Tag: policy

NASA now demolishing the obsolete mobile launch platform used during Apollo

9:42 am

The second of three mobile launch platforms that were used during the Apollo program to transport the Saturn-5 rocket to its launchpad but are all obsolete and no longer in use is finally being demolished for salvage.

The first has already been scrapped, while the third is still in use for “servicing the crawlerway between SLS launches.”

NASA has been storing the platform in the Vehicle Assembly Building, but there was no longer room there, with Boeing taking over more space for assembling SLS core stages. The platform itself was deemed unsafe for display at any museum, with the cost of making it safe too high.

Better to salvage it than have it sit in the way of future space operations. After all, when you get down to it, it is simply some metal and hardware. The history was accomplished by the humans who built it, and who would be appalled if later generations used their work as a club to prevent new achievements in space.

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China’s X-37B copy lands successfully after 276 days in orbit

8:35 am

China’s reusable mini-shuttle, essentially a copy of Boeing’s X-37B, has completed its second flight, landing in China on a runway after 276 days in orbit.

The project will provide a more convenient and inexpensive way to access space for the peaceful use of space in the future, according to the statement.

The reusable test spacecraft launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert Aug. 4 (UTC), 2022. The spacecraft released an object into orbit, U.S. Space Force tracking data revealed late last year. The small satellite operated in very close proximity to the spaceplane.

This apparent second flight on the secretive spacecraft differs from its first mission in 2020. That flight saw the spaceplane orbit for four days.

During the flight the spaceplane made numerous orbital maneuvers.

Like the X-37B, this reusable mini-shuttle allows China to do many technology experiments in orbit and then return them to Earth for analysis.

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The modern corrupt legislative way of doing business: Know nothing, fund everything!

1:57 pm

Fill it in with any amount, regardless of facts
It doesn’t matter how much money is in the government treasury,
our government will fill this check out anyway, to the max.

This week the Democrat-controlled legislature of the state of California passed a bill allocating $150 million dollars from which cash-strapped hospitals could obtain loans to help pay their bills.

The state will give out the $150 million in the form of interest-free loans to nonprofit or public hospitals that meet certain conditions. The state will prioritize loans for medical centers in rural areas and those that have a disproportionate number of patients on Medicaid, the joint state and federal government health insurance program for the poor and the disabled.

Loans will have to be repaid in six years, though it will be possible for the loan to be forgiven if the hospital meets certain requirements.

In another news report describing the process in which this bill was approved and passed included one particular quote that illustrated magnificently the modern manner in which almost all American legislatures now function, from small city councils to Congress in Washington, regardless of party. As stated by one state senator during preliminary hearings before the bill passed:

“We don’t know how many hospitals, we don’t know which hospitals. We don’t know which areas those hospitals are (in), we don’t know anything. And now we’re asked to approve $150 million to be doled out without access to plans, without access to the finances that would give us the evidence to feel comfortable with this,” said Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat, during a Senate budget committee hearing on Tuesday. [emphasis mine]

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ESA finally admits — sort of — that private enterprise can do it better

9:48 am

Stephane Israel, the architect of ESA's rocket failure
Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace and the
architect of its failure to compete in the field of rocketry.

Today there was a news report in which Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace, kind of admitted at last that the expendable design of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket was a mistake, and that it will take a decade more to fix it.

“When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket,” said Israël, according to European Spaceflight.

He added that it will not be until the 2030s before Europe begins flying its own reuseable rocket.

Israël’s comments illustrate the head-in-the-sand approach he has exhibited now for decades. He claims the European Space Agency (ESA) chose to make Ariane-6 expandable so that it would be ready quickly, but its development has not been fast, and in fact is now more than three years behind schedule. When it finally begins flying operational it will have taken almost a decade to create it.

His comments also are his lame attempt to push back against a recent ESA report [pdf], issued in late March, that strongly rejected the decades-long model that ESA has used to build its rockets. Up until now and including the construction of Ariane-6, ESA designed and built its rockets, using Arianespace, headed by Israël, as its commercial arm. In other words, the government ran the show, much like NASA did for most of the half century following the 1960s space race. The result was slow development, and expensive rockets. Arianespace for example never made a profit in its decades-long existence, despite capturing half the commercial market in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The March ESA report rejected this model, and instead advocating copying what the U.S. has done for the past half decade by shifting ownership and design to the private sector, as advocated in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in space. To quote the ESA report:
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Today’s blacklisted American: Biden administration threatens to shut down Catholic hospital system because of a candle

12:36 pm

The evil candle that must be snuffed out!
The evil candle that the Biden administration insists must be snuffed out,
or else the hospital must close.

