Tag: politics

The troubled politics of ground-based astronomy

10:54 am

Link here. The article outlines the politics and negotiations now going on during the writing of the next astronomy decadal survey, the document American astronomers have published every decade since the 1960s to provide the science agencies in the federal government guidance on how to spend the taxpayers’ money on the next decade’s astronomy projects.

The focus is on the problems now faced by the two big American ground-based telescopes, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

The future of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) likely depends on whether the survey recommends that NSF spend what sources put at $1.8 billion to support a recently forged partnership between the projects. If it does, other proposals could lose out, such as a ­continent-spanning radio array and detectors for neutrinos and other cosmic particles.

While some astronomers are pushing for this $1.8 billion bailout to save both, others are arguing the money can be better spent elsewhere. There is also a third option, not mentioned, which would be to abandon one of these telescopes and instead build just one.

The story is focused entirely on ground-based astronomy, which is remarkably very near-sighted for scientists whose job it is to see a far as possible. The future of astronomy is in space, and to not consider that alternative in this discussion means you aren’t considering all your options. For $1.8 billion, using private rockets and competitive construction approaches, I strongly believe a very large optical telescope could be launched that would provide far more cutting edge astronomy than any larger ground-based telescope. Hubble has proven that endlessly for the past thirty years.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Cancelled by his bank for being pro-life, he started his own

12:10 pm

Banks blacklisting conservatives
What too many banks want to do to conservatives.

Today’s story is similar to my blacklist story two days ago about former national security advisor Michael Flynn [See the bottom of this post for an update on the Flynn story!]

Just as Flynn was blackballed by Chase bank, evangelist and motivational speaker Nick Vujicic found himself frozen out by his own bank because of his Christian, political, and pro-life beliefs.

Vujicic said he began to speak out against the innocent killing of unborn babies in March 2019. Within 16 weeks of doing that, he revealed, “we had a grenade at our house, a false magazine article published against me, a lawsuit threat, a spying drone, and a bank kicked me out.”

…”I got kicked out of a bank with no warning. They froze my credit cards, froze my debit cards,” he said. “They gave me a letter to say that they did a review of me as a client and they don’t want anything to do with me.”

What makes this story different from the Flynn story is that Vujicic responded by starting a project to found his own bank.
» Read more

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A Martian sunset in Jezero Crater

10:15 am

Sunset on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced slightly to post here, was taken by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. Looking west to the rim of Jezero Crater, it catches the Sun as it sets behind that rim.

The image was taken on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Seems somehow fitting to catch a sunset on Mars on this date, to illustrate how far we have come in that half century.

To my mind, not enough. Our ability to send robots to other worlds has certainly improved, but in 1969 we were able to put a human on another world. Since 1972 we no longer have had that capability, so that in 2021 all we can do is fly robots elsewhere.

It is time for this to change. I’d much prefer to make believe this photo was a sunrise suggesting a bright future, than the sunset it actually is, indicating a coming dark age.

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Launch schedules impacted by shortages and delivery delays of oxygen/nitrogen

9:53 am

The launch dates of several upcoming launches have been pushed back because of a shortage of liquid oxygen, needed instead for medical purposes, which in turn has slowed deliveries of liquid nitrogen because trucks have been reassigned to delivering oxygen to hospitals..

The effects of a nationwide liquid oxygen shortage caused by the recent spike in hospitalized coronavirus patients has already delayed the launch of a Landsat imaging satellite by a week, and threatens to impact more missions from launch sites in Florida and California.

NASA said last week that the launch of the Landsat 9 satellite aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California would be delayed one week until no earlier than Sept. 23 due to a lack of liquid nitrogen at the military base. ULA uses gaseous nitrogen, which is converted from liquid nitrogen, for purges during testing and countdown operations.

The space agency said pandemic demands for medical liquid oxygen impacted the delivery of liquid nitrogen to Vandenberg.

SpaceX officials have also indicated that their launch schedule may be effected as well.

While the Wuhan flu is being blamed for this shortage, I think it is possibly more related to the rise in launches themselves. Such flu epidemics have happened in the past, causing similar spikes in hospitals, without causing delays in rocket launches. However, the U.S. this year has already almost doubled the number of yearly launches as had occurred during most of the 21st century. In addition, there are now numerous companies building and testing new rockets, all of which require liquid oxygen. The demand by rocket companies for such fuels is thus far higher than it has been for decades.

So, what is the solution? I just described it. The high demand will force the price up for liquid oxygen, which in turn will make it profitable for new providers to enter the market producing liquid oxygen to meet the new demand. It simply appears that at this moment the industry that produces these gases has been slow in reacting to its new demand.

