Tag: politics

Bernie Sanders throws a wrench into Senate bill forcing NASA to award two lunar lander contracts

9:18 am

Capitalism in space? Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist/Democrat-Vermont) has submitted a new amendment to the new NASA authorization bill, now being debated in the Senate, that eliminates the earlier changes added by senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) that required NASA to award a contract to a second company for building its manned lunar lander.

This earlier amendment, submitted by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), modified NASA’s Artemis Program. Cantwell’s amendment, in part, called for $10.03 billion in additional funding for NASA to carry out the Human Landing System program. This legislation was filed as Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos were urging Congress to add $10 billion to NASA’s budget—enough money to fully fund the development of a second Human Landing System. It was passed 11 days ago without any debate by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Sanders’ terse amendment seeks to excise the Cantwell language that provides additional funding for a Human Landing System.

While Sanders’ amendment probably makes more sense based on the money that Congress has actually appropriated for this task, he didn’t do it for that reason. More likely he did it as a petty attack on Jeff Bezos, whose company Blue Origin was likely expected to win that second contract.

Nothing is settled yet of course. The bill still has to pass the Senate and also be approved by the House, then signed by the president. Much will change before then.

Regardless, isn’t nice how NASA’s modern space effort is so well designed by our senators and congressmen? What would we do without them?

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Folded ballots caused many (but not all) of the tabulator errors in New Hampshire vote

3:31 pm

The auditors of the Windham, New Hampshire, local vote have determined that folded ballots caused many of the false totals produced by the computer tabulators.

Auditors said they found “experimental confirmation that if the contest is undervoted, a fold through a vote target can create a vote.”

“Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,” Mark Lindeman, who is part of the audit team, told WMUR.

Harri Hursti, another auditor, wrote on Twitter that testing proved folded ballots were misinterpreted by machines. “Test decks proved that foldings across a vote targets is misinterpreted as additional phantom votes or subtracts votes due to false overvotes,” he wrote in a post.

Their testing however has shown that folded ballots are not the only cause of the untrustworthy tabulations.

Another machine was found to have “an even more dramatic problem” by the auditors, who said that only 28 percent of the votes for Republican candidates were counted.

The machines were apparently provided by a company called AccuVote, but the “machines’ intellectual property is owned by Dominion Voting Systems.”

The results here prove that these tabulator machines are totally untrustworthy, and should be junked entirely, with the state having a legitimate case for suing the companies involved for failure to deliver.

At the least. The research so far has found that the bulk of the errors routinely seem to penalize Republicans. If further research reveals that this partisan slant is not an accident, then criminal charges might very well be in order.

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GAO finds more NASA cost overruns in Webb, SLS, and Orion

2:18 pm

GAO graph documenting NASA's big project delays and cost overruns

The annual Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report on major NASA-led programs has found that the cost overruns and scheduling problems it has documented now for years continued in 2020.

You can obtain the report here. The graph to the left, from the report, summarizes the data quite succinctly.

The cumulative cost overrun of 20 major programs in development, defined as those with total costs of at least $250 million, grew to more than $9.6 billion in the report. Three programs — the James Webb Space Telescope, Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System — account for $8 billion of that total, including $4.4 billion for JWST alone.

SLS and the Exploration Ground Systems program accounted for effectively all of the $1.1 billion in overruns in 2020. … SLS alone accounted for nearly $990 million in cost increases. About two-thirds of that increase came from NASA adopting a GAO recommendation to lower the original baseline cost estimate for SLS to properly account for work that had been shifted to later phases of the program.

The report also documented almost 20 years of cumulative delays, with Webb leading the way with delays of more than seven years. The new report added 37 more months of delays during the last year.

The report, and NASA, laid the blame for many of the more recent delays and cost overruns on last year’s COVID epidemic, but if so those delays were imposed by choice, not necessity, considering how both China and SpaceX moved forward without any delays during the same time period. In reporting on NASA for the last three decades I have found it willing to initiate long delays at the drop of a hat, sometimes for reasons, such as a storm that causes some minor damage, that do not justify either the delay or its length. The COVID panic was just another example of this.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Tenured professor objects to segregated-by-race training classes at university; school investigates and punishes her

11:55 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: What the Lake Washington Institute of
Technology wants to do to anyone who expresses an
original and independent thought

They’re coming for you next: Because a tenured professor, Elisa Parrett, made a four minute statement objecting to the segregated-by-race training class the Lake Washington Institute of Technology was mandating for its teachers, the school instigated a nine month investigation resulting in a reprimand and rules forbidding her to speak on such topics again.

