China launches four satellites

Using its Long March 2C rocket, China today successfully launched four satellites, three military reconnaissance satellites and one data communications satellite.

While the first stage crashed inside China (no word on whether it landed near habitable areas), China also claimed it attempted a recovery of the fairings for reuse. At this time no information has been released on what was achieved.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

23 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 23 in the national rankings.

China test flies reusable suborbital spacecraft

The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press today announced that it had recently flown and landed a new reusable suborbital spacecraft. Here’s their full release:

A reusable suborbital carrier landed stably at an airport in Alxa League in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region during a flight demonstration and verification project on Friday.

Earlier on Friday, the carrier was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gobi Desert. Its first flight mission was a complete success.

Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the reusable suborbital carrier can be used in the space transport system.

The success of the flight has laid a solid foundation for the development of China’s reusable space transportation. Enditem

The release provided no further information. It also provided no images.

This could very much be a real thing, but it also could be entirely fake. The timing of such a factual-devoid press release, coming as it does between two different American commercial suborbital flights, suggests the Chinese government does not want to appear left out, and is claiming, without producing any evidence, that it too has a reusable suborbital spacecraft.

If this release is fake, it also does not mean that China does not have such a spacecraft in development. In fact, it almost certainly does. Like the Soviet Union, China’s state-controlled press has a tendency to exaggerate their achievements for propaganda reasons. But like the Soviet Union, China is careful to base the exaggerations on actual achievements or plans, no matter how tentative.

Based on this, I suspect that what this release tells us is that China’s government is building such a thing, but might not have actually flown it yet. If they have as the press release claims, then expect some images in the next week or so.

Today’s blacklisted American: Booksellers want to burn a book they do not like

The Bill of Rights cancelled by American Booksellers
No first amendment allowed at the
American Booksellers Association.

The horrible ironies of this story are beyond the pale. The American Booksellers Association (ABA), a non-profit trade organization founded in 1900 to represent independent bookstores while also defending freedom of speech, has now violently condemned the publication of a book that raised questions about the modern perverse sexual movement and its unbridled support of sex changes for young children.

First, some details about that book and its author:

Irreversible Damage [by Abigail Shrier] is not some partisan screed. In the book, Shrier delves into the startling trend of adolescent teenage girls identifying as transgender, which a scientific study described as a “social contagion.” Shrier endorses transgender identity and even hormones and surgery for some people, but she warns against “treatments” that will leave many girls permanently scarred, noting that an increasing number of those who previously identified as transgender have de-transitioned.

Note how careful Shrier is to label herself in favor of sex changes for children even as she raises fair questions about some of these procedures and the possible harm they may do.

No matter. No one at all is to be permitted to question the left’s modern sexual agenda. When the ABA included a mention of this book in its July membership newsletter, the control freaks came out in force, demanding retribution and the burning of Shrier’s book.

And the ABA immediately complied, kowtowing like groveling slaves in its statement of apology.
» Read more

Dictatorship overthrown in Michigan

A victory for law and freedom: The state senate in Michigan yesterday approved a repeal of the emergency powers law that Democratic Party governor Gretchen Witmer used last year to assume the equivalent of total dictatorial powers.

A Michigan House of Representatives GOP spokesman told news outlets that the chamber will vote on the petition soon. If it does not within approximately one month, or if the vote fails, then voters will decide on whether to repeal the emergency powers law in the next election. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature in Michigan.

If the House follows the Senate, then an emergency declaration will be good for 28 days before requiring the legislature’s approval to be extended.

Of course, the Democrats all voted against this repeal, as they like the idea of giving a Democratic Party governor absolute power that cannot be opposed. That the petition was brought to the legislature by the citizens of the state, as per Michigan law, also means nothing to them. They like absolute power, and want to wield it against those citizens.

That the state’s own Supreme Court has also ruled unconstitutional the emergency power law now being repealed, stating it was “an undue ceding of legislative authority to the executive,” makes no difference to the Democrats as well. And Witmer demonstrated this quite starkly when she defied that court ruling and invoked the law again to keep her lockdown of the state on-going, apparently forever.

The Democratic Party today has become the party of dictatorship, corruption, bigotry, and blacklists. Remember that the next time you vote.

NASA pushing for an SLS launch before the end of the year

According to a statement by NASA administrator Bill Nelson earlier this week, the agency is working hard in its stacking of the SLS rocket in Florida, with the goal of launching before the end of the year.

That statement was revealed in the last sentence of this article describing the work on getting SLS ready, work that appears to be moving along briskly with few surprises.

The present official targeted launch date is set for November. The agency had said it would take between six to ten months to get the rocket ready after the core stage arrived at Kennedy in May. This pointed to a launch sometime between November and March. Right now it appears that NASA is trying very hard to meet that earlier date.