We need only give the situation time and freedom to get solved and, most important, stay out of the way. Freedom and capitalism will solve the problem, as it always does.

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Prep of first SLS rocket continues to suggest no launch in ’21

9:28 pm

Though NASA and Boeing crews and management have been striving very hard to get the SLS rocket on the launchpad for a liftoff before the end of this year, the schedule has as expected continued to slip, with the chances of a launch by December now increasingly unlikely.

NASA engineers have not discovered any major problems during the SLS testing, but key milestones leading up to the Artemis 1 launch have been steadily sliding to the right in NASA’s processing schedule.

Before NASA raised the Boeing-made SLS core stage onto its mobile launch platform inside High Bay 3 of the VAB in June, managers hoped to connect he Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission on top of the rocket in August. That’s now expected this fall.

The first rollout of the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket from the VAB to launch pad 39B was scheduled no earlier than September. That’s now expected in late November, at the soonest, according to [Cliff Lanham, senior vehicle operations manager for NASA’s exploration ground systems program].

The schedule slips, while not significant amid the history of SLS program delays, have put a major crunch on NASA’s ambition to launch the Artemis 1 mission this year. The agency is evaluating Artemis 1 launch opportunities in the second half of December, multiple sources said, but that would require NASA to cut in half the time it originally allotted between the SLS fueling test and the actual launch date.

None of this is really a surprise. NASA had always said it would take about six to ten months to get the rocket ready for launch once it arrived in Florida, and it only got there in May. That meant a late November launch could only occur if everything went perfectly. As this is the first time this rocket has ever been assembled, it is not reasonable to expect such perfection.

Based on all factors, the launch will likely occur no earlier than January, but more likely in February, at the earliest. On that schedule it is very likely SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit first.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Mother of slain soldier censored by Instagram and Facebook

11:27 am

Screenshot of Instagram censoring

The new dark age of silencing: Apparently because her posts on Instagram and Facebook were highly critical of Democrat President Joe Biden, both social media companies immediately either shut down or restricted the accounts of Shana Chappell, the mother of one of the soldiers killed in the Kabul Airport suicide bombing.

The mother of a Marine killed in the suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week had her account removed from Instagram and “incorrectly deleted” from Facebook following her fierce criticism of President Biden in the wake of her son’s death.

Shana Chappell, the mother of Kareem Nikoui, 20, took to Facebook on Monday to slam Instagram for removing her account after she started posting about what happened to her son and her belief that Biden is to blame. Chappell claimed the social media platform started to flag several of her “posts from months ago,” and began to send her warnings that she could have her account disabled.

“It seems Instagram took it upon themselves to delete my account because i am assuming it was because i gained so many followers over my sons death due to Biden’s negligence, ignorance and him being a traitor,” she wrote on Facebook. “I’m gonna assume that Facebook is gonna delete me next! Funny how these leftist one sided pieces of crap don’t want the truth to come out!

It appears both Instagram and Facebook have since restored her accounts and apologized, with both saying that her account was “accidentally deleted.” Hogwash. These actions are never an accident. They are almost always against people criticizing the left or the Democratic Party (I repeat myself), with many such bannings never explained or corrected.
» Read more

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South Korea to launch its own rocket in October

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea is now targeting October 21, 2021 for the first test launch of its home-built Nuri rocket.

The October flight will be South Korea’s first domestic orbital launch attempt in more than eight years. On Jan. 30, 2013, a Naro-1 rocket placed the STSAT-2C technology demonstration satellite into low Earth orbit.

It was the final of three launches for now retired Naro-1, which consisted of a Russian Angara first stage with a downgraded engine and a South Korean developed solid-fuel upper stage. Two previous Naro-1 launches failed in 2009 and 2010.

They have also scheduled a follow-up test launch in May ’22, assuming all goes well on this first test launch.

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New cracks discovered on a different Russian ISS module

12:38 am

Russian officials revealed today that their astronauts have discovered new cracks on a different Russian ISS module, dubbed Zarya.

“Superficial fissures have been found in some places on the Zarya module,” Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, told RIA news agency, according to Reuters. “This is bad and suggests that the fissures will begin to spread over time.” The Zarya module, also called the Functional Cargo Block, was the first component of the ISS ever launched, having blasted into orbit on Nov. 20, 1998, according to NASA.

Russians have now found what appear to be age stress fractures on both Zarya and Zvezda, the two oldest modules of ISS. More important, the Russians are finally admitting that the cracks are stress fractures, something they had earlier denied.