They’re coming for you next: Because the Saint Francis Health System in Oklahoma has always kept a single candle lit in its hospital chapels, Biden administration officials are now threatening to shut down five Catholic hospitals in Oklahoma, citing federal government fire safety requirements.

If Saint Francis does not comply, the government will revoke its ability to obtain any Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) payments for treating patients, in essence blocking those patients from healthcare while threatening the entire Saint Francis Health System with bankruptcy.

In response, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (as legal representative of St. Francis) sent a letter [pdf] in protest, noting that the Biden administration’s goal has nothing to do with fire safety, but to censor and squelch the religious practice of the St. Francis Health System:
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Two Russian astronauts shift airlock on ISS during 7-hour spacewalk

9:58 am

With the help of the new European robot arm on the Russian half of ISS, two Russian astronauts completed a 7-hour spacewalk yesterday, successfully shifting a Russian airlock module to the new Nauka module on ISS.

The cosmonauts began their spacewalk at 11:01 p.m. Moscow time on Wednesday and spent seven hours and ten minutes outside the International Space Station (ISS). The main objective of their extravehicular activities was to transfer an airlock from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multi-purpose laboratory module. It was done with the help of the ERA robotic arm under the remote control of cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who stayed aboard the ISS.

The work is part of an ongoing series of spacewalks required to complete the installation of Nauka to the station.

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Pushback: Court rules that PA school district denied parent public documents in “bad faith”

12:26 pm

Megan Brock, without question still being targeted by the government
Megan Brock, without question still
being targeted by the government

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When Pennsylvania parent Megan Brock demanded, under her state’s right-to-know law, public documents of the Bucks County health department concerning its decisions to impose Wuhan flu lockdowns and school closures (with the office of open records ruling in her favor), county officials then sued her multiple times to try to prevent her access to the records.

The court has now ruled against the county’s lawsuits, while also ruling that the county had operated in “bad faith” and fined it $1,500, the maximum allowed by law.

After the court conducted an in-camera review of the records, Judge Denise M. Bowman ruled on April 28 that more than half of Brock’s requests, which were made under the state’s Right-to-Know Law (RTK), had been withheld “in bad faith.” She ordered the county to release certain documents and pay $1,500 in sanctions for each of the two lawsuits brought against Brock, the maximum allowed under RTK.

You can read the ruling here [pdf]. It notes in particular how county officials had even refused to provide the court one of these documents for review, demonstrating clearly its bad faith.
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Private college allows its students to blacklist refugee from Communist China

11:16 am

Whitworth University, where teaching close-mindedness is our goal!
Whitworth University, where teaching close-mindedness
is our number one goal!

They’re coming for you next: When the conservative Turning Point USA chapter at the private Christian Whitworth University in Washington state arranged a lecture from Xi Van Fleet — a refugee from communist China — it discovered it could not do so because it needed the approval of the college’s student organization, and the leaders of that organization voted 9-4 to blacklist that speaker.

On April 12, Whitworth’s student government voted 9-4 to deny a conservative group’s request to invite Chinese dissident Xi Van Fleet to speak at the university in Spokane, Washington. Van Fleet, now a Virginia resident, escaped Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and frequently criticizes ideas such as critical race theory and hecklers’ vetoes that, in her view, mirror it.

The minutes of this student government meeting are available online [pdf]. If you read them, you find that it is very clear these students do not believe in freedom of speech and instead think the most important thing a college can do is to protect them from hearing ideas they don’t like. These university-level government activists also exhibited an incredible level of general ignorance. Consider this comment from Niraj Pandey, listed as an International Student Senator:
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Irish startup lobbies for Irish spaceport

9:26 am

According to an official from the startup SUAS Aerospace, Ireland is an ideal location for the creation of a new spaceport.

Mr O’Halloran, who is now vice chairman of Irish space company SUAS Aerospace, said space vehicles could be launched from Ireland for telecommunications, environmental monitoring, or medical experiments.

…He later told the Irish Examiner: “There are loads of companies in Europe that need to have a facility of a launch pad, or a spaceport, and by and large they are all heading towards the Azores. The UK is now starting to set up spaceports, but they are now outside the EU. Ireland is ideal as a launching site.”

This Irish company’s focus, according to its website, is “…to build a leading European Space Port providing flexible commercial satellite launch facilities with provision for engine and rocket testing.” And it wants to do it in Ireland. O’Halloran’s speech was an effort to gin up both private and government support for the project, including a commitment of the Irish government to provide it the land it needs for such a site.

There are already three spaceports under development within the EU, in Spain, Norway, and Sweden, all of which at the moment are for suborbital rockets exclusively. Ireland’s location could make it a better choice for orbital launches, as it has many more options for flight paths over the Atlantic without crossing land.