This aggressive effort to launch on schedule is behavior quite out of character for the NASA of the past three decades. In the past, the agency would have moved leisurely along, so that those four months of margin would have almost certainly been used and the launch would have been delayed until March.

I suspect this push now to launch on time is partly generated by a fear that SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit before SLS. If that happens it will be a major embarrassment to NASA, considering that the agency has spent about three times longer and ten times more money on its rocket than SpaceX.

Isn’t competition wonderful? It even makes government work more efficiently.

Stay tuned. There is still a lot of time between now and November. This race between comparable rockets being built by the government and a private company appears to be neck and neck as we head down the stretch.

Thales Alenia to build first two modules of Axiom’s commercial space station

Capitalism in space: The Italian company Thales Alenia today announced it has finalized the contract to build the first two modules of Axiom’s private commercial space station, set to be docked to ISS initially but eventually to fly independent once ISS is decommissioned.

Total price for the contract is 110 million euros. According to the press release, they are targeting 2024 and 2025 for launching these modules, which will be able to house as many as eight residents.

Based on its past successful experience in building modules for the International Space Station, Thales Alenia Space is responsible for the design, development, assembly and test of the primary structure and the Micrometeoroid & Debris Protection System for the two Axiom modules.

The welding activities of the primary structure of the first module will start in September 2021, with the assembly process concluding in 2022. The first module will arrive at Axiom facilities in Houston in July 2023, where Axiom will integrate and outfit the core systems and certify it for flight prior to shipping to the launch facility.

With the launch of this station, human spaceflight in the United States will become completely independent of the federal government. Private companies will own the rockets, spacecraft, and stations, and the government will no longer have a major say on what goes on in space. The NASA bureaucracy that makes getting an experiment onto ISS cumbersome, difficult, and discouraging will be out of a job. (An example: In the 2000s American scientists studying plant growth in weightlessness ended up launching their experiments with the Russians because getting NASA approval turned out to be too difficult.)

This doesn’t mean that it will be easy to get a payload or experiment onto Axiom’s station. The demand will be quite high. It just means that the decision will no longer reside with the government, but with the private companies and citizens of the United States.

As it always should have been.

Furthermore, that the demand is going to exceed the supply will mean that additional stations will be built, and quickly, because the lure of profit will be there. For example, many of the commercial medical experiments that were on the verge of paying off but were shut down after the Challenger accident in 1986 could very well be brought back to life.

Arizona election audit uncovers more evidence of malfeasance in November 2020 election

In hearings today before the Arizona Senate, election audit officials described strong evidence of misconduct and election fraud in Maricopa County, the state’s largest.

Several issues were quite startling. First,

Audit expert Doug Logan revealed during Thursday’s Arizona state election hearing that auditors had reported there 74,000 mail-in ballots received and included in the 2020 election that were never recorded as being mailed out.

Ballots are not something that appear out of thin air. They are only supposed to be provided by the election board, under very strict rules. For there to be 74,000 voted ballots that the board never issued is suspect, to say the least.

Second,

the hearing revealed that 11,326 voters in Maricopa County were not on voter rolls on Nov. 7 but were on voter rolls on Dec. 4 and were marked as having voted in the Nov. 3 election.

That’s more than eleven thousand votes from people who were not registered to vote on election day.

Finally, they discovered that the record-keeping made it difficult if not impossible to match up duplicate ballots with the originals. According to the system used in Arizona, duplicate ballots are sometimes generated manually when the original is damaged and cannot be read by the tabulator. When this happens, the duplicate is supposed to include a serial number linking it to the original. This way no one can generate many duplicate (and fake) ballots to help their preferred candidate.

The audit found numerous duplicates with no serial numbers, meaning they could have been generated by someone to help their preferred candidate.

Would these these facts have changed the outcome? This is not known yet. We will have to wait until the final report, expected in August. Either way, these problems prove that the election was, at the least, poorly run, with the strong likelihood that actual criminal conduct occurred. And that last allegation is reinforced by the stone-walling of Maricopa County’s election board, which apparently does not want anyone to take a close independent look at what they have been doing.

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Opponents of critical race theory in Virginia subjected to harassment campaign

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Are Americans finally waking up?

They’re coming for you next: The parents in Virginia who are putting together a campaign to keep the teaching of the Marxist and racist program called “critical race theory” out of their local schools have been subjected to a harassment campaign that included hate mail, threats, and even slanderous letters sent directly to their employers.