The need to launch new commercial American modules to ISS as quickly as possible has now become even more urgent. Axiom plans to do so, but its first module is not scheduled to arrive before ’24. It now looks increasingly that the Russian modules might not make it till then.

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Report: 43K of 61K absentee ballots in Georgia county were counted despite being illegal

3:19 pm

According to a newspaper in Georgia, 72% of the absentee ballots (43K out of 61K) obtained from drop boxes in DeKalb County, which covers part of Atlanta, violated the legal chain-of-custody requirements, and thus should have been deemed invalid.

The problem was actually worse than that:

All told, 43,907 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in DeKalb County … were counted in the certified results of the November 3, 2020 election despite being delivered to the registrar’s office in clear violation of the chain of custody documentation of the Georgia State Election Board’s July 2020 rule.

Another 24 percent – 14,925 absentee ballots collected from drop boxes – were documented as received by the elections official more than an hour after being collected by a two-person collection team, but on the same calendar day. Arguably, these additional 14,925 absentee ballots could also be considered in violation of the election code rule that requires absentee ballots placed in drop boxes “shall be immediately transported to the county registrar.”

Less than 5 percent of the absentee ballots collected from drop boxes during the November 2020 election were recorded as being received by the elections official in an hour or less. [emphasis in original]

That a chain of custody for the drop-box absentee ballots was not maintained means that during the time gap someone could have gone through the ballots and eliminated votes they do not like, or replaced those votes with “corrected” votes.

The newspaper also reports similar issues with drop box absentee ballots in other counties.

While these problems do not necessarily suggest fraud or vote tampering in this county, it certainly stinks to high heaven, especially since the drop boxes themselves were a very bad idea that made election fraud easy.

Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes. Who knows what the real count was? We shall probably never know.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Chase Bank closes Lt. General Mike Flynn’s credit card accounts because they don’t like his opinions

12:10 pm

Chase Bank blackballs Mike Flynn

They’re coming for you next: Chase Bank has unilaterally closed the credit card accounts held by President Trump’s first National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, either because they don’t like his political opinions or are terrified of the left’s wrath if they don’t blackball him.

The language from Chase’s terse cancellation letter to Flynn, also shown to the right, is most revealing:
» Read more

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Sweden — land of no lockdowns or mandates — is doing best of all European nations against COVID

4:44 pm

Present European statistics on COVID
Click for full image.

Sweden has been slammed repeatedly by our panic-stricken mob of elitist leaders in politics, academia, and journalism for refusing to impose lockdowns or mask mandates. Instead, they essentially followed the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration and focused on protecting the vulnerable (the old and sick) while allowing everyone else (the young and healthy) to live normal lives. (This approach is what western civilization had done for the last two centuries when faced with a new flu epidemic, and only abandoned it in 2020 when our new leftist masters decided they knew better.)

The result was that the COVID virus quickly spread through Sweden’s strong and healthy population, did little harm, but left behind a nation of people who all have a natural immunity to the Wuhan flu and its later strains. Thus, while the rest of Europe — home of totalitarian and mindless governmental restrictions, lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates — is now dealing with new outbreaks of the Wuhan flu and new deaths, Sweden is not.

The chart above, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and annotated by Doug Ross, illustrates this starkly. He also notes this disgusting fact about the bankrupt journalists of today:

It took me well more than 12 seconds to find the website of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, where weekly Covid updates from each country are tabulated. That level of effort finding the numbers apparently is too difficult for Pro Journalists at the HDNY Times*, CCNN, NBS, Politishmo, Yapoo and the rest.

Natural immunity is the best way to protect against the arrival of new flu strains. The drugs that have been developed might do okay, but against respiratory diseases like the coronavirus they have never been a real solution, only a bandaid that is best reserved for that old and sick population who really needs it. This is why we have always advised older people to get flu shots, but not the young.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative student disqualified from student government because he’s conservative

1:22 pm

No free speech at Auburn University
No freedom of speech allowed at Auburn University!

The new dark age of silencing: A conservative student at Auburn University was voted down for government office essentially because it was revealed that he was conservative and Christian, and had expressed entirely reasonable views on Twitter criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and its racist and Marxist agenda.

A junior nominated for a position on Auburn University’s student government was successfully shot down because he expressed Christian and conservative beliefs on social media.

Stephen Morris was nominated for the position of chief justice of Auburn University’s Student Government Association. To his surprise, at the session where his nomination was to be taken up, held remotely over video, several members of the student senate strongly opposed his nomination.

