Using its Long March 2D rocket China today placed four satellites into orbit, two to observe the Earth, one to study asteroids, and one a technology test satellite.
No word on where the rocket’s first stage booster landed within China.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
18 SpaceX
16 China
8 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA
The US still leads China 24 to 16 in the national rankings.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: unilaterally repealed by Beliot College.
The new bigotry on American campuses: Beliot College in Wisconsin has decided to turn a former campus coffee shop into blacks-only haven, thus re-introducing Jim Crow segregation by treating blacks as a privileged race and all other ethnic groups and races as inferior and thus deserving of discrimination and second-class facilities.
In March, the private institution announced the Java Joint would be closed in order to become “a haven for Beloit College’s Black students.”
The gathering space was praised by Jada Daniel, the current Black Student Union president. “We hope to create a safe space for Black and Brown students, where we have a comfortable place to study,” said Daniel on the school’s website. “Daniel said BSU plans to host Soul Food Sundays, poetry readings, and other events during the year, following COVID safety guidelines,” the website says.
Meanwhile, when questions were raised about this clearly discriminatory policy, the school refused to comment, even as its own website said this:
» Read more
Capitalism in space: Sierra Space has signed an agreement with a spaceport in Cornwall, England, allowing it to land its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles there.
Sierra Space signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Spaceport Cornwall expressing support for future landings of Dream Chaser at the spaceport, also known as Cornwall Newquay Airport in southwestern England.
The MOU came after Sierra Space performed a study, supported by the U.K. Space Agency, evaluating the feasibility of using the spaceport for Dream Chaser landings. The lifting body vehicle is designed to glide to a landing on runways, and the initial study concluded the spaceport is “a suitable and viable return location for the orbital return” for Dream Chaser, Sierra Space said in a statement.
The more places Sierra can land Dream Chaser the more commercially viable it will be. For Cornwall, this strengthens its position as a spaceport, having already signed an agreement with Virgin Orbit to allow it to launch from there.
Capitalism in space: Russia has announced a range of new tourist flight options to ISS in an effort to compete against the new commercial tourist flights being offered by American companies.
Glavkosmos is offering space tourists the option of performing spacewalks from the International Space Station (ISS) and stays of up to 30 days aboard the orbital laboratory. They can even purchase the Soyuz space capsule that took them to and from the station.
The company, which is part of Roscosmos, recently upgraded its website to provide details of what paying customers can do when they book a trip to the station. The information is available in Russian and English.
You can see the English website here. It does not indicate what the prices are for these services, though it will have to be competitive with what SpaceX is charging in order to compete.
Side note: This story is on Doug Messier’s site Parabolic Arc, which is presently running a fund-raising campaign. Please consider donating. While Doug and I might disagree on many things, his work covering commercial space remains among the best on line.
The new colonial movement: China yesterday moved to the launchpad the Long March 2F rocket it will use to launch the first three astronauts to occupy its new space station.
The first element of the complex, the Tianhe core module, launched April 28 aboard a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket, China’s most powerful launch vehicle. An unpiloted cargo ship, named Tianzhou 2, launched May 29 and docked with the Tianhe core module eight hours later, delivering fuel, food and spacesuits for the Shenzhou 12 astronauts.
The Shenzhou 12 mission will last about three months, the longest stay in space to date by Chinese astronauts. Shenzhou 12 will be China’s seventh crewed spaceflight since 2003.
Chinese officials have not announced the launch date for the Shenzhou 12 mission, but rockets for China’s last three crewed spaceflights rolled to the pad at Jiuquan about a week before liftoff. That suggests the launch could occur around June 16 or June 17.
As this launch will be from a spaceport in the interior of China, it will dump its first stage boosters on land.
During that three month mission the three astronauts will likely do several spacewalks to deploy solar panels and other equipment on the exterior of the Tianhe module, preparing it for later modules as well as the next manned mission, scheduled for October and planned to last six months.
Persecution is now cool! Despite a thirty year career as a published feminist condemning the male patriarchy of American society while also working in the campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, leftist radical feminist Naomi Wolf has found herself banned permanently by Twitter for daring to write posts condemning the lockdowns and mandates of the past year, while also raising concerns about the vaccines being offered to prevent COVID-19.
