Both Russia and China successfully completed launches yesterday. Russia launched a military reconnaissance satellite using its Soyuz-2 rocket. China in turn launched a communications satellite using its Long March 3B rocket.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
31 China
21 SpaceX
14 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. still leads China 32 to 31 in the national rankings.
A new website has been established listing all the law firms available for fighting the Biden administration’s new Nazi vaccine mandates. As stated at the site:
[M]ost people (i.e. the people who just do what they are told by their employer, the government, or the narrative) do not know the law, so they believe that vaccine and mask mandates can be enforced. However, this is not true. This is when you will have to push back and contact an attorney to get advice.
I hope this helps you because now is the time to stand up to this kind of injustice and draconian medical tyranny. [emphasis mine]
The site not only lists a number of national legal organizations for filing lawsuits, it lists law firms, by state, that have said they will take these cases. It also adds this:
If you are Part of a Law Firm that would like to be added to The List, please email us at contact@fightthemandates.info.
As the website states, now is the time to stand up and fight. No more nice guy. Challenge these thugs, led by Democrat Joe Biden, in every way possible. Do not submit. Do not agree. Make them sweat.
I have never worn a mask, and continue to refuse to. Though this has denied me healthcare (no eye surgeon who does cataract surgeries nor will any lung doctor see me), I will not bow to this idiocy. I am now finding that some doctors will back down if I push hard enough.
Make them back down. Make them aware that their mask policies and new vaccine requirements are evil and you will not comply. You might not win, but if you do not fight you will have lost before the battle has even begun.
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: What Jimmy Kimmel wants.
Genocide is coming: According to television show host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have not gotten the Wuhan flu shots, whether by choice or medical necessity, should be denied access to health care in hospitals.
“It was not a fun Labor Day weekend COVID-wise,” Kimmel said in his post-holiday monologue. “Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed.”
He added, “That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.‘” [emphasis mine]
So much for the left’s endless mantra, “Healthcare is a right!” Kimmel is a typical leftist who deep inside is really “a totalitarian screaming to get out.” He now thinks it is okay to treat some humans as subhuman, because they happen to have made some decisions in life he disagrees with.
» Read more
NASA today announced that it and the European Space Agency have scheduled the Ariane 5 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana for December 18, 2021.
The agency set the new target launch date in coordination with Arianespace after Webb recently and successfully completed its rigorous testing regimen – a major turning point for the mission. The new date also follows Arianespace successfully launching an Ariane 5 rocket in late July and scheduling a launch that will precede Webb. The July launch was the first for an Ariane 5 since August 2020.
Launching before the end of ’21 will allow NASA to claim that Webb is only be ten years behind schedule, not eleven. The cost overruns however remain astronomical (no pun intended). Initially budgeted at $500 million, Webb is now estimated to have cost $10 billion.
Once launched the telescope will take about six months to slowly move to its Lagrange point location about a million miles from the Earth, in the Earth’s shadow. During that time it will also be steadily deploying its many segmented mirror for infrared observations (an important detail as Webb is not a replacement for Hubble, which does most of its observations in the optical wavelengths).
Should deployment and placement go as planned, Webb will undoubtedly do ground-breaking astronomy, especially in the field of deep space cosmology. If anything should go wrong, any repair mission will take at a minimum five years to mount, if ever.
Keep those fingers and toes crossed!
A report released today [pdf] by NASA’s inspector general has found that NASA’s management of its infrastructure projects — designed to replace or upgrade existing facilities — is badly organized and routinely leads to cost overruns and delays.