Morris’s critics accused him of racism over tweets they found offensive, and declared him unfit for service in student government.

The story at the link provides three examples of Morris’s tweets. None show the slightest indication of racism, merely a strong opposition to the agenda of Black Lives Matter, which despite its name seems entirely disinterested in the terrible crime rate in black communities, where innocent blacks are daily killed and robbed by the black criminals in their midst. Instead, all BLM cares about is eliminating any police protection for those innocent blacks, and for gaining as power and money for itself.
» Read more

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FAA’s space bureaucracy chief touts desire to limit his agency’s regulatory fist

10:18 am

Wayne Monteith, the man in charge of the FAA’s office of commercial space — which is tasked with regulating commercial space — revealed in a speech on August 25, 2021 that his goal is to speed that industry’s growth, not hinder it with odious regulations.

Wayne R. Monteith, a retired Air Force general who served for years in space billets in Colorado Springs is now the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He told a Space Symposium crowd at The Broadmoor Wednesday that to a large extent, he’s trying to keep his agency out of the way of the rush to space. “A regulatory agency can either be an accelerator or an inhibitor of industry,” he said. “We choose to be an accelerator.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t be so sure. While right now Monteith noted that the agency is taking a laissez-faire approach to anyone who wants to fly in space, acting only to make sure space accidents will not harm “the uninvolved public,” he also said this in his speech:

Monteith warned, though, that mishaps for manned space flight that escalate to what he called “catastrophe,” have consequences. “The worst case is a catastrophic failure,” he said. “Then, we will regulate.”

In other words, he recognizes that if he tried now to impose his bureaucratic will on commercial space, it would not fly politically. What he really needs to expand his power is some space accident, a crisis you might say, that he can then use to convince others that he should be controlling things more.

Based on the response of the press, public, and American culture in the past half century, his thinking is quite sound. Routinely since World War II, as soon as something goes wrong in any field of endeavor the American public and political class has repeatedly wanted the government to move in and take greater control, under the false premise that somehow the government can prevent further failures.

Instead, we have accomplished less, and fueled the rise of an all-powerful bureaucracy capable and quite willing to squelch achievement. This is the pattern that Monteith is relying on, and based on recent history, he is entirely justified in believing so.

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China studying the construction of large-scale structures in space

9:57 am

The new colonial movement: China has now indicated that it has established a project to study methods for building very large structures in orbit, with uses ranging from generating beamed solar power to providing mega-sized manned spaceships and space stations.

Though vague, the project would have practical applications for potential megaprojects including colossal space-based solar power stations. Such facilities would be based in geostationary orbit and span kilometers. These stations would collect solar energy and transmitting power to Earth through microwaves.

Kilometer-scale, ultra-large spacecraft are described as “major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term habitation in orbit,” according to the project outline within the mathematical and physical sciences attachment to the released document.

The project would focus on minimizing the weight of the spacecraft to reduce the number of launches and construction, according to an initial report by the South China Morning Post.

It appears that this project is only in its preliminary design phase, with a budget of $3.2 million. Its existence however reinforces the overall rational and long term approach China’s government is taking to space exploration. At this moment they mean business, and are focused on getting the cutting edge technology designed and built rather then maintaining a bureaucratic infrastructure and the jobs that go with it — as NASA and Russia have been doing for the past forty-plus years.

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ULA to no longer sell Atlas-5 launches

9:36 am

Capitalism in space: In an interview ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno has announced that they have contracts on all of the company’s remaining Atlas-5 rockets, and will no longer be offering that rocket for new sales.

“We’re done. They’re all sold,” CEO Tory Bruno said of ULA’s Atlas V rockets in an interview. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has 29 Atlas V missions left before it retires sometime in the mid-2020s and transitions to its upcoming Vulcan rocket, Bruno said. The remaining Atlas V missions include a mix of undisclosed commercial customers and some for the Space Force, NASA, and Amazon’s budding broadband satellite constellation, Project Kuiper.

This means that the company is now firmly committed to its Vulcan rocket, which also means it is entirely committed to the repeatedly delayed BE-4 engine that Blue Origin is building for that rocket. This announcement suggests that Bruno is confident that the BE-4’s problems have been overcome, and that Blue Origin is about to begin regular assembly of the many flightworthy engines ULA will need.

If so, this is really good news. It not only means that Vulcan launches will finally begin, but that Blue Origin might also begin flying its New Glenn rocket. Both will give the U.S. some competitive options for getting big payloads into space. Right now the only real choice at a reasonable price is SpaceX, and having one choice is never a good thing.