Twitter booted Wolf shortly before she intends to release her new book, Step Ten, that will explain how COVID-19 is being used by elites to grease the skids toward authoritarian fascism. “A much-hyped medical crisis,” Wolf argues, “has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms.”
The ironies here are endless. First, Twitter’s ban literally proves Wolf’s point. That Twitter executives don’t see that further illustrates their intolerance.
Second, the irony of Wolf’s banning might actually be somewhat amusing if it weren’t so suppressive to free thought. » Read more
It appears the reason a Georgia judge decided to unseal all 147,000 mail-in ballots for close inspection were the affidavits from four poll workers stating that tens of thousands of mail-in ballots voting for Biden appeared to be mere photocopies of the same ballot, and should have been invalidated and were not.
Voyles [one of the poll workers] said she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on paper different from others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the presidential election.
She also said none were purportedly folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.
“All of them were strangely pristine,” said Voyles, who for 20 years has monitored elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.
The watchdogs suspect as many as tens of thousands of the ballots may have been manufactured in a race that Biden won by just 12,000 votes, in large part because of the late surge in mail-in ballots counted after election monitors were asked to leave State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
This is the same issue that is suspected for many mail-in ballots in other states, thousands of fake ballots that appeared out of nowhere late in the vote counting, all of which were for Biden and all of which appeared very questionable.
If after inspection these allegations are found to be true , it very likely will invalidate the certified results in these states. At a minimum, it will show that the election of Joe Biden was fraudulent.
The Senate today passed a new NASA authorization that requires the agency to award a second manned lunar lander contract in addition to the one it gave SpaceX for its Starship spacecraft.
The bill also recommended a $10 billion increase over five years in this specific lunar lander program to pay for that second contract.
None of this is law yet, as the House must agree also. In addition, as this is an authorization, not an appropriation, the extra money has not been appropriated, which means it does not yet exist. And should it be approved at these recommended numbers, it means that NASA will be forced to stretch out the creation of both lunar landers, as the money appropriated is still less than required to build either.
I suspect that this budget shortfall will not delay SpaceX’s Starship significantly, as that company has obtained sufficient private funding to build it regardless. More likely the second lunar lander will face longer delays, unless its builders decide to do what SpaceX has done, and obtain private capital to get it done fast.
Note too that this recommendations follows Congress’s general policy of imagining money grows on trees and that there is an infinite supply. While it might be a good idea to pay for two landers, the country’s debt suggests otherwise. Maybe a wiser course would be for the government to only offer a tiny percentage of the capital, and demand the builders find their own funding, as SpaceX has done.
Examples of Critical Race Policy materials that
were being used at Coca-Cola
Blacklists are back and American Airlines want ’em! American Airlines has instituted an investigation into the opinions of one of their pilots, Guy Midkiff, because he committed the “crime” of criticizing the introduction of the bigoted and Marxists program called Critical Race Theory (CRT) in his local schools.
The attacks against him by one group that supports CRT have been vicious and slanderous, as documented at this story. The members of this group, the Southlake Anti-Racism coalition (SARC), have repeatedly commented on American Airlines’ Twitter feed, accusing Midkiff of harassing students and women while calling him a racist, all without any evidence. Some examples:
» Read more
Click for original image.
China’s state-run press today released two images taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter showing its Zhurong rover on the surface of Mars.
Those photos are to the right. The top shows the location prior to the rover’s landing. The bottom, taken on June 2nd, shows the rover and its landing platform, as well as its entry capsule, heat shield, and parachutes.
In the image, taken by a high-resolution camera installed on the orbiter of Tianwen-1 at 6 p.m. on June 2 (Beijing Time), two bright spots are visible in the upper right corner. The larger one is the landing platform, and the smaller one is the Zhurong Mars rover, the CNSA said.
…The dark area surrounding the landing platform might be caused by the influence of the engine plume during landing. The symmetrical bright stripes in the north-south direction of the landing platform might be from fine dust when the landing platform emptied the remaining fuel after landing, the CNSA said.