One example cited in the article:

An anti-critical race theory (CRT) activist, Jessica Mendez, says that in June her employer was sent a flyer that called her an “active racist.” “You should be ashamed to employ a known and active racist!” the flyer, obtained by Daily Caller, read. The flyer added, “Yes, what is wrong with her? She’s a racist!!”

It further showed photos of Mendez at various anti-CRT rallies protesting the curriculum of Loudoun County Public Schools. Loudoun County has been at the center of a revolt against the implementation of CRT in school curricula that has spread across the country.

» Read more

New research: COVID is harmless to children

Surprise, Surprise! A new study of all hospital admissions in England from March 2020 through February 2021 found that, for people younger than 18 deaths from COVID-19 were “incredibly rare.”

Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.

Taken together, the unusually comprehensive studies could provide some comfort to parents who have been shielding children who they thought might be vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19. “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave of the pandemic,” Russell Viner, who studies adolescent health at the University College London, told reporters.

In some cases, those efforts might have done more harm than good, added Elizabeth Whittaker, an infectious-disease specialist at Imperial College London. “Shields are very leaky,” she said. “The shields have not been perfect, and have probably caused more stress and anxiety for families than benefit.”

This study merely proves what common sense has known for eons, and was backed up by decades of research, both before and after the arrival of COVID-19. To kill an epidemic of a flu-like disease like COVID, the best thing you can do is to expose as many healthy children as possible to it, while keeping those children away from the more vulnerable elderly population. The children will quickly gain immunity, without risk, and then help limit the spread of the disease. More important, once immune they and their grandparents can once again see each other, with no risk to either.

Instead, today’s modern panicky and emotional expert class shut everything down, and ended up causing more harm than necessary, in all ways. Businesses were destroyed, old people died in solitary confinement, and children were subjected to child abuse with masks and social distancing.

Worse, that expert class still refuses to admit it was wrong, and in many ways is doubling down on its stupid. Witness the government’s top expert, Anthony Fauci, and his claim only yesterday that COVID-19 is dangerous to children and that toddlers older than two need to wear masks. He, like most of the government health officials who have been given vast power in the past year, speaks not from data but from his own personal opinion, shaped solely by politics.

Thailand’s government approves new space law

The new colonial movement: The cabinet of Thailand has approved a new space law that will establish a space agency and establish a regulatory framework for both its private and public space industry.

The core principles included the planning of a policy to support both state and public sector participation in a “new space economy”, the creation of a national space policy committee to draw up space policy. The bill also sets up a national space administration agency to perform secretarial tasks for the national space policy committee, with a director that will have the power to appoint officials.

As the language of the bill is not available, it is unclear exactly what the bill does, other than establish a government framework for Thailand’s space industry. Its passage however illustrates the growing international passion for joining the new commercial effort in space. Thailand apparently does not wish to be left behind.

India successfully completes static fire testing of rocket engine for human flights

The new colonial movement: India has successfully completed the third long duration static fire tests of its Vikas rocket engine, to be used on its planned manned space mission dubbed Gaganyaan.

[T]he Vikas engine is the workhorse liquid rocket engine powering the second stage of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), second stage and the four strap-on stages of the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and the twin-engine core liquid stage (L110) of GSLV Mk-III.

Experts point out that the successful testing is necessary as the testing is part of the human rating of a rocket that was not originally designed to launch humans into space. Every space agency follows its own standards of human rating of a launch vehicle and there are no global standards. “This test is one of the critical items which need to be checked in human rating GSLV Mk-III. Semi-Cryogenic engine SE-200 which will replace Vikas is still under development and its developmental times will not match the ambitious Gaganyaan timelines. Vikas is one of the most reliable engines in the world and has proved its mettle.

If you look at PSLV, GSLV Mk-II and GSLV Mk-III missions where Vikas has been used, the burn profile or duration is approximately around 150-160s only on a typical flight. Testing its performance above its designed operational limit is essential to ensure engine reliability against any event of a mishap.

In other words, for the manned mission Vikas will have to burn for a much longer time than its normal profile. They have now successfully shown that it can handle that long burn time.

FAA threatens shutdown of SpaceX’s Starship program at Boca Chica

Banned by the FAA?
Starship banned by the FAA?

They’re coming for you next: An FAA official revealed yesterday that the agency has not approved the launch tower that SpaceX is building for its Starship/Superheavy rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, and threatened that if disapproved the government would force the company to tear it down.

The Federal Aviation Administration warned Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a letter two months ago that the company’s work on a launch tower for future Starship rocket launches is yet unapproved, and will be included in the agency’s ongoing environmental review of the facility in Boca Chica, Texas. “The company is building the tower at its own risk,” an FAA spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday, noting that the environmental review could recommend taking down the launch tower.