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Amazon protests SpaceX’s Starlink plan to FCC

9:23 am

Amazon on August 25, 2021 filed a protest with the FCC against SpaceX’s proposed expansion of its Starlink constellation that would allow almost 30,000 satellites to be launched.

“Should the Commission depart from its rules and precedent and endorse the approach of applying for multiple, mutually exclusive configurations, the consequences will extend far beyond the SpaceX Amendment,” wrote Mariah Shuman, corporate counsel for Amazon’s broadband megaconstellation venture Project Kuiper, in an Aug. 25 letter to the FCC. “However inefficient this strategy might be for the Commission and parties responding to applications, other prospective licensees will surely see the benefit in maximizing their optionality by describing multiple configurations in their license applications.”

Shuman asked the FCC to “dismiss SpaceX’s Amendment, and invite SpaceX to resubmit its amendment after settling on a single configuration for its Gen2 System.”

It appears Amazon does not want the FCC to approve multiple proposed satellite configurations put forth by SpaceX in a single application. Instead, it wants the FCC to force SpaceX to pick one, and submit that alone. It also appears that doing what Amazon requests would be more in line with past FCC policy.

While Amazon might have a point, the optics once again make another Jeff Bezos’ company look ugly, more interested in using the courts to stymie its competitors than actually launching anything. Amazon’s Kuiper internet constellation was first proposed in early 2019. More than two years have passed and none of its more than 3200 satellites have launched — not even one test satellite — with no clear indication yet on when launches will finally begin.

SpaceX began testing its Starlink system in 2018, and already has about 1,700 operational satellites in orbit. The comparison between the two companies is stark, and not favorable to Amazon.

In fact, Elon Musk was not shy in taking advantage of these optics to note them quite sharply in a tweet yesterday, saying, “Turns out Besos [sic] retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.”

Amazon is not Blue Origin, but both companies were founded by Bezos, and it appears right now that both prefer court battles to rocket engineering.

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Today’s blacklisted American: World’s top vaccine expert censored by Twitter & LinkedIn and punished by the CDC

12:14 pm

No real scientists allowed!
The opinions of real scientists banned!

They’re coming for you next: Even as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard medical professor and one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines, has been repeatedly censored by Twitter and LinkedIn, he has been banned and punished by the CDC for daring to publicly dissent from its government lockdown and mask and vaccine mandate policies.

First, I think it important to know who Martin Kulldorff is. This article provides a succinct resume of his qualifications:

Dr. Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He helped develop the CDC’s current system for monitoring potential vaccine risks.

Then there is this opinion by one of his collegues:

Kulldorff is a “world-class” vaccine safety “superstar,” said Jeffrey Brown, a Harvard Medical School colleague specializing in drug and vaccine safety research. “His qualifications are spectacular,” Brown said of Kulldorff. “He’s an international expert in vaccine safety. No one on earth would question whether he’s qualified. … He’s a pioneer.”

And yet, he has now become a pariah on social media as well as at the CDC, all of whom are apparently no longer interested in a robust and honest discussion about COVID.
» Read more

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Spanish judge invalids agreement to build TMT in Canary Islands

9:05 am

The consortium attempting to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), blocked by protesters in Hawaii, has now had its back-up location in the Canary Islands blocked by a Spanish judge, who last month invalidated the agreement between the consortium and local authorities.

[A]n administrative court in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the capital of the Spanish archipelago, ruled last month that the 2017 concession by local authorities of public land for the tentative project was invalid. The ruling was dated on July 29, but only became public this week after local media reported about the decision.

In the ruling obtained by The Associated Press, Judge Roi López Encinas wrote that the telescope land allocation was subject to an agreement between the Canary Astrophysics Institute, or IAC, and the telescope’s promoter, the TMT International Observatory (TIO) consortium. But the judge ruled that the agreement was not valid because TIO had not expressed an intention to build on the La Palma site instead of at the Hawaii site.

In other words, it appears the agreement was ruled invalid because the TMT builders had not made a firm commitment about building at the Canary Islands.

At this moment it truly looks like TMT is dead. It has no alternative site, and its political support in Hawaii is nil. While the Democratic Party politicians that rule that state have mouthed support for it, almost all their actions since the protests began has been to help the protesters and stymie construction.

What I think will soon begin happening is that the partners in TMT will begin to back out, switching their support to the other large ground-based telescopes being planned, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European-Extremely Large Telescope. Since these are both being built in Chile, the loss of TMT means that there will be no large ground-based telescope coverage of the northern sky.

