Tag: policy

Using ICBMs to lower launch costs

10:02 am

The competition heats up: Orbital ATK is lobbying Congress to lift a ban on the use of decommissioned ICBM missiles for commercial launches.

Orbital ATK is pressing U.S. lawmakers to end a 20-year ban on using decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) for launching commercial satellites and the effort has raised concern among companies that have invested millions of dollars in potential rival rockets. Orbital Vice President Barron Beneski said in an interview on Friday that the company was pushing Washington to get the ban lifted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that sets defense policy for fiscal 2017, which begins Oct. 1. The missiles were idled by nuclear disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia in the 1990s.

The company wants to use the solid rocket motors in the surplus missiles to increase the capability of their Minotaur 4 rocket, designed for the small satellite market. Interestingly, Virgin Galactic, who is aiming for this same smallsat market with its LaunchOne rocket, is protesting, and has even garnered the lobbying support of the industry’s trade organization..

“It’s a dangerous precedent when the government tries to inject itself in the commercial marketplace. It can be disruptive, and not for the right reasons,” Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a Washington DC-based trade organization, said in an interview on Thursday.

Orbital ATK is not asking for exclusive use, so other companies could also obtain surplus missiles for their own use. However, the ATK in Orbital ATK’s name comes from the half of the company that before the merger was an expert in using solid rockets for space. This gives Orbital an advantage here that the other companies do not have, and explains their protests.

Nonetheless, I say tough. The government should surplus these rockets, and let the competitive chips fall where they may. Anything that lowers the cost to put payloads in orbit cannot be a bad thing for the launch industry, as it will serve to increase the number of customers that industry will have and thus help to increase everyone’s sales figures.

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Misuse revealed of vomit comet at NASA

7:16 pm

It appears that, stuck with the “vomit comet” airplane that they no longer had much use for, NASA managers tried to justify its existence and budget by assigning it tasks for which it and its crew were not designed or trained to do.

The unorthodox use of the C-9 aircraft was driven, according to the complaints, by a desire at the high levels of the agency to prove the Vomit Comet was of practical use. Apparently, it didn’t work—the C-9 aircraft program was defunded and shut down in 2014.

Since 1959, NASA has used a variety of aircraft to simulate the weightlessness of space in order to train astronauts and perform basic experiments in zero gravity. From 2005 to 2014, the C-9, built in 1970, became one of NASA’s primary Vomet Comets. According to documents uncovered by Motherboard using the Freedom of Information Act (embedded at the bottom of this article) show that the Vomit Comet was used on at least two occasions for purposes other than simulating space flight, while still labeling the missions “crew training.” In 2013, the agency officially looked into having the plane reclassified to run these types of missions.

In one of these cases, the plane was flown to Greenland without the proper equipment or training for the crew, and experienced what was described by crew as “a near fatal crash.” It didn’t crash, but the crew apparently feared for their lives.

The program was shut down in 2014 with the operations handed over to private companies. Now if NASA needs to train astronauts, they simply hire these companies, which make the bulk of their money flying private missions, something NASA wasn’t allowed to do.

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Russia schedules first Vostochny launch

7:08 pm

The competition heats up: Roscosmos has scheduled April 27 as the date for the first launch from its new spaceport in Vostochny.

I do wish them luck. I don’t think the Russians will be very successful at competing in the new private launch industry that is beginning to emerge, centered as they are on Soviet-style, top-down, giant government-run organizations, but I still hope they succeed at whatever they attempt in space. As far as I am concerned, the more the merrier.

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Florida passes law outlawing theft by government

11:21 am

Good news: Florida’s Republican governor today signed a law that forbids state police from seizing any property from any citizen unless they actually arrest and charge that person with a crime.

The big deal with this particular reform is that, in most cases, Florida police will actually have to arrest and charge a person with a crime before attempting to seize and keep their money and property under the state’s asset forfeiture laws. One of the major ways asset forfeiture gets abused is that it is frequently a “civil”, not criminal, process where police and prosecutors are able to take property without even charging somebody with a crime, let alone convicting them. This is how police are, for example, able to snatch cash from cars they’ve pulled over and claim they suspect the money was going to be used for drug trafficking without actually finding any drugs.

I should also note that getting this law written and passed was spear-headed by the Republicans in Florida’s legislature, though Democrats there also supported it. I note this not to imply that Republican politicians are great, which they routinely are not, but to note that of the two parties, in recent years it has generally been the Republicans who have opposed asset forfeiture, which I like to call theft-by-government.