The investigation included the hiring of a private investigator, numerous interviews, public humiliation, and wild unsubstantiated claims that her remarks caused widespread trauma. The school removed her from her teaching duties, and worse, doubled down on its insistence that future sessions will be segregated by race. From the university’s president Amy Morrison:
» Read more

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Zhurong rolls onto Martian surface

10:39 am

Zhurong's view of lander after deployment onto Martian surface

The new colonial movement: According to China’s state-run press, the Zhurong rover has successfully rolled off its lander and reached the Martian surface.

The image to the right was taken by the rover’s rear hazard avoidance camera, and shows the lander and the deployment ramps behind Zhurong.

At this moment China has released no other images of the Martian surface, nor have they revealed if they have a precise idea of where the lander actually put down on Mars. This latter information is essential for them to plan the rover’s travels over its 90-day nominal mission.

Nonetheless, it appears Zhurong is functioning perfectly. If all goes right, it will not only complete that 90-day mission but continue on for considerably longer, as have other similar small rovers on both Mars and the Moon.

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Election audit in New Hampshire confirms unreliability of machine tabulators

3:49 pm

Auditors today completed a hand recount of the votes in the town of Windham, New Hampshire and concluded that the count proves the machine tabulators are unreliable and do not produce trustworthy totals.

Hand recount finished & #’s very closely match the hand recount #’s done on Nov 12. Windham voting machine election results are confirmed to be unreliable. @WAuditors still investigating causes & contributing factors.

None of the local results are changed because of these new results, but the audit was done because a hand recount done in November showed serious discrepancies, with the hand count consistently finding more votes for Republicans compared to what was tabulated by the machines.

On Election Night, Republicans swept all four of Windham’s state representative seats. One Democrat, Kristi St. Laurent, fell short by just 24 votes and requested a recount.

But during the recount, the margin between St. Laurent and the Republican candidates changed significantly. The vote totals for all of the Republican candidates in the race increased by about 300, while St. Laurent’s vote count decreased by nearly 100.

While the outcome of the race didn’t change — the four Republican victories from Election Day were upheld at the recount — the change in vote totals raised serious questions for many from both parties.

The audit has now confirmed what the hand count has suggested. Both matched closely, but differed significantly from the machine totals, the numbers of which apparently penalized Republican candidates consistently.

They are now beginning an investigation into what caused the discrepancies. I would say above all the town should dump these machines and replace them with something that can be trusted, even if it means we go back to primitive times and hand count all elections.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired for reading anti-slavery novel to students

12:36 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: What St. John’s university wished it could do
to a Jewish professor.

They’re coming for you next: Hannah Berliner Fischthal, a professor at St. John’s University in New York and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, was immediately fired because she read aloud in her literature class a selection from Mark Twain’s anti-slavery book, Pudd’nhead Wilson, that included the “N-word”.

On March 3 she was called into a meeting with HR about her use of the N-word in class, the subsequent discussion of it and a comment she allegedly made about a Black student’s hair. Fischthal said she only made a remark about a student’s head being wrapped up during class and it had nothing to do with her hair.

She said she was also criticized for mentioning her family’s experience in the Holocaust during class.

On March 5 she was suspended pending an investigation she had violated the university’s policy against bias. On April 29 she was fired.

The school had been alerted to her terrible crime of reading accurately from an accurate book portraying the actual culture of the pre-Civil War south by at least one of her students, who apparently was so weak-minded that even hearing this word that-shall-not-be-named was ““unnecessary and very painful.” It didn’t matter to this brainless student that the book was written to condemn slavery and bigotry. All that mattered is that a word of six letters was spoken aloud and she or he was forced to hear it.
» Read more

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ESA proposes constellation of lunar communications and navigation satellites

11:15 am

The European Space Agency is proposing in this decade to build a constellation of communications and GPS-type satellites, dubbed Moonlight, to orbit the Moon.