The real solution? Stop building ground-based telescopes. Put them in space, where such political issues won’t exist, and the view will be unimpeded by either the atmosphere or the tens of thousands of new satellites expected to launch in the coming years.

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Blue Origin successfully completes another unmanned suborbital flight with New Shepard

8:47 am

Capitalism in space: Only one month after its first passenger flight, Blue Origin today successfully completed another suborbital flight with its New Shepard booster/capsule, this time flying 18 commercial payloads for NASA and others.

These details about the spacecraft itself I think are significant:

The New Shepard booster, Tail 3, and its associated capsule, RSS H.G. Wells, flew the mission. Tail 3 is dedicated to uncrewed science missions like NS-17, and this was Tail 3’s 8th flight.

…Blue Origin expects to fly one more New Shepard mission this year with sister ship Tail 4 and the crew-capable capsule RSS First Step

In other words, Blue Origin now has two working New Shepard spacecraft. This will allow them to eventually up their launch pace.

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Today’s blacklisted American gets an apology from Illinois regulators for threatening his medical license for opinions they didn’t like

2:39 pm

Today’s blacklist story is actually an update from my blacklist story two days ago about Dr. Jeremy Heinrichs, who because he had publicly expressed strong skepticism about the mask mandates being imposed by his state government in Illinois, had been threatened with the loss of his medical license by state regulators.

It appears those regulators have now quickly apologized for getting caught acting like jack-booted thugs.

“The initial response to your inquiry requested information that the Department does not need,” Dina Martin, an attorney with the Illinois Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, said in a letter to Henrichs’ legal counsel. The department had originally asked for “a detailed statement on your opinion about masks, and whether you support and will enforce a mask mandate based on your elected position as a school board member.”

“I sincerely apologize for the tone and content of those communications,” Martin said in her August 19 letter, obtained by Just the News.

It also appears that the regulators plan to drop their complaint investigation.

This is how you treat bullies. You don’t back down. You don’t apologize. And you certainly don’t hide in shame out of fear their unjustified attacks will hurt you. No, you fight back hard, and brightly expose them for all to see. Like all bullies they will immediately back off themselves, especially if their attack has no merit (which is almost always the case).

There is no indication however that the regulators who sent those improper initial communications have been punished in any way. I expect not. The Illinois government got caught this time, but has no intention of preventing this from happening in the future. If anything I expect the government has simply asked these employees to lay low for awhile and try the same thing again later, in the hope that others will be more easily intimidated.

To really fix this the voters need to fire everyone in these governments, from the Democratic Party elected officials who control Illinois to the lowest bureaucrat who thinks such behavior can sometimes be justified.

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Musk’s Boring Co offers to dig tunnel for resident transportation during launch closures

1:49 pm

Capitalism in space: Elon Musk’s Boring Company has proposed digging a tunnel so that people can still access Boca Chica’s beaches even during periods when SpaceX is doing launch operations and needs to close the surface roads.

The Boring Company (TBC) met with Cameron County officials to discuss the possibility of a tunnel project running from South Padre Island (SPI) to Boca Chica Beach.

The Boring Company pitched the idea of an SPI-Boca Chica tunnel to Cameron County administrator Pete Sepulveda Jr. and county engineer Benjamin Worsham early this summer. Cameron County officials have been thinking of giving people access to part of Boca Chica Beach even during closures.

The county has said it likely cannot afford to pay for such a thing, but Musk’s company is still proposing to do an in-depth study to find out what will be necessary to make it happen.

It could very well be that Musk might find some cash to help pay for this himself. The public relations would be excellent, and it would I think be the right thing to do. It is also possible that the local communities will have more cash themselves because of the booming economy SpaceX is bringing them.

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China completes two launches

2:23 pm

China today successfully completed two launches, using from different spaceports its Long March 2C and Long March 3B rockets.

The 2C launched a two demo internet communications satellites designed to eventually be used in a large constellation similar to the constellations of SpaceX and OneWeb. The launch also included a third unidentified communications satellite.

The 3B placed in orbit what is believed to be a military reconnaissance satellite.

Both rockets dumped their first stages somewhere in the interior of China. No word on whether those stages carried parachutes or grid fins to better control their landing, or crashed near habitable regions.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

29 China
20 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 29 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: A man’s life destroyed because he visited the Capitol on January 6th

1:17 pm

Twitter's idea of debate
Show trials: The Biden administration’s goal for pro-Trump protesters

Genocide is coming: Because the Biden Justice Department is determined to throw the book at him, the life of truck driver Robert Reeder has been thoroughly shattered, losing his job and friends and even alienating his family, simply because he decided to participate in the protests at the Capitol on January 6th and got caught up in the chaos that ensued.