Sadly, the Republicans were key players in getting this kind of policy legalized in the first place.

In both cases, it is really the voters who to blame, or to be credited. When the laws were passed allowing police the right to confiscate private property, the voters cheered, thinking such actions would help stop the drug trade (which they were encouraging by buying the drugs). Politicians responded to the voters, and passed the laws, tweaking them as power-hungry politicians do to make them work to the government’s favor, not the citizens. Now, having realized how bad these laws are, the voters are electing politicians who want to remove the laws. That pressure is resulting in laws like this.

Milton Friedman explained this process quite wisely many years ago.

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Russia insures first Vostochny launch

8:40 am

In the heat of competition: Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has obtained insurance for the first launch from Vostochny, covering the rocket and the launch facilities it will use.

This story tells us more about Russia’s present circumstances than the situation at Vostochny. Normally, government space agencies self-insure. Russia, however, is having serious economic problems, and I suspect that the managers there have recognized that if this launch fails and the launchpad is damaged badly, they don’t have the cash to quickly rebuild it. Granted, the insurance itself will probably cost them a lot of money they also don’t have, but considering the significant quality control problems the Russian aerospace industry has had in recent years, combined with the corruption that has surrounded the construction at Vostochny, they are probably wise to cover themselves in the not unlikely chance that something goes wrong.

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Sierra Nevada favors Alabama for Dream Chaser’s commercial port

9:50 am

The competition heats up: At a workshop in Alabama this week Sierra Nevada’s vice president indicated that though the company has not yet finalized its decision, it is strongly leaning to picking Huntsville as the commercial spaceport for its Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, being built to ferry cargo to ISS.

“There was a leap of faith on the Huntsville side that we would be a company that could get this vehicle built and start servicing the space station…,” Sierra Nevada Vice President John Roth said Thursday. “Yes, we have been approached by other airports for ventures. We’re not moving forward at this time with any of those. Right now, Huntsville is the only community we’re moving forward with a (landing) license on.”

A preliminary local study identified four hurdles to landing Dream Chaser at the Huntsville International Airport: required licenses for the craft and airport, environmental impact approval, Federal Aviation Administration approval of the landing path and possible runway damage.

Why do I sense the unseen hand of porkmeister Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) in this story? Could it be that one of the reasons NASA finally included Dream Chaser in its cargo contract was that the company had not only chosen the Alabama-based Atlas 5 rocket for its launch vehicle but was also courting Alabama for its commercial base, and Shelby had made it clear behind the scenes that he wanted that business? Could it be that Sierra Nevada is now returning the favor, having gotten the contract?

Don’t get me wrong. I think it was a good choice for NASA to give that contract to Sierra Nevada. I just think it important to note how giving some of our power away to politicians allows them to wield that power over us, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes against it, but always to make themselves more powerful. In the end, giving that power away is never a good option.

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Ordered to reduce red tape, federal bureaucrats increased it

6:53 pm

Government in action: In response to two executive orders by President Obama ordering federal agencies to review their regulations to eliminate red tape and streamline government operations, federal bureaucrats added 6.5 million paperwork hours to their workload and increased regulatory costs by $16 billion even as they wrote these reviews.

The American Action Forum has found the reviews consist mostly of recycled regulations by federal agencies that have actually increased regulatory costs. “The recent ‘retrospective reports’ from the administration reveal that executive agencies have added more than $16 billion in regulatory costs, up from $14.7 billion in the previous update, and 6.5 million paperwork hours,” the report said.

The agency reviews are a result of President Barack Obama’s initiative for a “government-wide review of rules on the books,” which the White House claims to have led to $28 billion in net five-year savings since 2011. However, the American Action Forum has found retrospective reviews often add additional costs to the economy. A review in 2014 added $23 billion in costs and 8.9 million paperwork burden hours.

No one should be surprised by this. Asking agencies to review their regulations will instead be seen by them as a glorious opportunity to justify their existence with more work. The way to eliminate these regulations is for the elected officials in charge to, surprise!, eliminate these regulations. Don’t ask the bureaucrats to do it. Tell them to do it.

And when these bureaucrats go to the press to complain and say how the elimination of this or that regulation will cause the sky to fall, the politicians have to have the courage to not back down, even when the press teams up with the bureaucrats to slander them for trying to bring the federal government under control.

