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: It appears it wasn’t enough to ban one woman in Colorado from receiving a desperately needed kidney transplant because she and her donor had not gotten their COVID shots. Now, Jared Polis, the Democratic Party governor of Colorado, has told all hospitals in the state to ban everyone from getting treatment if they refuse to get the experimental drugs being touted, falsely, as vaccines against COVID.

Polis’ order reportedly gives health care professionals the authority to prioritize crisis care under the direction of the state health department. “If you are unvaccinated, a regular trip to the grocery store, a night out to dinner are more dangerous than they have been at any point during this pandemic,” Polis said, according to NBC News. “The delta variant is brutally effective at seeking out the unvaccinated, like a laser-guided missile.”

“While the state has a nearly 80 percent partial vaccination rate, unvaccinated people with severe Covid-19 are overwhelming hospitals, many of which reported being over 90 percent capacity,” said Scott Bookman, Covid-19 incident commander for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The language of this executive order makes it clear that it authorizes discrimination against those who are not vaccinated for COVID-19.

Polis’ order was likely issued in response to the kidney transplant story in order to give the state’s hospitals some political cover as they ramp up their discrimination against those who refuse to get the experimental COVID shots.

Some news reports suggest that this order really only applies to elective treatments, but that does not appear to be the case. The actual order states:
» Read more

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Crew on China’s space station complete first spacewalk

9:17 am

The crew on China’s Tianhe space station have successfully completed their first spacewalk, with two astronauts spending 6.5 hours on the exterior of the station, testing their new spacesuits, the station’s robot arm, and the overall equipment used during such outside activities.

Zhai Zhigang was doing his second spacewalk, the first in thirteen years. Wang Yaping was doing her first, which made her the first Chinese woman to walk in space. This was her second space mission, the first in 2013 when she was the second Chinese woman fly in space.

The third crew member, Ye Guangfu, stayed on aboard the station to coordinate activities with the crew outside.

The crew is expected to do one to two more spacewalks during the rest of their six month mission. During that time two more large modules will be launched to the station.

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Endeavour undocking from ISS delayed one day; Endurance launch still set for November 10th

9:03 am

Because of high winds, the undocking of Endeavour from ISS was delayed from yesterday until today, with the landing now set for later this evening.

If conditions are favorable Monday, Crew-2 astronauts Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide and Thomas Pesquet will enter their Crew Dragon capsule currently attached to the International Space Station and depart at 2:05 p.m. ET. Splashdown in one of seven potential landing sites off the Florida coast is expected about eight hours later at 10:33 p.m. ET.

The 24-hour delay from Sunday to Monday, however, didn’t impact the timing for another crew waiting to swap positions. Crew-3 astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, and Matthias Maurer are prepping for their Falcon 9 launch currently scheduled for no earlier than 9:03 p.m. Wednesday. Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A will host.

Both NASA and SpaceX want to get Endeavour back to Earth, as it has already exceeded the six month time it is designed (at present) to stay in space.

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China begins in-orbit test of what it claims is a “space debris mitigation” satellite

9:43 am

The Space Force has now detected a second object flying next to a recently launched Chinese satellite that China claims will do an in-orbit test of a “space debris mitigation” system.

On Nov. 3 U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron (SPCS) catalogued a new object alongside Shijian-21 with the international designator 2021-094C. The object is noted as a rocket body and more precisely an apogee kick motor (AKM), used in some launches for a satellite to circularize and lower the inclination of its transfer orbit and enter geostationary orbit.

Apogee kick motors usually perform a final maneuver after satellite separation so as to not pose a threat to active satellites through risk of collision. However both Shijian-21 and the SJ-21 AKM are side by side in geostationary orbit.

The close proximity of the two objects strongly suggests Chinese engineers plan to use the satellite in some manner to capture the AKM in order to de-orbit it.

While China is likely testing methods for capturing and removing space debris, using this AKM, it could also be testing military technologies, such the ability to snatch working satellites it does not own from orbit. The lack of transparency can only make everyone suspicious.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches three earth observation satellites

9:02 am

China today used its Long March 2D rocket to launch three more earth observation satellites, which could be for civilian or military use.

No word also on whether the first stage carried any grid fins or parachutes to control its return to Earth, or whether it crashed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

41 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 41 to 36 in the national rankings.

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China launches Landsat-type satellite using Long March 6

2:04 pm

China today successfully placed a Landsat-type satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit, using its Long March 6 rocket. From the link:

The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center sits at an altitude of approximately 1,500 meters (4,920 feet) above sea level, its dry climate making it an ideal launch site for the Chinese space program. Unlike the Kennedy Space Center or the Guyana Space Centre, however, Taiyuan is located inland rather than on China’s eastern coast. This means spent rocket stages can crash-land near populated regions depending on the rocket’s flight trajectory.

Some recent flights of [Long March] rockets have featured parachutes and even grid fins mounted on the first stage boosters, presumably in an attempt to mitigate any collateral damage caused by falling debris. Friday’s launch did not see this type of hardware in place.

