Tag: policy

Today’s blacklisted American: Black DEI administrator fired by college for demanding accuracy and color-blind policies

1:18 pm

Tabia Lee
Tabia Lee

They’re coming for you next: Tabia Lee, the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Education [OESE] at De Anza College in California, was denied tenure and fired from her job when she repeatedly demanded historical accuracy and color-blind policies from both her department and the rest of the college.

“Historical accuracy and color-blind policies” from a modern college run by leftists? It is to laugh.

Tabia Lee is a black woman who had been an adjunct professor at De Anza when she got the job to run part of the OESE department.

After years of working as a middle-school teacher and an adjunct professor, and founding a network to help minority teachers attain national board certification, Lee was excited get a tenure-track position at De Anza, where her job includes designing workshops to promote inclusion. “I researched them, and I thought we had similar values around diversity, equity and anti-racism,” she said. “I was selected, and I was like, wow, this is a dream come true.”

Instead, Lee found herself constantly harassed and slandered because she tried to bring to her work an even-handed philosophy that attempted to deal with the problems of racial conflict fairly. For example, when Jewish students and faculty members told her they had experienced anti-Semitism on campus, Lee tried to organize a campus event to discuss the problem.
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NASA engineers continue to struggle to save the Flashlight lunar probe

10:30 am

In an update today, NASA reports that engineers continue to troubeshoot the failure of the experimental thrusters on the Lunar Flashlight cubesat, in an effort to improvise a way to get the probe into lunar orbit.

Shortly after launch on Dec. 11, 2022, the operations team for NASA’s Lunar Flashlight determined that three of the four CubeSat’s thrusters were underperforming. This cast doubt on whether the mission could complete its stretch science goal of detecting surface ice at the Moon’s South Pole. After analyzing the situation, team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Georgia Tech arrived at a creative maneuvering technique that would use the one fully-functioning thruster to get into planned orbit. But when attempting the modified maneuvers in January, that thruster also experienced a rapid loss in performance and the team determined that Lunar Flashlight would likely be unable to reach its planned near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon.

After further troubleshooting, the operations team has been working on ways to restore partial operation of one or more thrusters to keep the spacecraft within the Earth-Moon system. They have had some success but continue to try new things to clear the suspected obstructions in the thruster fuel lines. They have until the end of April to generate the required thrust to preserve the opportunity to allow for monthly flybys of the lunar South Pole.

Though it increasingly appears Lunar Flashlight will not make lunar orbit, the mission is not a failure, since it was first and foremost an engineering mission testing a variety of new cubesat technologies, including the failed thrusters. Their failure and the efforts by engineers to recover them is important data for developing better cubesat thrusters on future such planetary probes.

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Italy funds development by Avio of smallsat rocket and methane engine

10:13 am

In a move that might eventually separate Italy from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Arianespace commercial division, the Italian government on March 13, 2023 announced that it has committed $308 million to the Italian company Avio to develop both a methane-fueled engine and the smallsat rocket to go with it.

The money will be used by Avio on two projects, one to develop an upgraded version of its M10 methane-fueled engine that has already completed two dozen static fire tests, and the other to develop the smallsat rocket, with a targeted first launch in 2026.

While the investment is officially in partnership with the ESA, its wholly-Italian nature suggests in the end it will not be part of Arianespace, but function as an independent competing rocket operated and owned by Avio, which is also the company that developed Arianespace’s Vega family of rockets.

If Italy allows Avio to pull free of ESA and operate as a separate competing rocket company, it will do Europe a favor. Right now the monopolistic nature of ESA is preventing it from competing successfully in the new commercial launch market. Having separately owned and competing private companies will only energize this European industry, which has generally been moribund for years.