The bright spots in the center of the image are the back cover of the entry capsule and the parachute jettisoned during the landing. Another bright spot in the lower left of the image is the heat shield of the entry capsule, the CNSA said.
Based on the second photo, it appears that Zhurong has barely moved far from the lander since it rolled off on May 22nd.
And that’s all we really know. The Chinese press release provides no details about how well the rover is functioning, where exactly this location is on the surface of Mars, nor anything else of interest. The rover might be in the region covered by the MRO photos I posted yesterday, but if so the resolution isn’t good enough for me to find the spot. I am sure however that MRO scientists are presently carefully comparing their highest resolution version with these Tianwen-1 images to pinpoint it. They will then follow-up with their own high-resolution images of Zhurong from MRO.
The rover has a planned mission length of 90 Martian days, which runs through the end of August. How much the Chinese government will reveal about its operations and results however remains completely unknown. If it functions as planned expect science papers published in about a year. If not we will only get silence.
Doesn’t exist at the University of Oklahoma.
They’re coming for you next: A college volley ball player at the University of Oklahoma, Kylee McLaughlin, was blackballed from her team because she refused to endorse the agenda of Black Lives Matter and voiced her own conservatives opinions during a team discussion after viewing a left-wing political film about American prisons.
When she also expressed some of her conservative opinions on social media, her coach demanded she delete the post immediately and call all the team’s coaches and players to apologize.
The legal document says: ‘Although (McLaughlin) supports equality, social justice, and finds racism despicable, she disagreed with the WOKE culture and critical race theory advocated and practiced by two of her coaches who are the Defendants in this action.’
She said coaches and administrators later told her she did not fit in with the culture and gave her three options to continue at the university without playing time. She was given the choice of transferring, continuing on scholarship as a non athletic student or taking a redshirt year, keeping her scholarship and practice separately from the rest of the team. During the redshirt year, she was made to carry out more than 10 hours of online diversity and inclusion training, she said.
She didn’t say anything racist, she merely disagreed with the leftist agenda of the movie they saw. But since “one black teammate” was offended and determined without challenge that she was racist, the coaches decided they had to blackball her.
The good news? » Read more
The Scream by Edvard Munch, the absolute wrong response
to any emergency, and sadly the very response Americans adopted
against COVID-19.
Three more stories in the past few weeks have proven once again what I and many others saw unequivocally more than a year ago: The panicky response to COVID was unwarranted and not based on the actual facts on the ground but on manipulated and unproven assumptions.
Those assumptions were touted for purely political reasons. Worse, too many Americans meekly accepted those assumptions without any of the kind of mature skepticism that is required of adult citizens in a democratic republic. The result: Our rights were violated and false and corrupt politicians gained power, power they eagerly abused.
First, officials in Alameda County in California revealed on June 4th that they have reduced the number of COVID deaths in that county for the past year by about 25%, from 1,634 to 1,223.
“There are definitely people who died from reasons that were clearly not caused by COVID,”said Neetu Balram, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Public Health Department. Balram couldn’t give specifics about the true cause of death for the 411 people removed from the COVID-19 data, but she said the cases were identified after reviewing codes entered by county coroners into CalREDIE, the state’s database for disease reporting and surveillance.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who was open-minded enough to pay attention. The federal government provided hospitals and doctors a bonus for claiming as many deaths as possible as caused by COVID. They thus inflated the numbers grossly. Moreover, encouraging a panic in 2020 over the Wuhan flu served the political ends of the Democratic Party (to which almost all health officials belong) because it then justified the illegal easing of election laws so that Democrats could commit election fraud in November with ease.
Thus, doctors had both financial and political incentives to inflate the COVID numbers, which apparently they did with glee.
Two research papers published in mid-May added further weight to these conclusions:
» Read more
Trofim Lysenko preaching to Stalin. His policies destroyed
Soviet plant research, persecuted anyone who disagreed
with him, and caused famines that killed millions. And they are
all policies now being adopted by the American medical field.
Persecution is now cool! Last year, the University of Pittsburgh fired cardiologist Norman Wang because he wrote and published a peer-reviewed paper calling for race-neutral policies in medicine.