All the evidence suggests that Reeder, along with almost all the protesters on January 6th, did nothing particularly violent. Their actions were spontaneous (as an FBI investigation has reluctantly admitted), and mostly peaceful. Moreover, Reeder’s behavior, along with his fellow pro-Trump protesters, pales in comparison to the violence and rioting committed routinely by leftist protests from Antifa and BLM, for which they are never charged or punished.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Illinois threatens to cancel doctor’s license because it doesn’t like his opinions

3:46 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled in Illinois
No first amendment in Illinois

They’re coming for you next: State regulators in Illinois are threatening to take away a medical license of a doctor, Jeremy Heinrichs, because he has publicly challenged the mask mandate being imposed by his state government.

In a provided statement, Henrichs said: “I have considered authoritative medical evidence that questions the necessity of mandatory masking in our schools. As a result, the [Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation] has threatened my medical licensure unless I expressly support and enforce a mask mandate for all students.

“The [IDFPR] has commanded me to ‘toe the line’ or suffer personal and professional consequences,” he added.

…In a separate email, a state medical investigator, whose name was redacted from the email, said a complaint filed against Henrichs “appears to be a parent or concerned citizen who did not agree with the doctor’s opinion on the masking motion for schools. That would fall under the unprofessional conduct part of the medical practice act,” the email said. “What the medical disciplinary board wants to know is if the doctor will support and enforce the mask mandate by the Governor.”

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Why only NOW is there mounting concern over President Biden’s mental health?

12:36 pm


Biden as he forgets what truths we hold as self-evident in March 2020.

A Daily Mail story from last week reported on the growing concern of doctors and other health experts about the mental state of Joe Biden, the oldest American president ever.

Questions have been raised about US President Joe Biden’s cognitive wellbeing after a car crash interview over his handling of the unfolding Afghanistan crisis. America’s oldest president provided jumbled responses to questions and mixed up details about his son in an interview with ABC. The stumbles did not make the broadcasted version but were revealed when a full transcript of the interview was published overnight.

It revealed the President incorrectly stated his late son Beau Biden worked for the Navy in Afghanistan, before correcting himself that he served for the Army in Iraq. It follows a spate of gaffes and slips of the tongue since the 78-year-old ran his successful presidential campaign in 2019.

This story only highlights a growing slew of news stories and op-eds that have appeared recently during the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, in both the right and leftwing press, that have noticed how President Biden appears repeatedly confused in interviews while showing signs that he does not quite understand what is going on around him.

Of course, for the press and the political class to recognize these facts now, after Biden has become president, is equivalent to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. As I noted in October 2020, before the election, these cognitive issues have been obvious for the last two years, and had been getting steadily worse throughout 2020 during the election campaign. As I wrote then,
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Two smallsat orbiters to launch in ’24 to study Martian upper atmosphere

11:53 am

NASA has picked a twin orbiter mission being built by a partnership of the University of California-Berkeley and the private rocket company Rocket Lab to place two smallsats in orbit around Mars to study how the harsh environment of space might be causing the red planet to lose its atmosphere.

The entire project is dubbed ESCAPADE (an insanely contrived acronym) but the two smallsats have been dubbed “Blue” and “Gold.”

The mission builds on decades of experience at SSL in building satellite instruments and fleets of spacecraft to explore regions around Earth, the moon and Mars, specializing in magnetic field interactions with the wind of particles from the sun. Each of the two satellites, named after UC Berkeley’s school colors, will carry instruments built at SSL to measure the flow of high energy electrons and ionized oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules escaping from Mars, magnetic field detectors built at UCLA and a probe to measure slower or thermal ions built at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

With twin satellites, it is possible to measure conditions simultaneously at two places around the planet, Lillis said, allowing scientists to connect plasma conditions at one site to the escaping ion flux at another. Over the course of the mission, the two satellites will change positions to map the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere of nearly the entire planet from an altitude of between 150 and 10,000 kilometers.

Maybe the most important aspect of this mission however is not what it will learn at Mars, but how it is being financed and built. NASA is only paying about $80 million, a tiny amount compared to most past unmanned planetary probes. The university in turn is buying Rocket Lab’s Photon satellite structure rather than building the satellites from scratch. It will configure the instruments to fit into that ready made satellite body, thus saving time and money.

By doing it this way NASA and the planetary science community is increasingly relying on private companies to provide them their planetary probes, rather than building such things by hand themselves, at much greater cost. The result is a growing and thriving private commercial sector that owns and builds its own planetary probes, for profit.