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Pushback: Doctors blacklisted by government for disagreeing on its COVID mandate policies now fighting back

2:04 pm

Written by many of the doctors of the Norfolk Group
Correct from the start despite government censorship,
and written by many of the same doctors of the Norfolk Group

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Eight high-ranking doctors, many who were censored and blacklisted by the government and big social media outlets for daring to disagree with the government’s lockdown, masking,, and COVID jab mandates, have now issued a detailed report, dubbed the Norfolk Group report, outlining the many errors of those policies, as well as offering what the scientists call “a blueprint” for moving forward. From their introduction:

In separate chapters we summarize key background information and propose specific questions about failures to protect older high-risk Americans, about school closures, collateral lockdown harms, lack of robust public health data collected and/or made available, misleading risk communication, downplaying infection-acquired immunity, masks, testing, vaccine efficacy and safety, therapeutics, and epidemiological modeling.

We chose not to discuss economic issues, although we recognize that negative effects on the economy have long-term negative effects on public health. We have also chosen not to engage in issues regarding media handling of the pandemic, nor questions of how, when and why the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated. Public health responses to a pandemic are devised and implemented independently of viral origin.

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Russia’s Luna-25 unmanned lunar lander to be delivered to Vostochny in early June

10:23 am


Click for interactive map.

According to Russia’s state-run press, its Luna-25 unmanned lunar lander will finally be delivered to its launchsite in Vostochny in the first ten days of June 2023, after many years of delays.

The press announcement made no mention of a launch date after delivery, though according to an earlier report Roscosmos is aiming for a July 13, 2023 launch date.

The landing site on the Moon is Boguslawsky crater, as indicated by the green dot on the map to the right. If it occurs as planned, it will join three other landers now targeting 2023 lunar landings, Ispace’s Hakuto-R1, Intuitive Machines Nova-C, and India’s Chandrayaan-3, with three of four landing in the Moon’s south pole regions. The white cross marks the location of the south pole itself, on the rim of Shackleton Crater.

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Virgin Orbit resumes limited operations

10:12 am

In anticipation of a possibly deal to save the company, Virgin Orbit officials have resumed limited operations, bringing back a small number of employees to work on crucial issues required for its next launch.

“Our first step will begin Thursday of this week, when we plan to return a subset of our team to focus on critical areas for our next mission,” Virgin Orbit said in a statement. “We are looking forward to getting back to our mission and returning to orbit.”

…Reuters reported that Virgin Orbit is working on a $200 million infusion from Texas-based venture capital investor Matthew Brown via a private share placement, citing a term sheet. Following a meeting by Virgin Orbit’s board on Tuesday, the two sides plan to close the deal on Friday, according to the non-binding term sheet, Reuters said.

Should the company resume full operations and launch again, I am certain it will not launch from the United Kingdom, at least not until the UK has fixed its launch licensing bureau, the Civil Aviation Authority, which took so long to approve Virgin Orbit’s launch from Cornwall it practically bankrupted the company.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Vermont’s organization of principals bans Christian school for being Christian

1:16 pm

Mid Vermont Christian School: banned for supporting Christianity

They’re coming for you next: One month after administrators of Mid Vermont Christian School decided to default a game against a public high school girls team that had a boy in woman’s clothing as a player, citing safety and religious concerns, the Vermont Principals’ Association moved to ban that Christian school from all sports and sponsored activities.

Jay Nichols, the executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association, said the organization’s 15-member executive board was unanimous in its decision. “If you don’t want to follow VPA rules, that’s fine,” Nichols said. “But then you’re just not a VPA member. It’s fairly simple. That’s really all we’re gonna really say about it.” [emphasis mine]

In its letter to Mid Vermont Christian, the VPA stated “…the school’s actions do not meet the expectations of the VPA’s 1st and 2nd policy, Commitment to Racial, Gender-Fair, and Disability Awareness and Policy of Gender Identity, respectively.”

If you want to know in detail what VPA’s 1st and 2nd policies are, you can read them here. The key quote is this:
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Pushback? University of North Carolina pretends to ban ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ requirements in hiring

11:51 am

Failure Theater!

They’re coming for you next: On February 23, 2023 the board of governors of the University of North Carolina voted to ban all requirements that applicants in hiring and admissions make statements advocating the racist political agenda of “diversity, equity and inclusion” [DEI].