According to the report, NASA has been spending about $359 million per year on its infrastructure for the past five years, about $1.8 billion. And what have we gotten from this spending? This quote from the report sums it up nicely:
Of the 20 [Construction of Facilities] projects we reviewed, 6 incurred significant cost overruns ranging from $2.2 million to $36.6 million and 16 of the projects are 3 months to more than 3 years behind their initial schedules. Costs increased primarily because requirements were not fully developed by the Agency before construction began, requirements were not fully understood by contractors, and contract prices were higher than originally estimated. Delays occurred because projects faced postponed start times and changing requirements, among other reasons. Finally, NASA did not provide effective oversight to determine whether the Agency’s portfolio of [Construction of Facilities] projects met cost, schedule, and performance goals. [Facilities and Real Estate Division] has failed to consistently keep up with oversight requirements of approved and funded projects and current oversight guidance does not align with Agency facility goals. [emphasis mine]
But don’t worry. Congress is about to pour several more billion dollars into NASA’s coffers for infrastructure work. I am sure the agency will figure out ways to go overbudget and behind schedule with this money as well.
For more than twenty years I have seen government-run projects fail miserably, across the board, Whether it be big rockets, high speed trains, military actions in foreign countries, foreign intelligence, or health policies in response to new viruses, our government routinely fails, its effort quickly falling far behind schedule while costing many times its initial budget. Worst of all, the final product is often useless or completely unable to achieve its initial stated goals.
And yet, Americans don’t seem to notice. We still turn first to government for everything. Too many of us depend on the CDC for our health advice, though its advice has been repeatedly mistaken, inconsistent, or just plain wrong for years. Others think NASA is the only one who can build and launch a manned space mission, though almost all of its in-house manned projects have been disasters for decades.
And above all, we must use our military to shape and reshape nations worldwide, though our military has done poorly in almost every war it has fought since World War II.
There are exceptions to all this, but the overall pattern is clear. As Tucker Carlson said recently, “We are led by buffoons.”
» Read more
No freedom of speech allowed in the software
and gaming industries.
They’re coming for you next: John Gipson, the co-founder and president of the software game company Tripwire, has been forced to step down because he had the nerve to issue a single tweet expressing support for Texas’s new anti-abortion law.
The tweet quickly generated intense controversy. Many individual gamers called for a boycott of Tripwire’s games, sharing tips on how to hide listings for its products in Steam’s online game store or making donations to women’s charities in Mr Gibson’s name.
Supporters of the Texas law also responded, with the original tweet clocking up nearly 13,000 replies.
But Shipwright Studios, a “work-for-hire” studio that contributed to some of Tripwire’s games, wrote it was ending a three-year relationship because of Mr Gibson’s comments. “While your politics are your own, the moment you make them a matter of public discourse you entangle all of those working for and with you,” Shipwright Studios said. “We cannot in good conscience continue to work with Tripwire under the current leadership… [and] will begin the cancellation of our existing contracts”.
Tom Banner studios, the creator of one of the games that Tripwire publishes (Chivalry 2), also came out condemning Gibson, as did several of his partners at Tripwire.
So what evil thing did Gibson say? Here is the entire content of his tweet:
» Read more
Capitalism in space: The first planned orbital Superheavy booster, prototype #4, has been moved back to the orbital launch site, this time with all of its 29 engines fully installed.
It appears SpaceX engineers are about to begin an extensive test campaign of this booster and its engines. They need to test the fueling of all 29 engines. They need to test fire the engines as a unit. And they need to do a full static fire of them all to see if they will work together as planned.
All these tests, which based on SpaceX’s past pace, will likely take about three to four weeks, which means that the orbital test flight cannot occurr before the end of September, as previously guessed. More likely they will not be ready to fly before the end of October, at the soonest.
That schedule is also impacted by the FAA’s bureaucracy, which still needs to approve the environmental assessment required before any Starship orbital flight. That approval process has been ongoing, but could still take several more months, especially if the effort by some fearful environmentalists to stop the flight gains political momentum.
Screen capture of explosion from Everyday Astronaut live stream.
When the range officer was forced to terminate the first launch of Firefly’s Alpha rocket on September 2, 2021, the subsequent explosion caused some of the debris to apparently fall near the spectators who had come out to see the launch.