ESA is asking two industrial consortia in Europe to define what an integrated sat-nav and telecoms system at the Moon would look like.

It’ll include a constellation of at least three, but probably more, positioning-and-relay satellites to give global coverage, and will likely include some surface beacons, too, to augment the accuracy of the navigation signals.

“The target we have at the moment is that the constellation would be able to allow for an accuracy of 100m and probably better. We think we are able to get to 30m in the first instance,” explained Paul Verhoef, the director of ESA’s navigation department.

The two consortiums are the UK’s Surrey Satellite and Italy’s Telespazio.

It also appears the ESA is proposing making this system available to all lunar exploration missions, whether they be part of the U.S.’s Artemis program or China’s lunar plans. If so, it is commercially smart, as they will have plenty of customers to buy their services.

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China scrubs launch of station cargo freighter again

10:43 am

For the second time in two days China has scrubbed the launch of the first unmanned Tianzhou cargo freighter to the core module of its space station,

As before, the Chinese only said that the scrub was due to unstated “technical issues.”

They will likely try again tomorrow, but that is pure speculation. Without a more detailed report from China, we really have no idea what is happening.

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Moranbong Band – Csardas & Gypsy Airs

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who notes,

Talk about an eclectic Evening Pause. “Csardas” was written by Italian, Vittorio Monti, in the early 20th century. “Gypsy Airs” was composed by Spaniard, Pablo de Sarasate, in the late 19th century. Both compositions are inspired by Hungarian music. And the orchestra is North Korean.

The band was organized by North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. This performance was from 2012. From the link this interesting tidbit:

In December 2015, Kim Jong-un sent the band to perform in a series of shows in Beijing to improve relations between China and North Korea; these would have been the band’s first performances outside of North Korea. However, the band left Beijing on a scheduled flight to Pyongyang only a few hours before their performance was scheduled. China’s Xinhua news agency stated that all of the band’s performances had been cancelled due to “communication issues at the working level.” The Korea Herald reported that North Korea had cancelled the tour because China had requested that North Korea’s missiles should not be shown during performances.

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China scrubs launch of Tianzhou freighter to its Tianhe station module

12:24 pm

The first launch of a Tianzhou freighter to China’s first module, dubbed Tianhe, of its planned Chinese Space Station (CSS), was scrubbed early this morning for unstated “technical reasons.”

Not only has China’s state-run press or its space agency not revealed what caused the scrub, they have said nothing about a new launch date. This cargo freighter however apparently needs to be in place before the arrival of the station’s first crew, now roughly scheduled for sometime in June.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Former Trump official Sebastian Gorka

11:42 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Facebook and Instagram
Does not exist at Google or YouTube.

They’re coming for you next: Along with all other former Trump officials being blackballed by today’s dominant leftist culture, former Trump deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka has found himself banished, first from Fox News, and then from Google’s YouTube.

While Gorka’s problems at YouTube were in the past related to copyright disputes, the final ban last month was simply part of that site’s effort to censor any legitimate discussion of election fraud during the November 2020 election. From their own spokesman:

“In accordance with our long standing strikes system, we terminated the channel America First with Sebastian Gorka, for repeated violations of our presidential election integrity policy,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Hill. … “As we’ve publicly shared, our presidential election integrity policy prohibits content uploaded after last year’s safe harbor deadline that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election,” Choi wrote. “Any channel that violates this policy will receive a strike and channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period are permanently removed from YouTube, as in the case of America First with Sebastian Gorka.”

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Long-time scholar banned for questioning gender fluidity

11:54 am

Lysenko with Stalin
Trofim Lysenko, the APA’s new hero, preaching to Stalin as he
destroyed Soviet plant research, persecuted anyone
who disagreed with him, and caused famines that killed millions.

They’re coming for you next: John Staddon, a retired and well-published scholar and researcher, was banned from an email discussion group run by the American Psychological Association (APA) for daring to question the modern leftist concept that one can chose one’s sex.

Staddon was deleted from the listserv for allegedly violating the division’s code of conduct. “The division leadership has received complaints about some of the posts that you have sent to the division listserv,” wrote Jonathon Crystal, an Indiana University Bloomington provost and professor of psychological and brain sciences, on behalf of the division’s executive committee.