In addition, he was publicly denounced by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the journal retracted his paper, even though no one could cite any errors in his work.
As the criticism mounted, Wang was removed from his position as the director of a fellowship program in clinical cardiac electrophysiology at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and was prohibited from making any contact with students. His boss reportedly told him that his classroom was “inherently unsafe” due to the views he expressed.
Unsafe, eh? Can’t have those students hear any opinions or facts that might contradict the modern “woke” narrative!
Wang is suing both the AHA and the University of Pittsburgh for defamation and violating his first amendment rights. Whether he wins or not remains quite unknown, especially considering the increasingly intolerant nature of today’s society.
The article at the link however goes far beyond simply telling Wang’s story. First, it describes the cases of two other doctors who were forced to resign for similar reasons: they questioned the modern obsession with race and suggested that things would be far better if “race was taken out of the conversation.” The mob immediately rose up against both, and their medical organization, the American Medical Association (AMA), then moved to get them fired or removed.
The article then however goes even farther, outlining how this evil oppressive blacklisting culture is beginning to have a much wider and very negative impact on the practice of medicine and the treatment of patients.
» Read more
The American flag: Banned by the NAACP.
The local NAACP chapter at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) was badly triggered over Memorial Day weekend by the horrible sight of an American flag hanging from the end of a crane’s cable at a university construction site, and demanded the cable and flag be removed.
The NAACP claimed that what really upset them was the standard cable loop just below the flag at the end of the cable, which they immediately assumed was a noose!
Ronald Davis, president of the New Britain NAACP, told FOX 61 that “Regardless of what someone else says about that, what I see, as a black man? That’s a noose. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Take it down.”
But one intrepid College Fix reader noticed there are several steel cable loops hanging from the crane, and the only one that appears to bother another is the one with the American flag on the end of it. He cites one image of the crane in which viewers can see three or four cable loops.
“I guess they noticed only the one holding the flag, which means that it’s the flag that triggers them,” the reader said. [emphasis mine]
It is clear that because he and the NAACP specifically focused on the one loop where the American flag hung tells us what really offended them. They really wanted the American flag removed. And I am sure if they had their way it would be banned forever.
» Read more
As first revealed in mid-May, Arianespace has been forced to delay the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by at least one month because of a problem with the fairing on its Ariane 5 rocket, found during an August 2020 launch.
There have been no Ariane 5 launches since. According to yesterday’s press briefing, however:
“The origin of the problem has been found. Corrective actions have been taken,” Daniel de Chambure, acting head of Ariane 5 adaptations and future missions at ESA, said. “The qualification review has started, so we should be able to confirm all that within a few days or weeks.” He did not elaborate on the problem or those corrective actions, beyond stating that the problem took place during separation of the payload fairing. Industry sources said in May that, on the two launches, the separation system imparted vibrations on the payload above acceptable limits, but did not damage the payloads.
It appears this new delay to Webb’s launch is because two commercial payloads must lift off first before Webb, with the first now scheduled for July. According to Arianespace, it will take two months prep for the next commercial launch, followed by two months prep for the Webb launch. That puts the launch of Webb in November.
Overall this particular delay is slight, only a few weeks, and pales in comparison to the ten years of delays experienced by NASA during development and construction of Webb. It also will add very little to the telescope’s overall budget, which has grown from an original price of $500 million to now about $10 billion.
China early this morning successfully placed a weather satellite into orbit using its Long March 3B rocket.
No word on where the first stage crashed, though we know because the launch was from an interior launch site that it had to have crashed somewhere within China, hopefully not on any village anywhere.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
16 SpaceX
15 China
8 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 22 to 15 in the national rankings.
This list should change in only a few hours, as SpaceX has a Falcon 9 launch scheduled for 1:29 pm (Eastern), carrying a Dragon cargo freighter to ISS.
No first amendment on Amazon.
Blacklists are back and Amazon’s got ’em: Yesterday my blacklist column noted how Amazon has blackballed the live stream of a film biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
That however is not the only example of Amazon’s anti-free speech agenda and its desire to silence conservative thought. In recent months book authors and publishers have repeatedly discovered that Amazon has been either banning outright their books, or shadow-banning them from searches so that potential customers cannot find them.
