Tag: policy

Congress passes short term extension of commercial space regulatory “learning period”

9:19 am

The Senate yesterday passed a short term extension of the regulatory “learning period” at the FAA that limits its ability to regulate commercial space.

[The Senate] quickly passed an extension of the FAA’s authorization, a final piece of “must pass” legislation before the end of the year. The bill (H.R. 6503) passed the House on December 11. Among other things, it extends the “learning period” for commercial human spaceflight until March 9, 2024 that otherwise would have expired on January 1. The learning period, or “moratorium,” prohibits the FAA from promulgating new regulations on commercial human spaceflight while the industry is in its infancy.

The president still needs to sign this bill, but that is expected.

Originally passed in 2004 as an eight-year period, this “learning period” has been extended several times since. The industry wants a longer extension, as it still considers itself quite rightly to be in an experimental test phase, not operational in the sense of airplane manufacture.

Not that this extension matters. It appears in the past two years that the regulators at the FAA have decided to ignore the law and make believe this learning period really doesn’t exist, based on how that agency has treated test launches by SpaceX and others. Rather than let their launches proceed quickly as tests, the FAA has begun to treat each test as an operational flight that requires a long investigation before further launch approvals are given.

Unless there is a major change in leadership in the White House, we should expect a major slow-down of the American launch industry in the coming years, regardless of whether this “learning period” is extended or not.

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First segments of Extremely Large Telescope have shipped to Chile

8:58 am

After 20 years of development, the first eighteen segments of Europe’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have now shipped to Chile, with another 780 more segments to go.

The assembly of the telescope’s massive mirrors will take place over the next 4 years. This week, the first segments of what will be the main mirror – called ‘M1’ – arrived in Chile.

Once complete in 2028, these segments will create a primary mirror 40 meters across, about 131 feet, four times larger than the 10.4 meter Gran Telescopio in the Canary Islands, presently the largest telescope in operation.

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Pushback? Deal between Republicans and Wisconsin University to shift away from DEI

12:41 pm

Failure Theater!

Failure theater: In a deal worked out suddenly between the board of regents at the University of Wisconsin and the state legislature, the university will get $800 million for infrastructure improvements and pay raises in exchange for imposing some limited reductions in its Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) programs.

The deal also requires UW system campuses to refrain from adding new DEI positions through December 2026. Administrators must also reassign at least one third of their current DEI-focused employees to roles dedicated to academic and student success. Mandatory DEI statements in admissions and hiring are also to be abolished under the deal, and efforts to fund a conservative professorship at UW-Madison must be launched, according to the terms.

You can read the actual language of this deal here [pdf]. The deal also requires the university to replace its Target of Opportunity Program (TOP) — which established systems to favor hiring minorities over others — with a new “alternative program focused on recruiting faculty (regardless of their identity or ethnic/racial background) who have demonstrated the ability to mentor ‘at risk’ and/or underrepresented students to achieve academic success and who have demonstrated academic and research excellence.”

Does this deal do what it appears to, reduce or eliminate the very racist DEI program at the University of Wisconsin? Hardly. » Read more

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Spain’s new space agency

9:32 am

Link here. The article provides a detailed description of the history leading up to the formation in March 2023 of Spain’s new space agency, Agencia Espacial Española (AEE) (the Spanish Space Agency in English).

It appears the goal was to consolidate Spain’s government space operations from eleven different agencies so as to better coordinate that government’s work with the nation’s burgeoning new commercial space sector.

By law, Spain has created the AEE without any increase in public spending. The new agency has been allocated an initial budget of 700 million euros per year, which was primarily drawn from funding for ESA [European Space Agency] participation, the CDTI, and INTA [two other Spanish agencies]. However, it is expected that the AEE will receive higher budgets in the future for the development of its own programs outside those directly linked to the ESA. The task of financing space activity public and private alike is of utmost importance, and one of the agency’s roles should be to create mechanisms for making investment attractive and effective, either directly or through public-private partnerships — a model that is producing excellent results in several countries around the world, like the United States. [emphasis mine]

It appears the goal is to emulate the policies followed by NASA in the past few years, buy services and products from the private sector rather than build these things within the government. If so, AEE will likely help jumpstart that new space industry. Whether it can stay focused on this goal, or shift into a typical government empire-building operation that sucks the life out of everything, will be its real fundamental test.