The FAA last year began an environmental review of SpaceX’s Starship development facility, as Musk’s company said it planned to apply for licenses to launch the next-generation rocket prototypes from Boca Chica. While the FAA completed an environmental assessment of the area in 2014, that review was specific to SpaceX’s much-smaller Falcon series of rockets.

This revelation from FAA officials is most interestingly timed, coming on the same day as this garbage article about the terrible environmental damages some activists imagine SpaceX’s launch facility might someday cause. As is usual for a mainstream news source, the article makes no reference to the wildlife preserve that surrounds the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where we have empirical proof for more than a half century that a spaceport does no harm to the environment and actually acts to protect it from development.

Nor was this the only such attack article in the past two days. Here is just a sampling:
» Read more

Evidence found proving Georgia ballots were counted multiple times in 2020 election

The audit of 147,000 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, has now found definitive proof that the same ballots were counted multiple times, thereby manufacturing fake votes.

The link takes you to a Twitter video showing examples of several absolutely identical ballots that were run through the tabulators multiple times to produced fake votes. The multiple scans were also done on the same tabulator, meaning it was likely done by the same person.

This proves that there was vote tampering in Fulton County. The investigation now has to determine who did it, which will be possible because the ballots show the tabulator used and when. Linking this to footage on security cameras will determine the perpetrator.

The audit also has to determine the extent of the fraud. One or two ballots tabulated twice is not significant. There is other evidence that suggests thousands of ballots were tabulated improperly and intentionally in this manner. If the audit demonstrates this, and calculates the number of votes involved, it could prove the election in Georgia was invalid.

At a minimum it proves that Georgia needs a complete overall of its election system, including a complete house-cleaning of all involved, especially in Fulton County.

UPDATE: Read this detail report on the new allegations and discoveries that point to outright fraud in the Georgia November 2020 vote tallies. It captures the whole story very nicely.

Today’s blacklisted American: School district fires teachers for expressing their opinions publicly

Modern science!
Modern education in Oregon: Facts don’t matter!

Persecution is now cool! An Oregon school district is moving to fire two teachers because they began a campaign to keep the bathrooms in their schools male and female only.

The teachers are suing the school district to keep their jobs.

Assistant principal Rachel Damiano and science teacher Katie Medart of North Middle School face a pre-termination hearing before the school board Thursday. They are seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) and preliminary injunction as they continue suing the Grants Pass School District for violating their speech rights under the U.S. and Oregon constitutions.

…The district argues the federal court can’t reinstate Damiano and Medart to their positions, from which they’ve been on paid leave for three months for “inappropriate behavior,” unless the school board accepts the superintendent’s recommendation to fire them.
» Read more

NASA awards three contracts to develop nuclear propulsion concepts

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded three different contracts to three different corporation partnerships to develop new nuclear propulsion concepts for use in space.

The contracts, to be awarded through the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), are each valued at approximately $5 million. They fund the development of various design strategies for the specified performance requirements that could aid in deep space exploration.

Nuclear propulsion provides greater propellant efficiency as compared with chemical rockets. It’s a potential technology for crew and cargo missions to Mars and science missions to the outer solar system, enabling faster and more robust missions in many cases.

The contracts went to these partnerships:

  • Lockheed Martin and BWX Technologies
  • Aerojet Rocketdyne, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, and X-energy
  • Blue Origin, Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy, General Electric Research, Framatome, and Materion

Once the concepts are put forth at the end of the 12-month contracts, the DOE’s laboratory will review them and make recommendations to NASA for further work.

This contract, along with other NASA contracts to develop nuclear power for use on planetary surfaces, strongly suggests that the fear of using nuclear power in space is receding. If so, the capabilities in space will increase significantly in the coming years.

Facebook gets out of satellite business; “sells” its employees to Amazon

Capitalism in space: Facebook has now apparently abandoned a project to launch its own communications satellites and instead has made a deal with Amazon whereby it sold its satellite division to the Bezos-founded company, where they joined Amazon’s Kuiper communications satellite project.

Over the past year, Amazon has revealed details about Project Kuiper’s antenna design, selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket for the initial satellite launches, and acquired still more office space for Kuiper employees in Redmond.

According to The Information, the employees who came to Kuiper from Facebook in April are based in the Los Angeles area. They are said to include physicists as well as optical, prototyping, mechanical and software engineers who have worked on aeronautical systems and wireless networks. One of the employees, Jin Bains, was formerly Facebook’s head of Southern California connectivity and is now described on his LinkedIn page as a director on the Project Kuiper team.