“I do not want to get into the particulars of the range of complaints over the years, but I will note that a number of members of the executive committee and others have voiced concerns publicly on the listserv in an attempt to make you aware of how readers of the list might view some of the posts,” Crystal wrote. “The executive committee views the use of the division listserv as a privilege and has voted to remove you from the listserv. I am writing to inform you that your email address has been removed from the listserv,” Crystal wrote, adding Staddon can use “other outlets to share your views.”

And what was Staddon’s evil conduct? This is what he had written:
» Read more

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Pennsylvania votes to severely limit governor’s emergency powers

10:48 am

Good news: Pennsylvania voters yesterday soundly approved constitutional amendments that severely limit the emergency powers of their governor, thus preventing the present and future governors from endlessly renewing such powers.

One would give the General Assembly the ability to end or extend a declared emergency without the involvement of the governor, and the other would end a declared emergency after 21 days unless extended by the General Assembly.

Previously, once the governor’s emergency powers were granted they would last for 90 days, and the governor himself could automatically renew them endlessly. This is what Democrat governor Tom Wolf has been doing for the past year. His last renewal however expires tomorrow. It is unclear whether this vote will forbid him from renewing those dictatorial powers again.

The vote however signals to all Pennsylvania politicians the hostility the voters have to these endless emergency powers and the abuse of power that has resulted.

This vote in Pennsylvania also shows us the way to freedom. Reform must come from the states, the cities, and the local school boards, not at the federal level. If enough states make changes to their laws to strengthen their voting systems to prevent what has become almost routine Democratic Party fraud, that party will lose power at all levels. If enough parents get involved in school board activities, the politicization of education for the purpose of leftist indoctrination will end.

Once these things happen, reform at the federal level might finally have a chance.

Good people have got to stop doing nothing. Time is running out. Soon it will be too late for them to do anything.

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Senate revises NASA authorization to protect lunar lander award to SpaceX’s Starship

9:47 am

Even as the full Senate today begins its review of NASA’s newest authorization, the bill has been modified to grandfather in the contract award that NASA gave to SpaceX to build its manned lunar lander using Starship.

An earlier version of the bill had included language inserted by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) demanding NASA award within 30 days a contract for a second lunar lander. The modified bill extends that timeline to 60 days, but also specifically protects SpaceX’s contract award:

The Administrator shall not, in order to comply with the obligations referred to in paragraph (1), modify, terminate or rescind any selection decisions or awards made under the human landing system program that were announced prior to the date of enactment of this division.

The revised bill still puts NASA in a ridiculous position. Combined with Cantwell’s amendment, the agency will now be forced to name a second lunar lander contract within sixty days. Though it recommends doubling the money for this program ($10 billion over five years instead of ten), it does not actually appropriate it. Moreover, that new budget recommendation is still about one half of what NASA had originally requested in order to fund the construction of two lunar landers.

Not surprisingly, the entire bill [pdf] has become a pork-laden collection of spending put together without any concern for the needs for the nation. Instead, ithe 1,445-page long bill “is the proverbial ‘Christmas tree’ with a Table of Contents that alone is 15 pages” that different senators keep adding items to, making it a hodge-podge of incoherence.

The bill itself however still has to be approved by both the Senate and the House. While this should act as a corrective to make it more sane, don’t expect that. Instead, the more likely result will be that the two houses of Congress will combine together their own personal earmarks into one humongous bill.

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1st pictures from Zhurong finally released

9:09 am

Zhurong's front view
Click for full image.

Zhurong's rear view
Click for full image.

China today finally released the first images from its Mars rover Zhurong, proving that the rover landed successfully and is operating as planned. The link takes you to the website of the Chinese space agency, in Chinese. This link provides some details in English.

The two images to the right show the front and rear views from Zhurong, sitting on top of its landing. The black & white front view shows the deployed ramps that the rover will roll down when it begins it operational phase. It shows, as expected, the generally flat terrain of the northern lowlands plains of Utopia Planitia. In the distance however there appears to be distinct features, possibly the rim of a small crater. At the moment the exact location of the rover is not known, so no precise map yet exists of its surrounding terrain. This will change in the coming days as both Chinese and American scientists hone in on the rover using orbital images.