The link gives about a number of examples, but a quick internet search finds numerous others (see for example here, here, and here).
Only rarely will Amazon admit to this censorship, and when it does, it does so by claiming vague rules about preventing “hate speech,” even though this giant online store has done nothing to remove books and products promoting Islamic terrorism, Nazi paraphernalia, and Antifa-supporting materials.
» Read more
Anthony Fauci: Washington’s liar-in-chief
In the past few days a slew of 2020 emails by Dr. Anthony Fauci have revealed his dishonest, incompetent, corrupt, and political agenda during the entire COVID-19 epidemic.
The emails have revealed he lied about his connections with the Chinese Wuhan lab. They reveal that he knew all along that the virus was almost certainly leaked from that lab. They also reveal that he immediately worked to prevent these facts from being revealed publicly, lying if necessary to do it and successfully forcing publications to withdraw news stories based on his lies.
Of all these revelations, however, the one email that best illustrates Fauci’s dishonesty and venality was the one in February 2020 — before the epidemic had taken hold and before any shutdowns had been imposed — where he bluntly admitted what has been known for more than a century, that the general widespread use of masks by people who are not sick is pointless and will accomplish nothing.
In his words:
Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a vey low risk location. Your instincts are correct, money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines. [emphasis mine]
Less than two months later, Fauci had completely changed his tune, claiming that Americans needed to wear masks all the time. » Read more
Two stories today from New Zealand, both related to the American company Rocket Lab, help illustrate the often absurd and irrational nature of modern government rule-making.
First, New Zealand’s Employment Relations Authority attacked the company after ruling against it in a single employee grievance case. The case involved a fired employee who filed and won his grievance when he refused to sign the company’s offered settlement. Based on this single case, authority officials quickly and publicly blasted Rocket Lab as if it had committed numerous blasphemies:
Authority member Rachel Larmer found that the dismissal was “extremely unfair” and that the company “failed to comply with even the most basic and widely understood principles of procedural fairness”.
As the article noted, it “is unusual for the authority to be so overtly critical of an employer.” Yet, attack Rocket Lab it did, very bluntly and very publicly.
Yet, at the same time, this same New Zealand government has apparently been giving this evil employer routine waivers of its draconian border restrictions imposed to prevent the arrival of COVID.
More than 150 aerospace specialists have arrived on short term visas to work in New Zealand for the satellite launch service provider Rocket Lab since the country’s border closed. Immigration New Zealand said 156 foreigners were granted border exemptions as part of a government-approved programme for the company.
Rocket Lab spokesperson Morgan Bailey said the company had focused on bringing in essential workers for its launches, who would usually stay for two weeks after completing managed isolation.
Normally visitors to New Zealand need to quarantine for two weeks. Apparently, the government is allowing foreign workers for Rocket Lab to bypass that rule and make alternative arrangements.
So which is it? Is Rocket Lab a horrible slave-driver who must be watched like a hawk so that it does not abuse its workers, or is it a generous provider of work and business for New Zealand that is so valuable gives it a privileged position where some laws don’t apply to it?
In truth, New Zealand’s laws themselves are now simply being enforced somewhat randomly, based merely on whether a specific government official personally likes or dislikes the company. That is my impression at least.
But then, that is the impression given and now common throughout the western world. We no longer treat the law as sacrosanct, but instead use it for political purposes, which require its plain meaning to shift and change like Jello, depending on the personal and political motives of the individuals involved. And all for the sake of power.
Capitalism in space: In the budget proposal submitted by the Biden administration the Pentagon included a request for $47.9 million to help develop the infrastructure it will need to use SpaceX’s Starship rocket as a method for transporting cargo point-to-point on Earth.
“The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity,” the document states.
Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle’s development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities.
Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.
The proposal is calling for a fourfold increase in funding for this work, as the Air Force is already spending slightly less than $10 million this year on this work.
The bottom line is that it appears SpaceX already has at least one real customer for its giant rocket. And if the military is that interested now, it likely means many more private customers are beginning to line up.