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White nose syndrome found on Washington state bat

4:08 pm

Bad news for bats: Scientists have confirmed a bat with white nose syndrome in the state of Washington, 1,300 miles further west than the previous detection.

On March 11, hikers found the sick bat about 30 miles east of Seattle near North Bend, and took it to Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) for care. The bat died two days later, and had visible symptoms of a skin infection common in bats with WNS. PAWS then submitted the bat for testing to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, which confirmed through fungal culture, molecular and pathology analyses that it had WNS.

I hate to express such a thought, but I can’t help wonder about the legitimacy of this detection. It is so far west and so far from the nearest other bat with white nose syndrome I cannot understand how this bat came to be infected, naturally. In order for this discovery to be confirmed they are going to have to detect it again, and more than once, on a number of bats. Otherwise, it will remain suspect and a possible false positive.

The worst part of this is that the government is surely going to begin instituting draconian measures to protect the bats in Washington, as well as across the entire western United States, even before this detection is confirmed. Having this single detection will make it much easier for government officials to ban humans from many more places, even though white nose syndrome is nowhere close.

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Emory University alumni push back against free speech attacks

12:40 pm

Push back: Emory University alumini are circulating a petition calling for the university to recommit itself to free speech instead of pandering to protesters demanding “emotional comfort, ideological conformity, and yes, ‘safe environments’.”

The petition was authored by alumni Matthew Walker and Ed Thayer, who said this:

“My Emory experience, which I look upon fondly, was periodically defined by eruptions of illiberal behavior from various student groups, although nothing as shrill and totalitarian as we are witnessing today,” Thayer said, adding that Emory administrators used to err on the side of free speech. “Nowadays they seem inclined to appease the worst intolerant and alarmist instincts of some students, while undercutting the foundations of free speech, tolerance, and a robust debate, which should thrive at a university.

Matthew Walker, for his part, summed up the whole situation in one word: “Unacceptable.”

The article above begins by focusing on how the university president has backed down from his original willingness to support the squelching of free speech. I suspect this pressure from alumni, who with most universities provide a great deal of financial support, is making him rethink his positions.

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Another subsidized solar power company going bust?

11:13 am

Your tax dollars at work! The U.S.’s largest solar power company, heavily subsidized by the federal government, now faces bankruptcy.

An SEC filing from TerraForm Global, a unit of SunEdison, claims “due to SunEdison’s liquidity difficulties, there is a substantial risk that SunEdison will soon seek bankruptcy protection.” Both SunEdison and TerraForm are delaying the filing of their annual financial report to the SEC.

News of SunEdison’s impending bankruptcy filing comes after the company’s shares fell 95 percent in the past 12 months, with shares now trading for less than $1 for the first time since the green energy company went public in 1995. SunEdison’s market value fell from $10 billion in July 2015 to around $400 million today.

The news also comes after the SEC announced it was launching an investigation into SunEdison’s disclosures to shareholders regarding the company’s liquidity. SEC enforcement officials “are looking into whether SunEdison overstated its liquidity last fall when it told investors it had more than $1 billion in cash,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

…The pro-labor union group Good Jobs First reported last year that SunEdison and its subsidiaries got nearly $650 million in subsidies and tax credits from the federal government since 2000. It was the 13th most heavily-subsidized company in America. This includes nearly $4.6 million in subsidies from the Department of Energy and Department of Treasury. Watchdog.org reported in October 2015 that SunEdison had gotten nearly $4.6 million from the Obama administration, including funding to build semi-conductors. A SunEdison bankruptcy could leave taxpayers on the hook for more than $2 billion.

But hey, what’s a few billion here or there, if the cause is worthwhile?

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Federal law outlaws launches on foreign rockets

5:37 pm

Killing competition: The American launch industry as well as the FAA regulators are in agreement that a 2005 law that limits American small satellite companies from using foreign launch companies should remain in place.

The CSLA, dating from 2005, is the U.S. government’s way of protecting the seemingly forever-nascent U.S. small-satellite launch industry from competing with government-controlled foreign launchers for U.S. business. It seeks to oblige non-U.S. rocket providers to sign a CSLA that, for all intents and purposes, sets U.S. commercial launch prices as the world minimum for government-owned non-U.S. launch providers.

The rationale is that these non-U.S. launchers, not bound by the constraints of profit and loss – but hungry for hard-currency export earnings – will undercut commercial U.S. companies’ launch prices and keep them from gaining market traction.