The board stated the university “shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement,” according to the resolution. An employee or applicant also can’t “be solicited or required to describe his or her actions in support of, or in opposition to, such beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles.”

According to the now-banned policy [pdf], anyone who wanted to either go to UNC as a student, or be hired or promoted there as a teacher, had to prove they had made a “positive contribution to DEI efforts.”
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Starship launch still stalled by FAA

3:47 pm

According to a tweet by Elon Musk today, Starship will be ready for its first orbital test launch in a few weeks.

Musk also noted however that SpaceX is still awaiting the FAA’s launch license, and because of this he now expects the launch in the third week in April.

Why it is taking months for the FAA to issue this license is disturbing, and suggests that under the Biden administration the feds are behaving more and more like the incompetent Civil Aviation Authority in the UK, which stonewalled Virgin Orbit’s launch for months so that the company now sits on the verge of bankruptcy.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay for this story, who will be gone for the next two weeks on vacation. Have fun Jay.

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Pushback: Smithsonian ordered to no longer violate the First Amendment

3:36 pm

The evil hat that Air & Space banned
The evil hat that Air & Space officials banned

Pushback: The Smithsonian Institution, which runs the Air & Space museum as well as other museums in Washington, D.C., has been ordered by the courts to stop violating the First Amendment, as it did when on January 20, 2023 it harassed and ejected students from a pro-life group, there as part of their participation in the annual March for Life demonstration, because they were wearing wool caps that said “pro-life” on them.

According to the consent order [pdf], the Smithsonian expressed “regret” for the event and promised to “remind all security officers stationed at NASM [National Air & Space Museum] of the rights of visitors.”

The order however does not simply accept the museum’s expression of regret. It specifically enjoins the Smithsonian and its employees “from prohibiting visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum from wearing hats or other clothing with messages, including religious and political speech” and requires it to distribute the consent order to “all security officers stationed at NASM, as well as other Smithsonian personnel who interact with the public, including volunteers and museum staff, within 7 days.” It also orders the museum to tell its security officers that their behavior on January 20th was wrong.
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Both India’s Chandrayaan-3 and Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C lunar landers pass vibration tests

9:21 am


Click for interactive map.

According to separate announcements just released, both India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander/rover and Intuitive Machine’s private Nova-C lunar lander have passed their last ground tests and are now ready for launch to the Moon later this year.

India’s space agency ISRO successfully completed testing of its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover in early March, completing vibration tests of the spacecraft and proving it will be able to survive the stresses during launch. The spacecraft successfully completed radiation testing in February.

ISRO is now targeting June 2023 for Chandrayaan-3’s launch.

Intuitive Machines meanwhile announced yesterday that its Nova-C lander has completed vibration testing, and is ready for launch later this year.

The map to the right shows the landing sites of these planned landers near the Moon’s south pole (indicated by the white cross), as well as Russia’s long-delayed lunar lander, Luna-25, which is now targeting a July launch.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Rhode Island school district blacklists Christian afterschool club because it is Christian

1:24 pm

Rhode Island: haven to oppression
Oppressive Rhode Island

They’re coming for you next: The Providence school district in Rhode Island has now been sued by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) for unfairly blacklisting CEF’s afterschool Good News clubs from using school facilities for meetings,

For nearly two years, the Providence Public School District has blocked CEF Rhode Island from hosting its elementary school Good News Clubs on district school facilities. However, other organizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, and Girls on the Run are given free use of school facilities for after school programs.

Note too that the school district had already approved CEF’s Good News clubs in 2019. According to the lawsuit [pdf], filed by the non-profit legal firm Liberty Counsel:

The District approved CEF Rhode Island’s August 2019 Rental of School Facilities application, allowing CEF Rhode Island to lead an afterschool Good News Club at William D’Abate Elementary School for the 2019–2020 school year, without any facility rental fee. Forty-eight children signed up for the club, but the club could only accommodate twenty children due to space limitations at the school.

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