Tag: policy

Judge okays vote on whether SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility can incorporate as city

9:03 am

After reviewing the local petition submitted by SpaceX requesting permission, a local judge as signed an order allowing the citizens of Boca Chica to vote on whether they can incorporate as city in Texas.

The incorporation petition, [Cameron County Judge Eddie] Treviño explained, was duly signed by at least ten percent of the qualified voters of Starbase. Additionally, the petition satisfied the statutorily required elements and set forth satisfactory proof that Starbase contains the requisite number of inhabitants as required by law and the area to be incorporated is not part of another incorporated city or town.

Since the submitted petition met all statutory requirements, Treviño said he is required under Section 8.009 of the Texas Local Government Code to order that an incorporation election be held on a specific date and at a designate place in the community.

The election is set to occur during the general election on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025.

SpaceX itself had organized the petition and submitted it to the county in mid-December, noting that it already “…currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.”

Expect the petition to be approved, making Starbase at Boca Chica one of the most spectacular company towns ever to exist.

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Hal Holbrook – Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in honor of his birthday

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I last posted a recreation in April 2017. Today, on Lincoln’s birthday, I present a recreation by Hal Holbrook, performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 13, 1966.

As I wrote in 2017, “Listen to the words, however. This is no pandering speech, as we routinely see today. It is hard, muscled, and honest, bluntly recognizing that all, from both sides of the Civil War, must pay for the scourge of slavery.”

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Modern academia: “We aren’t going to hire another white guy, are we?”

1:52 pm

Whites need not apply
Whites need not apply.

The quote in the headline above comes from a lawsuit [pdf] filed by a former professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Stephen Kleinschmit, who was eventually terminated because he had raised concerns within his department about its hiring practices, which beginning in 2019 became entirely focused on choosing its new faculty employees solely on whether they were born to the correct race, not on their talents or qualifications.

Kleinschmit raised his concerns because he was required to participate in the hiring process, and feared if he did not do so it “would make him a participant in illegal activities for which he would be held liable.” Instead of recognizing the clearly discriminatory and illegal nature of its racial hiring practices, however, the department decided to terminate Kleinshcmit’s contract instead.

He was ultimately terminated in August 2023 spring semester, ostensibly as a result of the need for “budget cuts.” Kleinschmit said the decision to fire him at that time appeared to be intentional, to not only cut him loose from his job at UIC, but also deny him the opportunity to seek employment at another university for more than a year.

However, Kleinschmit said he – the department’s only white male faculty member – was the only faculty member terminated at that time, despite claims of lack of finances, even as UIC moved forward with plans to hire more “diverse” faculty.

The complaint noted that Kleinschmit’s old job was later posted as eligible for hiring. But now the job ad was written in a way to encourage non-white male applicants, “as UIC shifted resources to a new job focused on fulfilling its racially discriminatory goals.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the department fired its only white professor in order to replace him with a minority.
» Read more

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NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS

9:47 am

NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.

The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.

Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.

The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.

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Firefly wins $8.2 million grant from Texas Space Commission

9:36 am

The new Texas Space Commission, established in 2023 by the state legislature and appropriated $350 million to encourage the development of a Texas aerospace industry, has awarded the rocket and lunar lander company Firefly $8.2 million grant.

Firefly said the funding will result in an additional 5,600 square feet of cleanroom space at its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, as well as added ground and test equipment, a spacecraft pressure proof test facility at the 200-acre campus in Briggs that has 200,000-square-feet of facilities, and upgraded infrastructure for mission operations and labs. The company’s Cedar Park headquarters is 28,000 square feet. The improvements are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

The 50 jobs will be added in engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing and spacecraft operations, according to the announcement. The grant also will enable the company to expand STEM outreach and internship programs, including working with the schools in the University of Texas System to provide hands-on experience in spacecraft development.

Though the commission was given $350 million to help industry, in truth the legislature allocated $200 million of that money to build a new “research and training facility” at Texas A&M. While this might help encourage engineering students to come to Texas and thus settle there within the industry, to me it looks like the commission was mostly created to distribute a very large chunk of cash to this one university.

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Orbex scouts Saxaford in advance of first launch

9:25 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.

Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.

Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.

Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.

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Maybe the only way to reform academia is to shut it down and start over

2:37 pm

NC State: Maybe rotten to the core
NC State: Maybe it’s rotten to the core

Back in 2021, when I was reporting new blacklist stories every single day during the intolerant madness after the COVID panic and the death of George Floyd, I posted the blacklisting and attempted destruction of a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, merely because Stephen Porter had publicly questioned the wisdom and soundness of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.

Though administrators tried hard to push Porter out, he managed to survive, and is still teaching at NC State. Sadly however his attempt for justice failed, his lawsuit against this harassment and slander campaign eventually being dismissed by the courts.

Porter however decided he couldn’t simply close the book on the matter. For example, the leftist effort at NC State to silence all debate during this same time resulted in one university employee committing suicide. He couldn’t take the constant harassment, the doxxing of his home address, the vandalism at his home, and the slanders accusing him of being a racist and “white supremacist” wherever he went on campus, all based on no evidence at all.

Moreover, even though the board of governors of the North Carolina university system in 2023 established an “institutional neutrality” policy that forbid its colleges from requiring new students or faculty to endorse DEI or compel them to obey the pronoun demands of others, Porter kept finding NC State violating that policy, in word and deed.