No word yet on where the first stage booster landed, or if it landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

40 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 40 to 36 in the national rankings. Its forty successful launches so far this year is the most by a single nation since Russia completed 49 in 1994.

This was also the 100th successful launch this year. Based on the number of planned launches presently scheduled,, that number could easily rise to more than 125, the most since the early 1980s.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Rutgers bars student from remote classes because he had not gotten COVID shots

11:57 am

Clowns in charge at Rutgers
Clowns in charge at Rutgers

They’re coming for you next: Logan Hollar, a student at Rutgers University, was blocked by the college from his university email account as well as attending remote classes because he refuses to get any of the COVID-19 shots that the school is now requiring.

Logan Hollar, 22, told NJ.com he largely ignored the school’s coronavirus mandate “because all my classes were remote” from his Sandyston home, a distance of some 70 miles from the university’s principle campus in New Brunswick.

But he was locked out of his Rutgers email and related accounts when he went to pay his tuition at the end of last month — and was told he needed to be vaccinated even though he has no plans to attend in person, according to the report. “I’ll probably have to transfer to a different university,” Hollar told NJ.com, revealing at least one other student to his knowledge is in the same position.

“I find it concerning for the vaccine to be pushed by the university rather than my doctor,” he told the outlet. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is the bottom line. » Read more

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NASA runs out of money for building second SLS mobile launcher

9:37 am

SLS's two mobile launchers, costing $1 billion
NASA’s bloated SLS mobile launchers

NASA has had to halt construction of the second mobile launcher platform for its SLS rocket because the agency has run out of money.

Overall, NASA spent almost a billion dollars on the first launcher (to be used only three times), and now has budgeted almost a half billion dollars for the second.

That’s about $1.4 billion, and apparently it is not enough.

The second Mobile Launcher (ML-2) has a cost estimate of $450 million. However, like ML-1, that cost is likely to rise over time based on the challenges involving ML-1, which ranged from being overweight to suffering from a slight lean. Both of these issues have since been resolved via engineering solutions. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate more NASA incompetence. The first platform was designed and built badly, being too heavy for its purposes while also improperly tilting sideways The agency had to spend a lot of money and time fixing these problems.

Meanwhile, SpaceX moves its Starship spaceship and Superheavy booster about in Boca Chica using simple truck movers that probably cost the company no more than a million dollars each, if that. And they became operational quickly, and are now in use.

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Astra proposes its own 13,000 satellite internet constellation

9:17 pm

Capitalism in space: Astra, the startup smallsat rocket company that has yet to successfully complete an orbital launch, has filed with the FCC a proposal to launch a 13,000 satellite constellation for providing internet services globally.

Astra said its satellites would be built in-house, and would be launched on Astra’s own rockets. The satellites would be sent into orbital altitudes ranging from 236 to 435 miles (380 to 700 kilometers), and would be equipped with propulsion systems to aid in collision avoidance and post-operational deorbiting.

Potential applications for Astra’s high-bandwidth connectivity would include communications services, environmental and natural resource applications and national security missions.

Though Astra could certainly launch many of these satellites itself, it is unlikely it launch them all with its small rocket. Thus, more launch business for other rocket companies!

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Weather forces another delay for Endurance launch to ISS

9:05 pm

Because of poor weather expected on November 7 evening NASA and SpaceX have once again delayed the launch of the manned Dragon capsule Endurance carrying four astronauts to ISS.

The U.S. space agency and SpaceX have pushed the launch of the Crew-3 mission, which will send four astronauts to the International Space Station, from Saturday (Nov. 6) to Monday (Nov. 8) at the earliest, because of anticipated bad weather over the coming days.

NASA and SpaceX are also now considering whether to bring the four astronauts of the previous mission, Crew-2, back down to Earth before sending Crew-3 skyward.

The reason they might bring the crew home first is because the capsule they will be using, Endeavour, is only rated to stay in space for seven months, and the end of that time period is approaching. If they wait much longer, the mediocre November weather could prevent a return before that end date is reached.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Ivy league professor to fail two students for not wearing masks

10:55 am

Monger email asking students to snitch on others
Click for original screen capture.

Persecution is now cool! Bruce Monger, the director of undergraduate studies for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, has told his students in an email that he is failing two of them, not for bad classwork or poor test grades, but because they did not wear their masks properly in class.

His email was a request to all his students to help him identify these two students, or to put it more honestly, to snitch on them.

To the right is a screen capture of that email, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here.

Interestingly, Monger’s threat does not follow university policy, and is likely one that in a just world would get him in trouble, not the students.
» Read more

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Court denies Blue Origin’s suit against NASA lunar lander contract award to SpaceX

10:17 am

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims yesterday denied Blue Origin’s suit against NASA’s lunar lander contract award to SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

NASA has immediately said it “will resume work with SpaceX under the Option A contract as soon as possible.”

I guess Blue Origin might have to consider the idea of actually building stuff now.