The Information reported that Amazon paid Facebook as part of the deal for the employee switchover, but did not provide further details. “It’s not unheard of for big companies to buy groups of employees from one another, just as they often buy small startups to beef up staff in various parts of their business,” The Information’s Sarah Krouse and Sylvia Varnham O’Regan explained. [emphasis mine]

This deal reveals a number of immediate facts, as well as one long term troubling one. First, it indicates as mentioned Facebook’s abandonment of its space ambitions.

Second, it suggests that Amazon might finally be recognizing that the people running its Kuiper satellite project are taking far too long to get it off the ground. Though proposed approximately the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, Kuiper remains unlaunched with no launches even scheduled, while SpaceX has more than 1,500 satellites in orbit, has been providing test service to customers in selected areas, and is about to become operational globally. This difference is achievement might be explained by this fact: The person Amazon hired to run its Kuiper project was someone Elon Musk fired in 2018 from his Starlink project because that person was taking too long to get it built and launched.

The new hires suggest that Amazon might have finally recognized this issue.

Finally, the long term troubling fact.
» Read more

More evidence of shocking fraud in Georgia’s 2020 election tally

The petitioners in a lawsuit claiming significant fraud and vote tampering in Georgia during the November 2020 election have announced today in a press release [pdf] further evidence that are downright shocking if true.

The VoterGA team found 7 falsified audit tally sheets containing fabricated vote totals for their respective batches. For example, a batch containing 59 actual ballot images for Joe Biden, 42 for Donald Trump and 0 for Jo Jorgenson was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump. The seven batches of ballot images with 554 votes for Joe Biden, 140 votes for Donald Trump and 11 votes for Jo Jorgenson had tally sheets in the audit falsified to show 850 votes for Biden, 0 votes for Trump and 0 votes for Jorgenson.

Fulton Co. failed to include over 100,000 tally sheets, including more than 50,000 from mail-in ballots, when the results were originally published for the full hand count audit conducted by the office of the Secretary of State for the November 3 rd 2020 election. Those tally sheets remained missing until late February when the county supplemented their original audit results.

Petitioners contend that Fulton County did not provide drop box transfer forms for at least three pickup days when obligated to do so via an Open Records Request. Those missing forms are still needed to provide chain of custody proof for about 5,000 ballots. [emphasis mine]

The evidence suggests that the tally sheets, used to make the final count, are filled with fraud and fabrications designed to steal the election for Joe Biden, changing the totals in the examples given above to remove 151 Trump/Jorgenson votes while adding 296 non-existent Biden votes to the total.

That Fulton County has failed to provide 100,000 tally sheets, and stalled for as long as it could to turn those sheets over, suggests that election officials there were well aware of these and many more fabrications, and wished to hide them.

In other words, they were partners in the crime, and have been trying to conceal this fact. One wonders what we would find if a full audit was done of all 100,000 tally sheets.

Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube shuts down conservative channel during its annual conference

banned by YouTube
No free speech for conservatives on YouTube!

Blacklists are back and YouTube’s got ’em! The American Conservative Union (ACU) was banned by YouTube this week, a ban that coincided precisely with the ACU’s annual convention, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), thus preventing it from airing content from the event.

The ACU, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), received “a strike” on their account from YouTube on July 9, preventing them from uploading new content for a week. This includes ACU’s CPAC 2021 Part 2 in Dallas, Texas, and Trump’s CPAC speech scheduled for Sunday, the organization said in a statement.

» Read more

House slams military for not reforming contracting for space missions

Government marches on, to nowhere! The House Appropriations Committee has issued a report strongly criticizing the Air Force and the new Space Force for its failure to reform in any way its contract acquisition management, even though that was the prime reason Congress created the Space Force in the first place.

The report dedicates an entire page to detailing the committee’s dissatisfaction with what it sees as foot-dragging on space acquisition reform — which was one of the primary congressional rationales for the creation of the new space service in the first place. Indeed, the [appropriations committee] reiterates: “The Committee believes the Space Force was established to bring greater attention and focus to fixing its acquisition issues because previous attempts to do so did not produce lasting results.”

The [committee’s] concerns include that that Department of the Air Force — which oversees the Space Force much as the Navy oversees the Marine Corp — still has no clear plan for creating a separate management chain for space acquisition. Similar concerns were voiced at a May hearing by both the chair and ranking members of the HAC defense subcommittee, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., respectively.

None of this should be a surprise. The reason the Space Force was advocated by some reformers was to get it out from under Air Force control and allow it to decide for itself what it needed. The belief was that this would streamline contracting and project development.

The fear, which I expressed repeatedly, was that the swamp in Washington would instead use this as an opportunity not to streamline operations but to create a whole new bureaucracy. That is standard operating procedure for government bureaucracies. Any time Congress has mandated a new agency designed to reduce bureaucracy it has for more than a century instead led to a larger bureaucracy, with nothing streamlined.