India’s launch rockets, for example, are designed and built by India’s space agency ISRO, and are backed not by private funds but by government money. The fear is that India could subsidize its rockets so that the price could always be kept below what any American company could charge.

The truth, however, is that competition and innovation, here in the U.S., has so successful undercut foreign prices that no amount of subsidies can hope to compete. Those foreign companies are now scrambling to actually redesign their rockets to lower their costs and thus their prices, rather than asking for more handouts from their governments. This law should be repealed.

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More chalk oppression at Emory!

12:38 pm

Push back: A conservative student group at Emory University has responded to the protests against pro-Trump chalk messages on campus by drawing more pro-Trump messages.

Over the weekend, students involved in Emory’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter responded to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the $59,444-per-year private school’s social justice warriors with a new, bigger, better political message in support of Trump, reports Inside Higher Ed. The newest chalking at Emory represents the Republican presidential front-runner in his trademark baseball cap. Scribbled on the cap is the slogan: “Make Emory Great Again.”

Young Americans for Liberty also chalked other messages on campus on behalf of every other remaining Republican and Democratic presidential candidate. Some of the other chalk imagery also managed to make clever use of the other candidates’ slogans. Leaders of the limited-government-focused group said their multi-candidate campus chalking adventure is manifestly not intended to endorse any particular candidate. Instead, the goal is to buck the growing national impression that Emory is full of ninnies who are afraid of temporary, mainstream political speech that can be instantly washed away with a bucket of water and a bit of scrubbing.

Good for them. They have more courage and common sense than the university’s idiot president, who had immediately agreed with the protesters that messages in favor of Trump had to be racist.

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Justice Department resumes program to steal property of citizens

9:40 am

Theft by government: The Obama Justice Department has resumed its partnership with state police departments to seize the property of citizens for profit.

Asset forfeiture is a contentious practice that lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted of wrongdoing — and in many cases, never charged. Studies have found that use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profit and less by justice.

The Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program allowed state and local authorities to pursue asset forfeiture under federal, rather than state law, particularly in instances where local law enforcement officers have a relationship with federal authorities as part of a joint task force. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize.

Participation by the Justice Department had been suspended in December, but not because the Obama administration didn’t like the program, it turns out. Instead, the suspension allowed them to keep the money themselves that local police had seized under federal law. This however discouraged local police from pursuing more confiscations, so they have resumed the program.

The graph at the link is incredible. Do you know that citizens now lose more property to the government under this program than they do from ordinary burglaries?

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SLS software over budget and behind schedule

5:28 pm

Surprise! The launch control software NASA is writing from scratch for its SLS rocket is way behind schedule and way over budget.

Development of this new launch control software is now projected to exceed $207 million, 77 percent above 2012 projections. The software won’t be ready until fall 2017, instead of this summer as planned, and important capabilities like automatic failure detection, are being deferred, the audit noted. The system is vital, needed to control pumps, motors, valves and other ground equipment during countdowns and launches, and to monitor data before and during liftoff.

NASA decided to write its own computer code to “glue together” existing software products a decade ago — while space shuttles still were flying and commercial shippers had yet to service the space station. Both delivery companies, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, rely on commercial software, the audit noted. [emphasis mine]

In other words, even though NASA could have simply purchased already available software that other launch companies were using successfully, the agency decided to write its own. And that decision really didn’t come before the arrival of these commercial companies, because when it was made a decade ago that was exactly the time that SpaceX was beginning to build its rocket.

This is simply more proof that SLS is nothing more than a pork-laden waste of money designed not to explore space but to generate non-productive jobs in congressional districts.

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“Why do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believe they know more about Islam than Muslim clerics?”

9:35 pm

Link here.

Read it all. This quote though sums it up nicely:

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.[emphasis in original]

I would answer the question in the headline very bluntly: The modern leftwing intellectual community, often led by Democratic politicians and college professors (but I repeat myself), are generally uninterested in reality. Their ideology trumps all, which is why they were able to push through Obamacare, and have had absolutely no understanding of the violence coming out of the Middle East and are willing to allow hundreds of thousands of people from that region to immigrate here without any vetting. As Obama ludicrously declared after the Brussels bombing this week, “We defeat them in part by saying, you are not strong; you are weak.” In other words, declaring them weak will stop their violence, end the terrorism, and make whole the lives they have shattered.