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Astronomers release fantasy proposals for government telescopes in the 2020s

8:54 am

The astronomical community today released its newest decadal survey, a outline of what major new telescope projects that community recommends the federal government should fund for the next ten years.

More details here.

This is I think the seventh such decadal survey since the first in the early 1960s. In the past these surveys prompted the construction of numerous space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and many others. Until 2000 these survey were enormously influential, which is why space-based astronomy boomed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now I call it a fantasy because I think it unlikely that most of its proposals — especially the space-based projects — will see fruition, based on the recent history in this century. For example, the 2001 survey recommended the James Webb Space Telescope among many other recommendations. The cost overruns of that project however eventually caused almost all the other space-based proposals to be cancelled, not only in the 2000s but in the 2010s as well. Furthermore, the 2010 survey called for the building of WFIRST, another Webb-like big space telescope that is now called the Roman Telescope, and that project’s high cost and complexity has further forced the elimination of almost all other new space telescopes. Nor has Roman been built and launched in the 2010s as proposed. It is still under development, with the same kinds of cost orverruns and delayed seen with Webb, which means in the 2020s most of the new proposals in this latest decadal survey will have to take a back seat to it, and will likely never get built.

Prove of my analysis is in the report’s press release:

The first mission to enter this program should be an infrared/optical/ultraviolet (IR/O/UV) telescope — significantly larger than the Hubble Space Telescope — that can observe planets 10 billion times fainter than their star, and provide spectroscopic data on exoplanets, among other capabilities. The report says this large strategic mission is of an ambitious scale that only NASA can undertake and for which the U.S. is uniquely situated to lead. At an estimated cost of $11 billion, implementation of this IR/O/UV telescope could begin by the end of the decade, after the mission and technologies are matured, and a review considers it ready for implementation. If successful, this would lead to a launch in the first half of the 2040 decade. [emphasis mine]

Proposing something that won’t be built for two decades is absurd. And the cost is even more absurd, as it is ten times what Hubble cost and seems more designed as a long term jobs program where nothing will get built but money will continue to pour in endlessly to the contractors and astronomers hired. That is what Webb and Roman essentially became.

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Boeing wins FCC approval for its own satellite internet constellation

11:45 pm

Capitalism in space: After four years of review, the FCC has finally approved a license for Boeing to launch its own internet constellation of 147 satellites.

The license requires Boeing to launch half the constellation by ’27, with the rest in orbit by ’30.

The real significance of this constellation, combined with those being launched by SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon, and even the Chinese, is that they are creating a gigantic demand for launch services. A lot of rockets of all kinds from many companies are going to be needed to put in orbit the tens of thousands of satellites now proposed.

Such demand, should it continue, guarantees that launch costs will drop, because there will be a lot of business and competition to force the costs down.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Parents threatened by Child Protective Services for protecting their kids from COVID

12:24 pm

Owned by government

Today’s blacklist story illustrates that no one is safe from the oppressive thumb of government, not even those who are clearly liberal and generally support Democrats. In this case we have the parents of two children, Eli and Kavitha Kasargod-Staub, who decided to keep the kids from their Washington, D.C., school because of their continuing concerns about COVID. As a result they were threatened with losing custody of those children by child protective services.

Kavitha Kasargod-Staub was looking forward to sending her two kids back to elementary school this fall. After a year of remote learning in Washington, D.C., her kids spent the summer attending day camp. “I’m certainly not in the group of people who avoid all Covid risk,” she said, adding that camp activities were outdoors and there was testing for children if someone was exposed to the virus.

But by August, Kasargod-Staub and her husband were watching Delta variant cases rise across the region. When her husband went to the school to review its safety protocols, he left alarmed, having learned that the HVAC system was broken and there was no plan for outdoor eating. Kasaragod-Staub, who had served as PTA president the year before, called up the principal to discuss. “The policies were vague, everyone was scrambling, so we decided to keep [our kids] home for the first week of school in the hopes that [D.C. Public Schools] would realize they made a mistake and catch up with things like testing and outdoor eating,” she told The Intercept. “It feels a little dumb now, but I genuinely thought things would change and they’d figure safety stuff out.”

Things didn’t change, and the children stayed home. Pretty soon, Kasargod-Staub was notified that her family was being referred to D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency due to her kids’ unexcused absences. “I have a lot of privilege, I know the system, and it was still terrifying,” she said. “My mind immediately goes to, ‘Where will this lead? Are they going to take away my kids?’”

Kasargod-Staub was soon contacted by a government social worker for an intake call. “The person I spoke to said, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t have any sense of where this will go,’” she recalled. About a week and a half later, things escalated, and child protective services called to schedule a home visit. [emphasis mine]

Though the parents began teaching the kids using a variety of home-school programs, they had not officially removed their kids from the school, which would allow them to claim they were home-schooling them. Nor had they qualified for remote learning, because “D.C. Public Schools … requires a doctor to certify that virtual school is necessary.” Thus, the arrival of child protective services, which became increasingly threatening, step-by-step, first by asking the questions that were more and more invasive and inappropriate. Then,
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