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Firefly schedules second launch in 2023

9:19 am

Firefly has now scheduled the second launch of its Alpha rocket in 2023, with a launch window of about 20 minutes on the morning of Decmeber 20, 2023.

The payload is a smallsat from Lockheed Martin testing new antenna technology, but the launch is for the Space Force. Like the previous September 15, 2023 launch, it is designed to test the ability of Firefly to get a payload into orbit quickly, from assembly to launch.

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China’s X-37B copy deploys six independent satellites

8:56 am

Four days after it was launched last week, China’s unnamed reuseable mini-shuttle, essentially a copy of the Space Force’s X-37B, deployed six independent small satellites that appear to be emitting a variety of signals.

The objects have been given letter names, A through F. Because their deployment occurred at different times they are in different orbits than the mini-shuttle, though all orbits cross at some point. The radio signals appear to be either simple beacons or signals of an as-yet undetermined nature.

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What makes a Nazi?

1:10 pm

The user's manual for today's pro-Hamas demonstrators
The user’s manual for today’s
pro-Hamas demonstrators

If you have any doubts that we live in a revised version of 1930s Germany, you need only open your eyes for only a few seconds and read these stories below. The list is hardly comprehensive, as it only provides a small sampling of the vicious, violent, and hateful demonstrations, riots, and violence that began after October 7th in support of the rape, torture, and murder by Hamas of more than 1,400 Israelis, many of whom were women and children, and have since morphed into an anti-Jewish compaign designed to intimidate and oppress Jews everywhere, merely because they are Jews.

The mob in front of the Israeli embassy in the third link above made very clear, in blunt chants, what all these pro-Hamas demonstrators want, as well as who they are:
» Read more

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UK finally gives Saxavord spaceport a license

11:33 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the United Kingdom finally issued a spaceport license today to the Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands, thirteen months after the application was submitted.

This license however does not mean that launches will take place anytime soon. First, Saxavord will have to resume construction of its facilities, which ceased earlier this year because of the CAA hadn’t issued the permit. Moreover, this license does not allow launches. As noted by the CAA:

Spaceport licences allow a person or organisation to operate a spaceport, they are granted in the UK under the Space Industry Act 2018 (SIA). For a launch to happen an operator will need to have developed and proven their technology, be operationally ready, and have a launch licence from the UK Civil Aviation Authority. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted language is especially crushing, because it literally forbids the launch of any new untested rocket. Since every single rocket so far being developed for these two spaceports is new and untested, none will be allowed to launch unless they move operations elsewhere. This requirement explains for example why the startup ABL shifted its next launch from the Sutherland spaceport — it had hoped to launch this year — to Kodiak, Alaska. Orbex will have even more problems, as it has signed a fifty year lease to launch its new Prime rocket from Sutherland, with its rocket factory close by. If it can’t test fly Prime from Sutherland the company will be very badly hampered.

Even if these companies eventually get launch licenses for their untried rockets, expect such approvals to take a very long time, based on the CAA’s past and present history. It took the CAA almost a year to approve Virgin Orbit’s launch license, essentially bankrupting the company.

Nor are my conclusions here — which I have been stating now for more than a year — simply opinions. They have now been confirmed by a new report issued only a few days ago by the UK Space Agency, which admitted the following:
» Read more

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Chinese pseudo-company launches satellite

9:45 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace today launched what is only described as a “prototype recoverable experiment spacecraft” by another Chinese pseudo-company, its Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

China’s state-run press now routinely makes no mention of these pseudo-companies. In the past China would tout them in an effort to make the rest of the world believe, falsely, that it had its own competitive and growing space industry. Now it appears the Xi government has decided it doesn’t like the growing and somewhat independent success of these companies, and is making it clear to all that, in the end, everything they do belongs to the government.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
61 China
17 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 104 to 61, and the entire world combined 104 to 96. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 96.