It appears the latter is what is now happening with the Space Force.

Today’s blacklisted American: History professor slandered and ostracized for noting the many historical errors of the NY Times 1619 project

Today's modern witch hunt
A witch hunt: What passes for intellectual discussion
at Central Connecticut State University

Persecution is now cool! A tenured history professor is under vicious and slanderous attack by the faculty and administration of his college because he has publicly and privately opposed the use in its history curriculum the New York Times 1619 project.

Jay Bergman, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University [CCSU], wrote to the state’s superintendents earlier in the year asking them to not embed the curriculum, saying it “presents America’s history as driven, nearly exclusively, by white racism” and that “nearly everything else in the 1619 Project, is entirely false, mostly false, or misleading.”

As Bergman also noted,
» Read more

Northrop Grumman wins contract to build Lunar Gateway’s habitable module

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded Northrop Grumman the construction contract for building HALO, (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), the module where astronauts will live and work on its Lunar Gateway space station.

Combined with earlier development contracts this contract, worth $935 million, brings the total fixed-price cost to about $1.1 billion.

[HALO], one of the first for the Gateway, will serve as a habitat for visiting astronauts and a command post for the lunar orbiting facility. It will have docking ports for Orion spacecraft, cargo vehicles like SpaceX’s Dragon XL and lunar landers, as well as for later modules to be added by international partners. HALO is based on the Cygnus spacecraft that Northrop Grumman uses to transport cargo to the International Space Station, but extensively modified with docking ports, enhanced life support and other new subsystems.

This module is not expected to launch before 2024. Moreover, it is supposed to work in conjunction with what NASA calls its Artemis 3 mission, the third launch of SLS and the first to dock with Gateway. SLS however is so far only funded through its first two flights, and has a schedule that is presently highly uncertain.

There is great irony here. HALO, based on the Cygnus cargo freighter, will be about that size. If the present schedule for SpaceX’s Starship continues as expected, it will be flying to the Moon at about the same time, and will have a cargo bay big enough to store several Cygnus freighters inside. And though no work has yet been done to make that cargo bay habitable, Starship’s cost per launch, about $2 million, is so far below the $1.1 billion cost for HALO that it will certainly cost much less than HALO to make it a habitable station. And it will be gigantic in comparison.

China launches 5 military reconnaissance satellites

Using its Long March 6 rocket, China today successfully launched five military reconnaissance satellites.

This is China’s fourth successful launch in the past week.

Though this newer rocket’s first stage does not use toxic hypergolic fuels — China’s older rockets — that first stage still crashes in China after its job is done and it falls to Earth. No word on whether it landed near inhabited regions.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

22 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 22 in the national rankings.

Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube shuts down channel that routinely broadcasts Trump rallies

The Bill of Rights cancelled at YouTube
No first amendment allowed at YouTube.

Persecution is now cool! One day prior to the July 3, 2021 Trump rally in Florida, YouTube unilaterally suspended Right Side Broadcasting, the channel most well known for live streaming such events.

The suspension was for seven days. YouTube also deleted the channel’s videos from several other Trump events. From Right Side Broadcasting blog announcement:

YouTube has suspended RSBN from live streaming and posting content to their YouTube channel on the eve of President Donald Trump’s Save America rally in Sarasota, Florida.

YouTube has also deleted all of RSBN’s coverage of Trump’s June 26 rally in Wellington, Ohio, along with his June 5 speech to the North Carolina GOP convention.

The videos deleted had several million views.

As is usual for these efforts at censorship, YouTube merely claimed that “The videos contain remarks from President Trump that violate the aforementioned policies and countervailing views on those remarks are not provided.” Of course, YouTube has never demanded any Democrat to provide “countervailing views” during their political rallies, and I am sure the Google-owned video broadcasting service never will.
» Read more

British startup rocket company wants to recover only satellite launched by UK

Capitalism in space: Skyrora, a British startup rocket company which is attempting to build the first rocket using hypersonic technology, has now issued a challenge to the commercial space industry to come up with a plan to snatch from orbit the only satellite ever launched by a rocket built by the United Kingdom and bring it back safely to Earth.

Edinburgh-based rocket company Skyrora is issuing a challenge to find a way to retrieve the Prospero satellite. The object was the first and only UK spacecraft to be launched on a British rocket, from Australia in 1971. It’s defunct now, obviously, but is still circling the globe on an elliptical orbit some 1,000km up.