Spectators who gathered across the Central Coast to watch the launch of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket — a privately designed, unmanned rocket built to carry satellites — instead saw it explode midair and debris rain down on nearby areas.
“I saw this thing floating down from the sky … then another piece, then another, and then hundreds of pieces varying in size were falling,” said Mike Hecker, a resident of Solvang who was out mountain biking in the Orcutt Hills with a large group of friends. “It was surreal to have rocket debris raining down on you,” he said.
According to all reports, it appears no one was injured or even came close to getting hurt.
We need to accept such things if we wish to do great things. The range officer destroyed the rocket to make sure it did not fly in one piece into anything on the ground, something that would have certainly caused great harm. Blowing it up prevented that, though it resulted in a small risk that smaller pieces might hit something.
Once, a story like this would have been intriguing but would have bothered no one. In today’s culture — which attempts to give everyone a “safe space” even from dissenting opinions — I fear that we shall find greater restrictions soon placed on launches.
The intolerance sweeping through our country has become so mindless that it repeatedly ends up being completely insane. It now appears that the website of the National Archives, which is also tasked with preserving the originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, automatically places a “harmful language alert” on all three.
The screen capture to the right shows the National Archives webpage for viewing the first page of the Constitution. The red box indicates the alert. That alert also appears at the top for every other page of the Constitution. It also appears if you view the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. (You can see screen captures of these additional alerts here and here.)
According to the National Archives, this “harmful language alert” exists because it is tasked with preserving all past documents, and thus must also make available to the public documents that:
» Read more
The new colonial movement: In a somewhat bold move, Chinese engineers appear to now be shifting the Chang’e-5 orbiter so that it will be able to return to lunar space to fly past the Moon.
The orbiter, one of four distinct Chang’e-5 mission spacecraft, delivered a return module containing 1.731 kilograms of lunar samples to Earth Dec. 16 before firing its engines to deep space for an extended mission.
The Chang’e-5 orbiter later successfully entered an intended orbit around Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, roughly 1.5 million kilometers, in March. There it carried out tests related to orbit control and observations of the Earth and Sun.
New data from satellite trackers now suggests Chang’e-5 has left its orbit around Sun-Earth L1 and is destined for a lunar flyby early September 9 Eastern time.
This data comes not from China but from amateur astronomers who specialize in tracking satellites.
The fly-by could provide the spacecraft the velocity it needs to reach near Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa, which China has said it is targeting for a 2024 sample return mission. Such a reconnaissance will help them design the sample return mission.
According to China’s state-run press, the country launched an “earth observation” satellite today using its Long March 4C rocket.
The satellite is part of a series of similar satellites launched by civilian agencies ostensibly for civilian use. The rocket was launched from an interior spaceport. No word on whether its first stage carried grid fins or parachutes to control its landing in the interior of China, or whether it crashed near habitable areas.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
30 China
21 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. lead over China in the national rankings has now narrowed to 32 to 30.
The House science committee is about to propose a NASA budget that would cut all funding for a lunar lander but add $4 billion so that NASA can build new buildings and facilities.
An updated draft of the bill, dated Sept. 4, offers good and bad news for NASA. It includes $4 billion for “repair, recapitalization, and modernization of physical infrastructure and facilities” across the agency. The bill does not assign amounts to specific projects or centers.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had made funding for agency infrastructure a priority in any budget reconciliation package, seeking more than $5 billion earlier this year. “There’s aging infrastructure that is dilapidated,” he told House appropriators in May. “They’ve got holes in the roof where they’re putting together the core of the SLS” at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Michoud suffered additional damage from Hurricane Ida last month.
However, the draft bill includes nothing for the other priority identified by Nelson, the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) program. Nelson said in May he wanted $5.4 billion for HLS to allow NASA to select a second company alongside SpaceX to develop and demonstrate a lander capable of transporting astronauts to and from the lunar surface.