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Environmental groups file another complaint attempting to stop SpaceX launches at Boca Chica

3:45 pm

In what is now becoming a routine process of harassment, several environmental groups have filed another complaint against the FAA and Fish & Wildlife for eventually issuing a second launch license to SpaceX, permitting it to do its mid-November second orbital test launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket from Boca Chica, Texas.

In the supplemental complaint, the groups — Center for Biological Diversity, American Bird Conservancy, Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., Save RGV and Surfrider Foundation — allege the FAA failed to properly analyze the environmental impacts of the first Starship launch before issuing a revised license for the second launch that took place Nov. 18.

That new licensing process included an environmental review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regarding a pad deluge system that SpaceX installed on the pad to prevent damage like that the pad suffered during the first launch. The FWS concluded that the deluge system would produce no significant environmental changes.

The environmental groups argue that both FAA and FWS fell short of what was required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to review the environmental impacts of Starship launches. The FAA, it stated in the complaint, “once again failed to take the requisite ‘hard look’ at the impacts of the Starship/Superheavy launch program through a supplemental NEPA analysis.”

Let me translate what this complaint really says, and I can do it only a few words: “Your review didn’t come to the conclusions we want — which is to block all work by SpaceX — so that we can do what we want!” Both the American Bird Conservancy and the Surfrider Foundation simply want unlimited access to the region for their own recreation, while the Center of Biological Diversity is only interested in stopping all human development anywhere — until it can settle its frequent lawsuits against the government and pocket its payoff.

As for Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas and Save RGV, both are bogus organizations. The first is for a almost non-existent Indian tribe that never even lived in this area (they were based in Mexico), and the second claims it represents the people of the south Texas region who want SpaceX’s work stopped. Since almost everyone in Brownsville and throughout the region is celebrating the new prosperity brought to them by SpaceX, it is essentially a front group for the Marxist environmental movement that hates all prosperity. It doesn’t represent anyone really in south Texas.

As before, this complaint will have to be fought, wasting time and money.

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Russia launches weather satellite

3:29 pm

Russia early today successfully launched a new weather satellite, the second in a new constellation, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

The flight path took the rocket north, with its lowers stages crashing in landing zones in Russia.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
60 China
17 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 104 to 60, and the entire world combined 104 to 95. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 95.

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Is the pushback against the bigots in academia finally and actually becoming real?

2:04 pm

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

To end this week on a positive note, a plethora of stories in the past few days strongly suggest that the bigoted status quo in most universities in America is finally facing some real pushback, pushback that includes the arrests of lawbreaking protesters, actual budget cuts to universities for having racial quotas and promoting race hatred, and the passing of new legislation to better enforce the civil rights laws that have been on the books since the 1960s.

First we have the news out of Pennsylvania. Yesterday the state legislature, led by the Republican caucus, voted down a $33.5 million budget item for the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school, doing so expressly because of that university’s apparent toleration of anti-Semitism as well as its extensive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program.

Annual state aid for Penn’s veterinary school normally draws strong bipartisan support in Pennsylvania’s Legislature and, earlier Wednesday, had won overwhelming approval in the Republican-controlled Senate.

However, it failed late Wednesday night in the House after the Republican floor leader spoke against it, saying Penn must do more to make it clear that it opposes antisemitism. “Until more is done at the university in terms of rooting out, calling out and making an official stance on antisemitism being against the values of the university, I cannot in good conscience support this funding,” GOP House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler said during floor debate.

Though the funding bill was supported by the entire Democratic Party caucus (whose base pushes these bigoted policies and so at heart so do the Democrats) as well as about 25% of the Republican caucus, it failed to gain the needed two-thirds majority to pass.

While this vote is a start, it hardly does enough. The state government still funds UPenn’s racial quota program, which includes programs that give favored treatment to women and minorities while discriminating against others, merely because of their sex or skin color.

Meanwhile at Brown University in Rhode Island, college officials called the police to have forty-one pro-Hamas students arrested for occupying a building.
» Read more

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China launches its X-37B copy on its third mission

3:52 pm

China today used its Long March 2F rocket to place its copy of the Boeing X-37B resusable mini-shuttle, lifting off from the Jiuquin spaceport in the northwest of China.