Skyrora, who will soon start sending up rockets from Scotland, regards the satellite as an important piece of UK space heritage. The company has already recovered part of the Black Arrow vehicle that placed Prospero in orbit. This fell back to Australia in the course of the mission where it languished for decades in the Outback until the firm had it shipped home and put on display.

Now, Skyrora is looking for ideas as to how best to approach and grab hold of the 66kg satellite, whose original mission was to investigate the space environment.

After that single successful launch of Black Arrow, the British government decided to abandon it, and in fact for the next half century refused to invest any money in space, at all. While the decision was probably economically wise for the government, it also did not do anything to encourage a private space industry, and for the next half century there was none in the UK. This is now finally changing, but fortunately not as a government space program like Black Arrow but as a competitive private launch industry aimed at profit.

Recovering Prospero would be a nice public relations stunt that might help further encourage that private industry.

NASA to scientists: Don’t expect to use SLS for science missions for at least a decade

In a briefing held by the planetary science community to propose its future missions for the next decade, a NASA official explained that there will likely be no available launches on NASA’s SLS rocket for planetary missions until the late 2020s, and more likely not until the next decade.

While NASA has a goal of being able to launch three SLS missions in a 24-month period, and two in 12 months, the supply chain is currently limited to one SLS per year. That will change by the early 2030s, [the official] said, growing to two per year and thus creating opportunities for additional SLS missions beyond the Artemis program. That will be enabled by changes to at the Michoud Assembly Facility to increase core stage production and a “block upgrade” to the RS-25 engine used on that core stage that will be cheaper and faster to produce.

The official also claimed that the cost of buying a launch on SLS is at best going to be $800 million, but that price won’t be available until the ’30s when SLS’s are launching more frequently. Until then, it appears NASA will charge one billion per launch.

All of this is pure fantasy on NASA’s part. Once cheaper and more usable private commercial rockets come on line, such as SpaceX’s Starship, SLS will go the way of the horse buggy. And this is likely to happen much sooner than 2030, more likely in the next three years.

Moreover, for both cost and practical reasons I cannot see any planetary scientist planning a mission on SLS, ever. There are now much cheaper options that are actually flying, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which costs about $100 million per launch. Moreover, SLS’s slow and cumbersome launch pace should scare any planetary scientist away, as such missions must launch on time, and SLS might easily miss their launch windows. In fact, this has already happened. For years Congress mandated that Europa Clipper launch on SLS. When it became clear that SLS would not be available for that mission’s launch window, Congress finally relented and allowed NASA to buy the launch from a commercial company.

China targets 2024 for next lunar sample return mission

The new colonial movement: China’s next robotic lunar sample return mission, called Chang’e-6 and targeted for a 2024 launch, will also attempt to bring back the first samples from the far side of the Moon.

Hu Hao, chief engineer of the China Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, announced in a statement released on China’s national space day in April this year that the Chang’e 6 probe, consisting of an orbiter, lander, lunar ascent vehicle and reentry capsule, will target the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.The SPA basin is a colossal, ancient impact crater roughly 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) in diameter that covers almost a quarter of the moon’s far side. The impact basin, considered to be the oldest on the moon, holds vital clues about the history of the moon and the solar system, according to a new report.

The precise spot for landing has not been revealed. Since the basin is so large and covers the Moon’s south pole, the mission could land in that region where ice is thought to possibly exist in the permanently shadowed floors of some craters. Whether they would attempt a landing in one of those craters is presently unknown, though unlikely because of the technical challenge.

FAA initiates new prelaunch air space clearance system

FAA has now begun using a new prelaunch air space clearance system that is intended to shorten the time airplane travel is disturbed by the scheduled launch of a rocket.

[The FAA] developed the Space Data Integrator (SDI) tool to reduce how long ATO must close airspace around space launches and reentries. The system is voluntary. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, and the Alaska Aerospace Corporation are current partners. SDI was first used operationally for SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch last week and is being used for the SpaceX-22 Cargo Dragon reentry today.

…Space operators now are voluntarily sharing telemetry data including vehicle position, altitude and speed, as well as data if the vehicle deviates from its expected flight path. Asked when additional companies might join, Monteith said he would have to defer to ATO to answer that question.

…Using the automated SDI system coupled with “time-based procedures and dynamic windows,” the FAA expects to be able to shorten airspace closures “from an average of more than four hours per launch to just more than two hours” and eventually less.

The article makes no mention whether this new system will allow the FAA to shrink the closure areas as well, which was Elon Musk’s main complaint after SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch near the end of June was scrubbed seconds before launch when a helicopter slipped into that airspace. As Musk wrote in a tweet,

Unfortunately, launch is called off for today, as an aircraft entered the “keep out zone”, which is unreasonably gigantic. There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.