Until the American people reject these head-in-the-clouds fools, we will be subjected to more terrorism, more violence, and more ludicrous and impossible laws that make our lives miserable. My chief worry, however, is that the American people might be as disconnected from reality as these Democratic leaders.

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Vostochny contractor ordered to pay loans

10:16 am

A Moscow court has ordered the main contractor building the Vostochny spaceport to pay back 3.5 billion rubles in debt to its bank.

VTB [the bank] has filed several lawsuits to recover debt from Dalspetsstroy [the contractor]. On February 24, the Moscow Commercial Court granted the bank’s lawsuit seeking 722 million rubles ($11 million) from the company. Another claim for 777 million rubles ($11.5 million) should be considered today.

It was the ex-CEO of this contractor, plus his two sons, who are charged with embezzling over a hundred million rubles from the project.

In related news, this Moscow Times article provides some nice details about Russia’s just approved ten-year plan for its space program. As reported earlier, Russia’s bad economic times has forced them to cut the program to the bone.

Somehow, why do I think that these two stories have so much to do with each other? Could it be that there is some inherent corruption within Russia’s giant government-run aerospace monopoly called Roscosmos that prevents that monopoly from innovating, competing, and doing things efficiently?

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The sad state of South Korea’s space sector

9:57 am

The new colonial movement: It appears that South Korea’s space industry is faltering, according to unnamed sources in that industry, and must be revitalized.

Many critics also point to the near absence of Korean conglomerates in the domestic aerospace scene as a major setback for the nation. “Since space businesses do not generate short-term revenues, most Korean conglomerates are reluctant to jump into the sector,” said an official from the aerospace sector. “Other nations, including the U.S. and Russia, on the other hand, have been running space programs for decades and have a large pool of seasoned engineers and talents, which is why the Korean aerospace industry is far behind in the race for outer space,” he said.

Samsung Group, the largest conglomerate here, previously ran aerospace business arm Samsung Techwin, now renamed Hanhwa Techwin after it was acquired by Hanhwa Group in 2014. Techwin was established in 1977 to develop flight engines. Samsung Group sold part of Techwin’s flight engines business to Korea Aerospace Industries in 1999 and pulled completely out of the aerospace sector in 2014.

What makes this story different from my previous two posts is that its focus is not building a government program (and the bureaucracy to go with it) but to find way to develop a robust private aerospace industry, competing for market share in the world market. With that approach, South Korea might actually launch something in the coming years.

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Europe aims for the Moon

9:49 am

The new colonial movement: The head of the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a video interview this week that building a lunar base is their next major goal.

The head of the multinational agency, Johann-Dietrich Woerner, said the village would “serve science, business, tourism and even mining purposes.” In a video interview posted on the agency’s website, Woerner said a permanent lunar base is the next logical step in space exploration. He said the village could replace the International Space Station in the future. The ISS has been continuously occupied since 2000. It was originally set to be decommissioned by 2020, but its operation has been extended through 2024. The agency said it could take 20 years before the technology is ready to make the Moon village happen.

My next words might sound familiar (see the post below), but few technical details were provided in the video. Instead it appears from the article and the actual interview that the focus here is to establish a bureaucracy, not design rockets or spaceships. I suspect Woerner is looking for projects that can justify the existence of ESA and its bureaucracy, not actually build anything. That he thinks it will take 20 years to make it happen, based on our technology today, is strong evidence of this, since the pace of innovation in the past decade suggests instead that such a Moon colony could happen far quicker, once private space starts making real money in orbit.

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Nigeria aims for manned space

9:36 am

The new colonial movement: Nigeria’s Minister of Science and Technology said this week that his country hopes to launch its first astronaut by 2030.

No details at all were provided, but it appears from the article that the focus here is to establish a bureaucracy, not design rockets or spaceships. I suspect they might be planning to pay a private company to put a Nigerian in space, but use this to justify creating a space agency that can be used as a vessel to provide jobs for all their friends.

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Saying “All Lives Matter” is now white supremacy

10:02 am

The coming dark age: A group of sixty professors at American University’s Washington College of Law have signed a letter claiming that to say “All lives matter” instead of “Black lives matter” is an example of “white supremacy.”

Dozens of professors from American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) openly condemned an unknown student as a white supremacist for posting a sign with the catchphrase “All Lives Matter” on a faculty member’s door.