He decided that he needed to fight back.
» Read more

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China and SpaceX complete launches

12:02 pm

Both China and SpaceX successfully completed launches today.

First, China completed the first launch of its Long March 8A rocket, an upgraded and more powerful version of its Long March 8 rocket. The rocket lifted off from China’s coastal Wencheng spaceport, and put the second batch (number unrevealed) of one of China’s new mega internet constellations.

Along with the basic Long March-8 model and the booster-free tandem configuration, it forms the Long March 8 series of rockets, providing a payload capacity range of 3 tons, 5 tons, and 7 tons to SSO. This significantly enhances China’s satellite networking capabilities for low and medium Earth orbits.

These rockets and the coastal spaceport will also allow China to steadily reduce its reliance on its older family of rockets that use toxic hypergolic fuels and launch from within China.

Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starliink satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2025 launch race:

19 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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A Pakistani rover will fly on China’s Chang’e-8 mission to the Moon

9:18 am

Pakistan and China have finalized plans to place a Pakistani rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander mission.

This rover partnership was first announced in November 2024. This new release appears to provide a bit more information about the rover itself.

The rover will have a mass of around 35 kilograms and carry science payloads for studying lunar soil composition, radiation levels, plasma properties and testing new technologies for sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will also feature a collaborative scientific payload developed by Chinese and European researchers.

The Chang’e-8 mission is targeting a 2030 launch and will land in the Moon’s south pole region. China also claims it will initiate construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), but that’s a bit of hyperbole. All it shall be is another unmanned lander with two rovers and other instruments, hardly a manned base. What will matter will be what follows, and how quickly.

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It won’t be Democratic Party stupidity that will give Republicans victories in ’26 and ’28

12:06 pm

Vultures eating carrion
Democrats in Washington

In the past few weeks there have been a number of very entertaining essays describing the insane inability of Democrats to learn anything from their defeats in the 2024 elections. From the second link:

The Democratic Party just can’t help itself. For its own psychological reasons, it can’t move beyond the “denial” stage of grief. Doing so would jeopardize the party’s sense of purpose, identity, and ego. Right now, the “patient” cannot heal itself because it won’t accept the diagnosis.

Instead, it rejects it: Trump is Hitler! Musk is Hitler! MAGA is Hitler! I’m the only one defending democracy!

A sane, rational actor would take a step back and consider his own role in losing three branches of government, a majority of statehouses, and two-thirds of the Supreme Court. And then they’d develop a better product.

Fortunately for the GOP, they’re just not ready for that level of introspection. Not yet. (And probably not until it’s forced upon them.)

And so, the losing losers of the Democratic Party continue to lose. They can’t even counterpunch effectively, because they overreact to every feint. They’re so ridiculously undisciplined, they’re chasing shadows, following the champ around the ring like a puppy dog — eating a buffet of rights, jabs, and uppercuts. [emphasis in original]

All true, but if conservatives think this stupidity on the left will win Republicans the mid-term elections in ’26 and the next presidential election in ’28, they are fooling themselves. » Read more

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Germany commits almost a million dollars to build off-shore launch platform

9:08 am

The Germany government has now allocated $897,000 to a private consortium of four companies to help finance its promised but delayed an off-shore launch platform.

The North Sea launch platform is being developed by the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance (GOSA), a joint venture formed in December 2020 by Tractebel DOC Offshore, MediaMobil, OHB, and Harren Shipping Services. The platform will be constructed on the 170-metre-long Combi Dock I vessel and will accommodate launchers with a mass of between 36 and 52 tonnes. A 2020 feasibility study stated that the development and operation of the North Sea launch platform would cost between €22 and €30 million over six years.

The consortium had first announced the project in 2023, with the first launch of several suborbital test rockets in 2024. Since then little has been heard of this project, with those launches never occurring.

If built as promised, this platform would accommodate rockets as large as the Falcon Heavy. Its goal, besides offering the platform to all rocket companies, is apparently to give German rocket startups the option of a German spaceport so they don’t have to depend on other countries.

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New calculations raise odds from 1.2% to 2.3% that asteroid will impact Earth in ’32

11:36 am

New calculations have increased the chances that the recently discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit the Earth in 2032 from 1.2% to 2.3%.

Ongoing observations from ground-based telescopes involved with the International Asteroid Warning Network will continue while the asteroid is still visible through April, after which it will be too faint to observe until around June 2028.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will also observe the asteroid in March 2025 to better assess the asteroid’s size. Currently the asteroid is estimated to be 130-300 feet across.

There remains great uncertainty in these numbers. We will really not know for certain if the asteroid will hit us until its orbit is studied for the next few years. Moreover, its size and make-up is also not known precisely yet. It could be as large as 320 feet, or as small as 130 feet. If the larger size, it poses a much greater risk, though that risk shrinks again if it is a rubble-pile asteroid that will simply break apart upon hitting the atmosphere.

This is not something to take lightly. Though the asteroid is not a world-destroyer, it does have the ability to cause significant damage, depending on where it hits. As its arrival is not for eight years, there is even time to quickly put together an unmanned mission to study it. (In the past I would never said this, but the domination of private enterprise in our present competitive space industry makes many things possible that were impossible when NASA and the government ran everything.)

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