China released no real information about the mission nor did it release any images of the launch. This mission comes only seven months after the last touched down, the fastest turnaround yet, suggesting China is working out the kinks for reuse. It is also possible this is simply a second spacecraft, since they tell us nothing of substance.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab (with a launch scheduled for tonight)
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 103 to 59, and the entire world combined 103 to 93. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 93.

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The long term deep-rooted bigotry at MIT, sadly typical of modern academia

1:41 pm

MIT student body, broken down by race

In doing my essay yesterday about the deep roots of corruption and bigotry within American academia, focused specifically on Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylanvia, I came across some revealing graphs proudly posted on the website of MIT’s own Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office that I decided needed to be highlghted more prominently.

The first graph is to the right. It shows the student percentages of various races at MIT, from 2005 through 2023. It clearly proves that the administration of MIT is aggressively discriminating against whites in order to meet the demands of its “MIT Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, & Composition” [pdf] (webpage here). Since 2005 there has been a 25% drop in white students at the school, with the main beneficiaries of this discrimination international students and Asians. Other minorities, such as Hispanics and blacks, also gained but to a much smaller extent.

The key word in that Strategic Action Plan’s title is the word “Composition.” Sounds so benign, doesn’t it? What is refers to however is the entire racial quota system the school has instituted to reduce its white population. As noted on the webpage describing this term:

The composition of our community, and of our leadership, should reflect a commitment to diversity. Establishing objectives, defining steps for achieving them, and improving processes for collecting more nuanced identity data will empower us to see ourselves more clearly and make progress.

In other words, the university must make a person’s “identity” or race the most important component in considering them for admission. Talent, skill, education, or experience are irrelevant. All that matters is skin color.

That webpage goes on to carefully delineate the methods used to implement this racial quota system, while always using carefully worded language that — while it conveys its clearly bigoted intent — does so in a way to give the university deniability if it is ever accused of discrimination.

Below are similar graphs showing racial percentages for both MIT’s staff and faculty.
» Read more

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The scientific results from South Korea’s first lunar orbiter Danuri

9:56 am

floor of Shackleton Crater
The floor of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s
south pole. Click for original image.

Link here. The article provides a good summary, with three results of significance:

  • NASA’s Shadowcam camera successfully obtained low light images of the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole. One of those images is to the right. All images showed no obvious evidence of ice. The arrow points to the track of a boulder that rolled down the slope.
  • A gamma-ray detector, designed to map the chemcial surface of the Moon, ended up detecting many intergalactic gamma-ray bursts, including the brightest ever in October 2022 that was observed by numerous detectors.
  • Data of the Moon’s magnetic field suggested the far side was “more electrically conductive than the near side,” a result that scientists said “doesn’t make sense.”

Danuri is still functioning, long after its primary mission was completed, and could continue to operate for years yet.

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Musk fires back at FCC decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award

9:45 am

In a tweet late on December 12, 2024, Elon Musk fired back at the FCC for its decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award first awarded to SpaceX in 2020 under the FCC program to encourage companies to provide broadband internet services to rural areas. As Musk noted quite accurately:

Doesn’t make sense. Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale!

They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it those who aren’t getting the job done.

What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules to prevent SpaceX from competing.

In September Musk had also endorced a Wall Street Journal editoral that suggested the Biden administration was attempting to cancel this grant because “it has it in for Elon Musk.” Musk response: “Sure seems that way.”

It seems that way even more so now. I wonder if Musk will now sue. Above all however he is right when he argues the entire program should be dissolved and the money returned to the taxpayer. There is no justification for the FCC to hand out this cash, especially when multiple private companies, not just SpaceX, are getting the job done and making profits at the same time.

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December 13, 2023 Quick space links – All Russia today

3:32 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Russia planning to lay off several major managers in manned program

    • The article at the link states that this decision suggests Roscosmos is shifting from space exploration and science to doing military and commercial missions. Sadly, these former communists still don’t understand how freedom works, which if allowed to flourish will end up paying for both.