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Environmentalists sue FAA, demanding it shut down Boca Chica and Starship

12:10 pm

Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command was issued
Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command
was issued on April 20, 2023. It also appears to be the fate of SpaceX’s
entire Boca Chica operation, if the environmental radicals get their way.

A group of environmental groups as well as a non-profit corporation calling itself the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc, today filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration FAA), demanding it shut down SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility and block all further Superheavy/Starship launches.

You can read the lawsuit here [pdf]. Its essence is contained in these two paragraphs:

The area surrounding the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica is a biologically diverse and essential habitat area for many species, including federally protected wildlife and animals that are considered sacred to the Carrizo/Comecrudo People, such as the critically endangered ocelot. The SpaceX facility is smack in the middle of publicly owned conservation, park, and recreation lands, including a National Wildlife Refuge, two State Parks, a State Wildlife Management Area, and a State Coastal Preserve. These lands are of extraordinary conservation value for a range of federally and state lists wildlife and other protected species such as migratory birds. Bird species from both the Central and Mississippi flyways converge there, making it an essential wintering and stopover area for migratory birds as they move north and south each year.

SpaceX activities authorized in the FONSI/ROD [the environmental reassessment issued last year] have and will adversely affect the surrounding wildlife habitat and communities. In addition to harm from construction activities and increased vehicle traffic, rocket launches result in intense heat, noise, and light pollution. Furthermore, the rocket launches and testing result in explosions which spread debris across surrounding habitat and cause brush/forest fires — including one that recently burned 68 acres of adjacent National Wildlife Refuge. The FAA calls these explosions “anomalies,” but in fact they occur frequently, with at least 8 over the past 5 years. FAA acknowledged that many more such “anomalies” are expected over the next 5 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has found that prior SpaceX rocket explosions harmed protected wildlife and designated habitat in violation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In other words, rockets and launch sites should never be placed inside wildlife refuges, because such activity is detrimental to wildlife.

A more false statement cannot be made. Under this conclusion the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, which have been operating in the middle of a wildlife refuge now for more than six decades, should be shut down immediately. All the wildlife there must certainly be dead!
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Pushback: FIRE sues school for banning students from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts

2:35 pm

The evil shirt Tri-County Area School officials banned
The evil shirt Tri-County school officials banned

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Because school officials at Tri-County Middle School in Michigan forbid two students from wearing sweatshirts that said “Let’s Go Brandon” on their fronts, even as they permitted other students to wear shirt promoting the queer agenda, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed a lawsuit against the schools.

In Feb. 2022, two Tri County Middle School students wore sweatshirts to school with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a political slogan critical of President Biden with origins in a more profane chant. Even though the political slogan is widely used — multiple members of Congress used it during floor speeches — an assistant principal and a teacher ordered the boys to remove the sweatshirts. However, administrators allowed students to wear apparel with other political messages, including gay-pride-themed hoodies.

The incident is part of a pattern of political favoritism by the school district. When the school district relaxed the dress code for field day, a school administrator ordered a student to stop wearing a Trump flag as a cape, but permitted other students to wear gay pride flags in the same manner.

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Big space Raytheon shifts gears to compete in the new space market

9:55 am

Capitalism in space: Raytheon, a traditional big space contractor focused mostly on winning military contracts, has decided to shifts gears from what has in recent years been a failed effort to compete for major contracts direct from the military and instead offer its capabilities to other commercial space companies.

This decision was fueled largely by the approach of the military’s Space Development Agency (SDA) to commercial contracts.

SDA’s approach to buying satellites from multiple prime contractors under fixed-price contracts is “revolutionizing space acquisitions,” [Raytheon official David Broadbent] said. The agency has been a “huge disrupter,” he said.

“Let’s call it what it is,” Broadbent added. “Raytheon and many of our traditional defense primes were constructed around sole source classified cost-plus businesses, and five to seven-year acquisition cycles.” Those markets no longer exist, he said. “So we’ve had to take a very hard look at ourselves … and drive to a far more efficient model of producing capabilities.”

In other words, Raytheon has recognized that the government golden goose of unlimited cost-plus contracts is gone, and that the company’s over-priced habits under those contracts made it difficult for it to compete against new startups designed to be efficient, low-cost, and quick on their feet.

By marketing its available products directly to other satellite and rocket companies, Raytheon can avoid the long contract competitions of the government, and make sales more effectively. As it does this it will also have time to restructure the company itself, trimming it down and making it more efficient so that it can better compete for government contracts at a later time.

Raytheon’s change is the result of the SDA essentially accepting many of the recommendations put forth in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space (a free pdf download). Rather than have the military the designer and builder of a few big and expensive satellites (also very vulnerable to attack), it is now the customer buying constellations of many small and cheap satellites from many private companies. Such smallsat constellations are much more difficult to disable by hostile powers.

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