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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations for orbital test flight

9:15 am

Starship prototype #20 being prepped
Screen capture from Labpadre live stream, available here.

Link here. In sum it appears that SpaceX is getting very close to launch, with the permit approval of the FAA increasingly becoming the biggest obstacle to progress.

Although the completion of all of this testing could take a long time, in Elon Musk’s mind, the path to returning B4 and S20 to being an integrated stack could be during this month.

A week ago, Musk tweeted that the “first orbital stack of Starship should be ready for flight in a few weeks, pending only regulatory approval.” Ultimately, once the vehicle is in its launch configuration, there will be a lengthy process of passing the aforementioned regulatory approval, with an environmental public comment period triggered ahead of launch. This has to be completed before the launch license can be granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The screen capture above shows Starship prototype #20 sitting on the suborbital flight test pad, as workers on cherry-pickers work on its exterior. The orange, green, and white tiles are likely tile locations still needing some level of installation work.

Based on SpaceX’s normal pace of operations, the engine testing for both Starship and Superheavy will take several weeks, once both are ready for such testing. While Starship appears just about ready, Superheavy apparently needs more work. When SpaceX stacked both together on the orbital launchpad several weeks ago, it suggested both were closer to launch than they were. Their present status suggests engine testing will likely begin in September, with Starship at the beginning of the month and Superheavy at the end of the month. That would make a launch possible sometime in late October, assuming the federal government doesn’t decide to shut this entire operation down by refusing to issue a permit.

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Trump says he “single-handedly” decided to move Space Force command from Colorado to Alabama

9:19 am

On Friday former President Donald Trump stated that it was his decision to put the headquarters of the new Space Force in Alabama, not in Colorado where most military related space operations have been located for decades.

“Space Force — I sent to Alabama,” Trump said. “I hope you know that. (They) said they were looking for a home and I single-handedly said, ‘Let’s go to Alabama.’ They wanted it. I said, ‘Let’s go to Alabama. I love Alabama.’”

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican who represents Colorado Springs, said Trump’s remarks were “an admission” that the headquarters move “was based solely on politics and personal preference — not the Air Force’s basing criteria or national security.”

When this decision was announced in January, I then believed porkmeister Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) had forced it through, but it appears now that is wrong. It was Trump, but still for reasons of pork.

This was a bad decision, one that from the beginning was going to have both practical and political opposition. For practical reasons Colorado always made better sense as Space Force headquarters because it would require less relocation of assets. For political reasons it was flying in the face of a lot of well-established vested interests in Colorado.

Trump’s admission yesterday will likely provide the final bit of ammunition needed by Colorado politicians to get it overturned.

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Russia delays launch of next unmanned lunar probe

9:04 am

According to a story in Russia’s state-run press, Roscosmos has decided to delay the launch of its Luna-25 lander from October 2021 to May 2022.

The story gave no reason for the delay.

Luna-25 would be the first Russian lunar probe since the 1970s, and is supposed to be that country’s first probe in a partnership with China to establish a manned lunar base by the 2030s.

Want to bet the Russian contribute to this project will be repeatedly delayed, and will also likely be disappointing? That has been the track record of Roscosmos for the past two decades (like all 21st century government projects). This first delay signals many more to come.

I am not saying Russia will fail to launch anything. What I am saying is that everyone should reserve a large store of skepticism about any promises Russia’s makes.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Unvaccinated students at Quinnipac University to be punished

11:53 am

Coming to your town in America soon!
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: coming soon to America.

Genocide is coming: Quinnipac University in Connecticut, having reimposed an indoor mask requirement, has now announced that it will fine and punish any students who do not provide proof that they have either been vaccinated against COVID or have a proper exemption.

Quinnipiac students may be fined up to $200 per week eventually until they prove their vaccination status. Fines for students who don’t supply vaccination proof will begin at $100 per week for the first two weeks. The penalty will increase by increments of $25 every two weeks until a max fine of $200 per week.

Currently non-complying students can avoid the fines if they show the proper documentation by Sept. 14. If they fail to meet the directive by then, they will lose access to the campus internet network.

No longer is the left screaming “My body! My choice!” Then that mantra for abortion worked to garner it political support from naive followers. Now the mantra is “Your body is ours! Let us do to it what we want or we will oppress you!”

It is a very short leap from merely punishing those who refuse a vaccine to rounding them up in camps to isolate them from the rest of society. From there, it is an even shorter leap to imposing mass executions to keep society clean from such unpure individuals.
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