 

  • Russia’s proposed space station is shrinking

    • This story is related to the first above. Rather than having the new station made up of several modules, like ISS, Tiangong-3, and Mir, Roscosmos’ division that builds its manned spacecraft, Energia, is working out a one-module design comparable to the Soviet Union’s Salyut stations from the 1970s.

In other words, the news from Russia today is that it is recognizing it no longer has the capability to build a manned space program. The decision to invade the Ukraine, and the resulting isolation and loss of its international satellite business, has left Roscosmos very short of cash.

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The rot in academia is very deep-rooted

1:04 pm

The poison Ivy League
The poison Ivy League: pushing bigotry as goal #1!

Last week I wrote how the bankrupt testimony of the heads of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT in front of Congress, where all three gave legalistic answers when asked whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate their colleges’ code of conduct, might have finally made ordinary Americans aware of the depravity and corruption that now permeates almost all of American academia.

It certainly appears so, based on the loud and almost universal condemnation of these three college presidents, with numerous calls for their resignations, from both Republicans and Democrats as well as students, teachers, and alumni.

What I did not note however was how deeply rooted that depravity and corruption is within academia, that even if all three of these presidents were immediately fired it would likely change nothing.

In fact, we can see the depth of that depravity by the response from all three colleges to this controversy. Only one president has so far been removed, and there only partly. At UPenn, President M. Elizabeth Magill submitted her resignation as president on December 9, 2023, after a meeting of the college’s board of trustees. That resignation however did not sever her ties to the school. She is still a tenured faculty member at the college’s law school, with the chairman of the board issuing his own endorsement of her good qualities (even as he resigned as well).

In other words, the university is very sorry you were offended. Magill did nothing wrong, we are doing nothing wrong, and we are going to do as little as we can to get the heat off of us as quickly as possible, so that we can then resume doing what we have been doing, indoctrinating racial hatred and anti-Semitism in all students.

Meanwhile at Harvard, the board of trustees responded by issuing a full endorsement of its own president, Claudine Gay, refusing to sanction her in any way for her willingness to allow anti-Semitism at Harvard. Worse, this endorsement occurred after news reports revealed she had repeatedly committed plagiarism in her published work. From the trustee’s statement:
» Read more

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FCC denies Starlink $886 million grant

9:48 am

Despite the fact that SpaceX Starlink constellation is presently providing internet access to more rural customers than any company worldwide, the FCC yesterday announced that it will not award the company a $886 million subsidy under its program for expanding broadband service to rural areas.

The FCC announced today that it won’t award Elon Musk’s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”

That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.

This decision can only be explained by utterly political reasons. SpaceX right now is experiencing a booming business, with its traffic up two and a half times from last year,almost all of which is in rural areas. That number is from a news report today, the same day the FCC claims Starlink can’t provide such service. As noted by one SpaceX lawyer:

“Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

The initial award was made in December 2020, when Trump was still president. It was first canceled in August 2022, after Biden took over. SpaceX appealed, but today’s announcement says the FCC rejected that appeal.

While there is absolutely no justification to give any company this money — SpaceX is proving private companies don’t need it to provide this service to rural areas — this decision is clearly political, driven by the hate of Elon Musk among Democrats and the Biden administration. They don’t care that SpaceX is a successeful private company providing tens of thousands of jobs as well as good products to Americans. Musk does not support them, and so he must be squashed.

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In 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted

9:33 am

According to a report in the science journal Nature published today, in 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted in a single year and illustrating the steady rise of fake papers in recent years.

The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found.

The bulk of 2023’s retractions were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley. So far this year, Hindawi journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles, citing factors such as “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process”, after investigations prompted by internal editors and by research-integrity sleuths who raised questions about incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers.

Wiley is moving to shut down this Hindawi subsidiary, canceling many of the journals and abandoning the name entirely. Meanwhile, the overall problem continues to grow, and threatens to get worse with the introduction of papers that can be written entirely by the new artificial intelligence software.

Much of this problem is tied to our bankrupt academic system, which judges scientists by the number of papers the publish rather than how they teach in the classroom. Thus, research scientists at universities have no motive to teach well. Instead they focus on getting papers in print, even if they have to fake it.

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