Congratulations America! This is the Congress we have voted for. They want a space agency tasked with finding ways to explore the solar system but will only fund the “repair, recapitalization, and modernization of physical infrastructure and facilities” on Earth.
In other words, NASA will have gold-plated buildings in which they will be able to do nothing but shuffle paper because Congress has given them no funding to fly anything in space.
What a joke. But then, as I said, this is the Congress Americans have chosen, so that means not only is Congress a joke, so are the American people.
The House Armed Services committee voted yesterday to postpone the proposed establishment of the Space Force’s headquarters in Alabama.
The House Armed Services Committee on Thursday passed, with bipartisan agreement, Colorado Springs U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn’s amendment to the Fiscal Year 2022’s National Defense Authorization Act — an amendment that would prevent the move of the command to Huntsville, Ala., and work leading up to it, until after the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General complete their reviews of the decision.
Results of the GAO review, currently underway, are expected to be released in March, Chuck Young, managing director of public affairs for the agency, told The Gazette on Thursday.
This congressional action is not a surprise. The vested interests in Colorado, where a great bulk of the present military space operations are based, were not going to take the shift to Alabama lying down.
Posted still driving north to Las Vegas. (Don’t worry, I’m not doing the driving.)
Probably in response to the revelation of the flight issue, not an actual safety issue, the FAA has grounded Virgin Galactic from any further flights pending the resolution of the investigation of the July flight, which drifted out of its planned flight path due to high winds.
This will likely delay their planned next manned flight, which had been tentatively scheduled for September-October.
Posted on the way to Nevada.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Doesn’t exist at American University in DC.
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” American University in Washington, D.C., has now instituted a policy segregating students by race in a course on racism, with the segregation specifically designed to give minorities a “safe space.”
According to The Eagle, the university added a Black affinity course section to AUx2, a class where students learn about “race, social identity, and structures of power.” In the course, students will “evaluate how racism intersects with other systems of oppression.”
The student newspaper states that all-Black sections of the course began during the spring 2020 semester, an addition that had been considered for a few years. “We’ve definitely heard from Black students and other students of color that the material can be a lot for them because it is part of their lived experiences,” Izzi Stern, the AUx program manager told the student newspaper. “And we wanted to create a space where they could be together in community and have an overall positive experience with the course.”
An interesting essay published earlier this week in The Space Review raises the coming dilemma that both NASA and Congress will soon have to face once Starship is operational and launching large cargoes and crews to orbit, both near Earth and to the Moon.
That dilemma: What do about SLS and Lunar Gateway once it becomes ridiculously obvious that they are inferior vessels for future space travel?
I think this quote from the article more than any illustrates the reality that these government officials will soon have to deal with in some manner:
[When] the Lunar Starship ever docks with Gateway, the size comparison with Gateway will appear silly and beg the question as to whether Gateway is actually necessary. Does this even make sense? Couldn’t two Starships simply dock with each other and transfer propellant from one to another. Is there really a need for a middleman?
The author, Doug Plata, also notes other contrasts that will make SLS and Lunar Gateway look absurd, such as when two Starships begin transferring fuel in orbit or when a Starship launches 400 satellites in one go, or when a private Starship mission circles the Moon and returns to Earth for later reuse.
All of these scenarios are actually being planned, with the first something NASA itself is paying for, since the lunar landing Starship will dock with Lunar Gateway to pick up and drop off its passengers for the Moon.
The bottom line for Plata is that the federal government needs to stop wasting money on bad programs like SLS and Lunar Gateway and switch its focus to buying products from commercial sources like SpaceX. They will get far more bang for the buck, while actually getting something accomplished in space.
Though he uses different words, and has the advantage of recent events to reference, Plata is essentially repeating my recommendations from my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space [free pdf]. Plata draws as his proof for his argument the recent developments with Starship. I drew as my proof a comparison between SLS and what private commercial space was doing for NASA, as starkly illustrated by this one table:
The government has got to stop trying to build things, as it does an abysmal job. It instead must buy what it needs from private commercial vendors who know how to do it and have proven they can do it well.