“The ‘All Lives Matter’ sign might seem to be a benign message with no ill intent, but it has become a rallying cry for many who espouse ideas of white supremacy and overt racism, as well as those who do not believe the laws should equally protect those who have a different skin color or religion,” the professors wrote in a statement to the WCL community.

For college professors to no longer recognize the plain meaning of words, and to instead assign a meaning of their own to those words, for their own political purposes, tells me that if I had a son or daughter attending this university I would pull them out immediately. Not only are students not being educated properly there, they are being taught nonsense and hate.

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New Horizons’ future research goals

9:15 am

On Monday at a planetary science conference Alan Stern, the project scientist for New Horizons, outlined the science goals in studying the Kuiper Belt should the spacecraft’s mission be extened through 2021.

The main goal will be the January 1, 2019 fly-by of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, estimated to be between 12 to 24 miles across. However, the proposal also includes the following:

“In addition to making a close flyby of MU69, we’re also going to be close enough in range to study quite a number of other small KBOs, and some large ones that are on the Pluto scale,” Stern said. New Horizons will be able to study them in ways that could never be accomplished from Earth. The closeness of the spacecraft will enable high resolution observations, and the ability to look for satellites that cannot be seen from Earth observatories or with the Hubble Telescope.

“Because we are looking back on the rest of the solar system, at the Kuiper Belt and the Centaur Population,” Stern said, “we’re going to be able to study another 18 or 20 small bodies to determine whether or not the recently discovered rings around the centaur Chariklo are a common occurrence, or something anomalous. And I don’t know of any other way over the next several years, except through New Horizons, that we can develop a data set like that.”

What I find amazing is that it appears from Stern’s remarks that NASA has not yet approved this proposal. Before the team discovered 2014 MU69, I would have been more skeptical about extending the mission, but since they will be able to do a close fly-by of a type of object never before seen, and considering the time and cost it takes to get to the Kuiper Belt, it seems foolish now to not approve this mission extension.

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An estimated $55 billion in Obamacare waste

9:31 am

Finding out what’s in it: Since its signing Obamacare has caused the government and public to waste approximately $55 billion.

Though most of that number, $45 billion, is an estimate of the amount of money businesses and people have been forced to spend filling out Obamacare paperwork and thus somewhat guesswork, the remaining $10 billion is based on hard data and real waste, such as handing out almost a billion in improper subsidies or spending $2 billion to construct a website that did not work.

But who’s counting? It is more important that we can go to bed at night knowing that the Democrats care about us, and will try anything, even if it is insane or completely stupid, to make us feel better about ourselves.

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DOD opens ULA investigation

9:12 am

The deputy inspector general of the Defense Department has notified the Air Force that he is beginning an investigation into ULA and the DOD over their relationship and contract.

He also made it clear that the investigation was sparked by last week’s comments by a ULA executive who subsequently resigned.

This is all a game. The Air Force and ULA have been colluding for years to squeeze out any competition. There is no one in Washington who needs an investigation to find this out. The inspector general will issue a report, the Air Force will admit its error and promise to do better, and they will then try to have things continue as they have.

The one difference, however, will be that SpaceX will be there, providing real competition. Thus, what matters isn’t the investigation by the inspector general. What matters is the existence of a competing company willing to put cost pressure on ULA and the Air Force.

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TMT leadership looks at alternatives to Hawaii

9:01 am

Though they have refused to comment publicly, the Facebook page for the Thirty Meter Telescope on Monday showed the telescope’s management visiting the Canary Islands, a potential alternative site to Hawaii.

Their Facebook post serves two purposes. It shows that they mean business when they say they must start considering abandoning Hawaii. It also might force the Hawaiian state government to stop dragging its feet in the permitting process that protesters have forced TMT to go through, a second time.

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Does captivity hurt or help killer whales? Scientists disagree

9:21 am

The uncertainty of science: Two different science research teams strongly disagree about the positive or negative effects of living in captivity for killer whales.

In a decision hailed by animal-rights groups, the US marine-park company SeaWorld Entertainment announced last week that it will no longer breed killer whales. But whether captivity harms the planet’s biggest predator is an area of active scientific debate.

The latest arguments centre on two 2015 studies that drew dramatically different conclusions about the lifespans of captive killer whales (Orcinus orca), relative to those of wild populations. Although many factors affect well-being, an apparent discrepancy between the survival of captive and wild animals has long been cited by activists as evidence of the poor welfare of captive killer whales.