I suspect there is discussion to reduce the size of the closure areas, but I also suspect that the FAA is resisting industry calls to do so.

Today’s blacklisted American: Facebook to punish users who link to peer-reviewed science it dislikes

Modern science!
How Facebook applies science.

Blacklists are back and Facebook’s got ’em! Facebook is now warning its users that it will punish them if they repeatedly link to peer-reviewed science papers that document the long known harmful effects from improper mask use.

Facebook is warning users against sharing a study that found dangerously high carbon-dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics. “Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways,” the warning says when users paste the link on Facebook, before confirming they want to share it.

It’s giving the same warning and threat of account restrictions to users who paste a link to Townhall.com article on a University of Florida lab that found dangerous pathogens on children’s face masks, submitted for testing by their parents. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, Facebook’s “‘fact-check’ simply highlight[ed] disagreements between the scientist who conducted the test and other scientists who did not conduct the test. … Instead of acknowledging that more study would resolve the dispute, [Facebook] call[ed] the report false. That’s not science — that’s propaganda.”

The second study about the number of very bad pathogens that gather on masks used during a single day was already discussed by me in an earlier post. That study found that after a single day of use,
» Read more

Problems with Blue Origin’s engine force more delays of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket

In a detailed and very informative review of the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin yesterday, Eric Berger at Ars Technica noted these unfolding facts:

For years, United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno had been saying the new Vulcan rocket, powered by two [Blue Origin] BE-4 engines, would launch in 2021. However, he recently told Aviation Week the first launch would slip into 2022. Bruno said this was due primarily to the mission’s customer, Astrobotic, whose Moon lander was not ready. Technically, Bruno said, Vulcan still had a chance to be ready for a 2021 launch.

This seems highly unlikely because it is already July, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) still does not have a pair of flight engines. After receiving the flight engines from Blue Origin, ULA needs to attach them to the Vulcan rocket, roll it to the launch pad, and conduct a lengthy series of tests before a hot-fire ignition. After this hot-fire test, the rocket will be rolled back to the hangar and prepared for an actual launch attempt. As of January, Bruno was saying this hot fire test with the flight engines would take place this summer. That will no longer happen.

In December both companies promised delivery of those flight engines by this summer, but so far nothing has arrived. Moreover, both companies have remained very tight-lipped about the cause of the most recent delays. In October 2020 Bruno said that an issue with the engine’s turbopumps had been identified and fixed, but if so why has the engine not arrived as promised?

A GAO report released last month had described issues with the engine’s “igniter and booster capabilities,” but Bruno himself has denied the igniter was a problem.

Regardless, Blue Origin’s inability to deliver this engine is causing problems at both companies. Both have been forced to delay the launch of their new orbital rockets. Both rockets were initially scheduled to launch in 2020, were delayed to 2021 about two years ago, and now are likely not to launch until 2022.

While ULA can still switch to its Atlas 5 rocket for some planned Vulcan launches (and has already done so), that rocket is more expensive and thus eats into the company’s profit margin. Using the more expensive Atlas 5 in bidding also makes it more difficult for ULA to compete with SpaceX in any head-to-head competition.

Blue Origin does not even have this option. Its proposed New Glenn rocket is grounded until it gets its engine operational.

All told, the failure of Blue Origin to deliver here is essentially grounding all of SpaceX’s potential American competition, a situation that is not healthy for the American rocket industry.

Enrollment in public schools plunges

Good news! Federal government data for the 2020-2021 school year shows a steep drop in enrollment in public schools, with the biggest declines in the youngest grades.

While overall the drop was only 3%, the drop was stunning from parents enrolling their children for the first time.

Even more stark is the drop in enrollment among younger students. Preschool enrollment fell by 22%, and preschool and kindergarten enrollment combined dropped 13%.

The drop is even more significant in that it is really the first such decline in decades.

It appears that almost one in four parents have decided that public schools are not a good place for their little ones. Foolish mask mandates, absurd social distancing rules, and leftist propaganda promoting bigotry and sexual perversity are not what they want for their kids.

In a sane world, we would quickly see a reduction in the budgets for these public schools. Sadly this is not likely. Too many local politicians are under the thumb of the teacher unions, and serve them, not their constituents.

In the end however these budgets must be cut, if not entirely zeroed out. As long as the money keeps flowing to these corrupt institutions, they will have power and will use it for bad ends.

Let me add one more point: Considering the horrible state of the public schools, their mistreatment of children in connection with COVID, their failure to teach anything well in the past few decades, their new endorsement of racial bigotry and hatred, and their increasing partnership with radical sexual perversity, I must ask: Why on Earth are 78% of parents still sending their kids there?

1 102 103 104 105 106 364