The color rear view shows that the rover’s solar panels and high gain antenna have properly deployed. While the design of Zhurong in many ways imitates the two American rovers Spirit and Opportunity (probably because China hacked into the JPL website for several years and downloaded their blueprints), it also includes several upgrades. For example, Zhurong’s solar panels unfold, providing a significantly larger surface area to gather sunlight. Both Spirit and Opportunity were somewhat hampered by the power they could obtain by their smaller solar panels. Both also experienced times when Martian dust on the panels reduced that power. Zhurong’s much larger panels will protect it better from these issues, and could allow it to survive longer on Mars.

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China’s Long March 4B rocket launches oceanography satellite

12:46 am

China tonight successfully launched a new oceanography satellite using its Long March 4B rocket, completing a three satellite constellation.

No word on whether the rocket’s first stage landed on any villages in the interior of China.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

15 SpaceX
13 China
7 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 21 to 13 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: New Apple hire fired immediately because other Apple employees considered his writings “unsafe.”

12:28 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Facebook and Instagram
Doesn’t exist at Apple.

They’re coming for you next: Though Apple had actively recruited Antonio García Martínez and had reviewed his past work thoroughly before hiring him, the company fired him almost as soon as he started working for them because some of its other workers had put together a letter calling for his blacklisting because his published writings made them feel “unsafe.”

“Given Mr. García Martínez’s history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks,” the letter read, “we are concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.”

All of this without even a hint that there’s ever been anything like such a problem at any of his workplaces.

The letter above, like the campaign against Martinez by hack press outlets like The Verge, includes a number of slanders and purposely false interpretations of what Martinez had written in his one published book, Chaos Monkeys, available on line from all ebook vendors and described on its Amazon page as
» Read more

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NASA gives an American the seat on Dragon flight that it had been holding for Russian

10:15 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has added an American astronaut to the next manned mission to ISS, set for October.

NASA said that Kayla Barron will join the Crew-3 mission, launching on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled for launch no earlier than Oct. 23. Barron joins NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, who had been assigned to Crew-3 last December.

The Crew-3 mission will relieve the Crew-2 astronauts who arrived at the station on another Crew Dragon spacecraft April 24. The four Crew-3 astronauts will remain on the station for a six-month stay.

The space agency had been holding that seat open for a Russian, as part of its long term barter arrangement whereby in exchange for flying Americans on Soyuz capsules, Russia flies Russians on American spacecraft. That arrangement had been used repeatedly when the shuttle was flying, but since its retirement the U.S. has been forced to buy its seats on Soyuz as it had nothing to offer in exchange.

With the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule however NASA has been trying to get the Russians to renew that arrangement. And though an American, Mark Vande Hei, flew for free on a Soyuz last month, the Russians have as yet refused to assign their own astronaut to this upcoming October flight, despite months of negotiations. It appears NASA decided it could wait no longer, and filled the seat with its own astronaut.

In fact, the announcement by Roscosmos on May 13th that the next two Soyuz launches to ISS will carry two commercial passengers each means that Vande Hei cannot return on a Soyuz until next year. The seat he would have used to come home now must be used by these tourists, meaning his mission will now be extended to last for as much as a full year or more.

Unless of course NASA decides to bring him home on a Dragon capsule instead.

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China rolls out rocket for next space station launch

10:00 am

The new colonial movement: On May 15th China rolled out the Long March 7 rocket that on May 20th will carry the first Tianzhou cargo freighter to the already launched core module of its space station.

Tianzhou-2 will carry 4.69 tons of cargo in a pressurized segment and 1.95 tons of propellant, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

Meanwhile, the core stage, dubbed Tianhe, has successfully completed its on-orbit checkouts and has placed itself in the right orbit for the arrival of Tianzhou.

If all goes right with this cargo mission, China is targeting a June launch for the station’s first three-man crew, who will attempt to stay at the station for three months.

Do not expect much information to be released by China during these missions. Like the Soviet Union of old, and as they have been doing routinely since their space program began to gear up in the past decade, they will only make periodic terse announcements, all of which will contain only the most superficial of information. Only much later will more be learned, usually many years after the fact when its news value has vanished and it only concerns historians and space buffs.

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