One of the studies is authored by a team largely made up of researchers at SeaWorld, which is headquartered in Orlando, Florida, and owns several animal parks that keep killer whales; the other is by two former killer-whale trainers at the company who feature in the 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which is critical of SeaWorld. In letters published last week, authors from each paper accuse the others of cherry-picking data to support positions on whether the animals should be captive — charges that each team in turn rejects.

Obviously, each science team has its own agendas. The result unfortunately is that the science is cloudy and unclear.

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United Arab Emirates teams up with Japan

8:49 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) has signed a cooperative agreement with Japan’s space agency JAXA.

The details are slim, but I suspect it is similar to the recent UAE/India deal and involves the UAE providing some of its oil money in exchange for getting some of Japan’s technical help.

Update: My suspicions were correct. UAESA has purchased launch services from Japan Mitsubishi for its Mars mission, dubbed Hope, scheduled for launch in 2020.

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China shuts down its first space station

3:52 pm

Though still in orbit, China has turned off Tiangong-1, its first space station, launched in 2011 and since visited by three manned crews.

The news story, from the state-run Chinese news organization, notes that the module’s orbit will slowly decay and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. It does not say how the Chinese intend to control that re-entry, since Tiangong-1 is likely large enough for some parts of it to survive and hit the ground.

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Russia finally approves 10-year space plan

9:31 am

The announcement yesterday that Russia is trimming its space budget by 30% was actually part of the final approval of their ten-year space plan, under discussion and planning for the past two years.

Interestingly, the 30% cut was only the last reduction of many in the budget plan since it was first announced. Initially, they hoped to budget 3.4 trillion rubles for their aerospace industry over the next decade. The final budget approved yesterday is for 1.4 trillion. That’s a 59% reduction.

Considering that the reductions have forced them to abandon any plans for building a re-usable rocket, they will be increasingly hard-pressed in the next decade to successfully compete for business in the commercial market. While Russia stands still with its older designs, others will be developing new less costly ways to launch rockets. The business will go elsewhere, and they will actually have even less money to work with.

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South Korea commits almost a billion dollars to AI research

8:56 am

In reaction to the recent Go victory by a computer program over a human, the government of South Korea has quickly accelerated its plans to back research into the field of artificial intelligence with a commitment of $863 million and the establishment of public/private institute.

Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years. It is not immediately clear whether the cash represents new funding, or had been previously allocated to AI efforts. But it does include the founding of a high-profile, public–private research centre with participation from several Korean conglomerates, including Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor, as well as the technology firm Naver, based near Seoul.

The timing of the announcement indicates the impact in South Korea of AlphaGo, which two days earlier wrapped up a 4–1 victory over grandmaster Lee Sedol in an exhibition match in Seoul. The feat was hailed as a milestone for AI research. But it also shocked the Korean public, stoking widespread concern over the capabilities of AI, as well as a spate of newspaper headlines worrying that South Korea was falling behind in a crucial growth industry.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye has also announced the formation of a council that will provide recommendations to overhaul the nation’s research and development process to enhance productivity. In her 17 March speech, she emphasized that “artificial intelligence can be a blessing for human society” and called it “the fourth industrial revolution”. She added, “Above all, Korean society is ironically lucky, that thanks to the ‘AlphaGo shock’, we have learned the importance of AI before it is too late.”

Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to industry rather than the universities. For myself, I wonder if this crony capitalistic approach will produce any real development, or whether it will instead end up to be a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians.

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Roscosmos budget slashed 30%

10:46 pm

How’s that consolidation working out for ya? The Russian government announced today that it will have to cut the budget for its space program by 30 percent over the next ten years due to the country’s deepening economic problems.

In line with its reduced funding, the space agency has agreed to delay a manned flight to the moon by five years – to 2035 from 2030 – and scrap plans to develop a reusable rocket, a potentially valuable cost-saving technology. A Roscosmos spokesman previously said the agency would reassess its plans after 2025.

Essentially, the consolidation of Russia’s entire aerospace industry into a single corporation run by the Russian government has produced a very expensive government program unable to accomplish much of anything for a budget of 1.4 trillion rubles ($20.4 billion) from 2016 to 2025. Sounds kind of like NASA, doesn’t it?

Give me competition over a centralized program any day, and see great things happen. Go with a centralized government program, and watch as the life ebbs from the creativity of everyone.

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