If the government does this, will not only save money, it will fuel an American renaissance in space. As we see already beginning to see happen now in rocketry and the unmanned lunar landing business.
No freedom of speech allowed at Lyft!
The new dark age of silencing: A driver has been fired by Lyft because a passenger complained that he was listening to a racist on the radio, when in fact his radio was tuned to a black conservative.
Ryan Alexander, who had been a Lyft driver for years, tells “The Dan O’Donnell Show” that a Lyft representative told him during a phone call Saturday that his account was suspended because he had been listening to “racist talk radio programming,” a violation of the app’s terms of service.
Alexander says he was listening to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke fill in for Mark Belling during the “Mark Belling Late Afternoon Show” Thursday evening when a passenger took exception to the discussion Clarke was having about Black Lives Matter and abortion rates in the African-American community.
“She called Clarke trash, slammed the door to my car when she got out, and specifically referenced abortion which Clarke did talk about briefly while she was in the car,” Alexander says.
During the portion of the program that the passenger heard, Clarke, who is Black, expressed the opinion that the Black Lives Matter organization did not truly care about Black lives because it was not upset about the rate of abortions among Black mothers.
Link here. The article outlines the politics and negotiations now going on during the writing of the next astronomy decadal survey, the document American astronomers have published every decade since the 1960s to provide the science agencies in the federal government guidance on how to spend the taxpayers’ money on the next decade’s astronomy projects.
The focus is on the problems now faced by the two big American ground-based telescopes, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).
The future of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) likely depends on whether the survey recommends that NSF spend what sources put at $1.8 billion to support a recently forged partnership between the projects. If it does, other proposals could lose out, such as a continent-spanning radio array and detectors for neutrinos and other cosmic particles.
While some astronomers are pushing for this $1.8 billion bailout to save both, others are arguing the money can be better spent elsewhere. There is also a third option, not mentioned, which would be to abandon one of these telescopes and instead build just one.
The story is focused entirely on ground-based astronomy, which is remarkably very near-sighted for scientists whose job it is to see a far as possible. The future of astronomy is in space, and to not consider that alternative in this discussion means you aren’t considering all your options. For $1.8 billion, using private rockets and competitive construction approaches, I strongly believe a very large optical telescope could be launched that would provide far more cutting edge astronomy than any larger ground-based telescope. Hubble has proven that endlessly for the past thirty years.
What too many banks want to do to conservatives.
Today’s story is similar to my blacklist story two days ago about former national security advisor Michael Flynn [See the bottom of this post for an update on the Flynn story!]
Just as Flynn was blackballed by Chase bank, evangelist and motivational speaker Nick Vujicic found himself frozen out by his own bank because of his Christian, political, and pro-life beliefs.
Vujicic said he began to speak out against the innocent killing of unborn babies in March 2019. Within 16 weeks of doing that, he revealed, “we had a grenade at our house, a false magazine article published against me, a lawsuit threat, a spying drone, and a bank kicked me out.”
…”I got kicked out of a bank with no warning. They froze my credit cards, froze my debit cards,” he said. “They gave me a letter to say that they did a review of me as a client and they don’t want anything to do with me.”
What makes this story different from the Flynn story is that Vujicic responded by starting a project to found his own bank.
» Read more
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced slightly to post here, was taken by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. Looking west to the rim of Jezero Crater, it catches the Sun as it sets behind that rim.
The image was taken on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Seems somehow fitting to catch a sunset on Mars on this date, to illustrate how far we have come in that half century.
To my mind, not enough. Our ability to send robots to other worlds has certainly improved, but in 1969 we were able to put a human on another world. Since 1972 we no longer have had that capability, so that in 2021 all we can do is fly robots elsewhere.
It is time for this to change. I’d much prefer to make believe this photo was a sunrise suggesting a bright future, than the sunset it actually is, indicating a coming dark age.
