Tag: politics

Arianespace successfully completes the last launch of Avio’s Vega rocket

9:29 pm

Tonight the last launch of the Vega rocket, built by the Italian company Avio and managed by Arianespace, successfully lifted off from French Guiana, placing a European Earth observation satellite into orbit.

The launch was delayed several years because of a failure during a previous launch that required a major redesign of an engine. Further delays took place when Avio literally lost the tanks for the rocket’s upper stage, and had to improvise a solution (which has never been explained fully).

The rocket will now be replaced by the Vega-C, which after several more launches will be entirely owned and managed by Avio, which will market it to satellite customers without any significant participation of the government middleman Arianespace.

This was only the second launch by Europe in 2024, so the leader board of the 2024 launch race does not change.

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 71.

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Sierra Space completes acoustic testing of Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first Dream Chaser launch

9:45 am

Sierra Space today announced that it has successfully completed acoustic testing of the Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first ISS mission of its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.

During the Direct Field Acoustic Test (DFAN), the test team placed stacks of purpose-built loudspeakers – each one a highly-engineered acoustic device – in 21-ft-tall columns surrounding the spacecraft. Their goal was to test whether the structural elements of Shooting Star could withstand the acoustic environment of a launch on a Vulcan Centaur rocket. Over a four-day period, test engineers blasted the spacecraft with a controlled sound field that was 10,000x higher intensity than the volume of a typical rock concert, recreating the sonic intensity of a launch. Shooting Star withstood acoustic levels greater than 140 dB for several minutes at a time, proving its flight worthiness.

The press release however made no mention as to when the launch will actually take place. Sierra first got the contract to build Dream Chaser in 2016, and was supposed to make its first flight in 2020. That launch has been repeatedly delayed, and is now four years behind schedule. Supposedly it was to take place this year on the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in the spring of 2024, but was removed from that launch because of delays in preparing Tenacity for launch.

As of today, no new launch date has been announced, and though Sierra says Tenacity will be ready for launch by the end of this year, don’t expect it to happen before 2025.

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Private company launches small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform

9:30 am

The rocket startup Evolotion Space on August 31, 2024 successfully launched a small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform operated by the Spaceport Company, a startup in itself.

The launch itself did not appear to reach space, but was instead designed to test both the rocket and the sea platform’s operation.

The experiment occurred approximately 30 miles south of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The test served to validate The Spaceport Company’s sea-based launch equipment and ground support equipment, said the company’s CEO and founder Tom Marotta. “Emerging hypersonic technologies require additional and larger test ranges to accommodate higher cadence testing campaigns,” he said. “With this new commercial facility, we will alleviate the burdens on government ranges and enable at-sea test environments that existing land-based ranges are unable to provide.”

The solid-fueled rocket meanwhile is being developed by Evolution to initially do hypersonic testing for the military.

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NASA asks space industry for proposals on using the shelved Janus probes on mission to Apophis

9:23 am

NASA has now put out a request for proposals from the space industry for refitting the two Janus planetary probes, whose asteroid mission was shelved when its launch as a secondary payload was delayed due to problems with the Psyche primary payload, as a mission to the asteroid Apophis in connection with its April 13, 2029 close approach to the Earth.

NASA has been studying this new mission goal since early 2023, but apparently had failed to come up with a plan. It is now asking the private sector for suggestions on getting it done, including finding the funding for any plans.

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Russia claims its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule

9:09 am

Phase I of China/Russian Lunar base roadmap
The original phase I plan of Chinese-Russian lunar
base plan, from June 2021.

According to Russia’s state-run press, its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule for a planned launch in 2027, though that press also claims the launch may happen in 2026 instead.

The problem with this claim is that Russia had for years said that this lunar orbiter would launch by 2025. As expected, the mission has not launched on time, as have all of Russia’s 21st century lunar exploration plans. For example, the previous lunar mission, the Luna-25 lunar lander, was originally supposed to land on the Moon in 2021, was not launched until 2023, and ended up crashing on the Moon when the spacecraft did not function properly during a engine burn in lunar orbit.

In the first phase of the so-called China-Russian partnership to explore the Moon, is shown by the 2021 graph to the right, China continues to do all the heavy lifting, and do so pretty much on the schedule predicted. Russian meanwhile continues to do what I predicted back in 2021, get nothing done on time and when launched have problems.

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Williams-Sonoma sued over its racist DEI hiring policies

1:27 pm

The racist hiring policies at Williams-Sonoma, beginning with its board of directors and continuing all the way down
The racist hiring policies at Williams-Sonoma, beginning with
its board of directors and continuing all the way down

On September 3, 2024 the non-profit first amendment legal firm America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the Williams-Sonoma corporation for its extensive DEI racial hiring policies that specifically favor some skin colors over others.

Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenware and home furnishings retailer with brands including Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow, proudly represents to the public and its shareholders and investors that race, sex, and national origin are motivating factors in its hiring, employment, and contracting practices.

As outlined in Williams-Sonoma’s 2024 Annual Report, their Equity Action Plan and Equity Action Committee led to “approximately 68.1% of our total workforce identified as female and approximately 41.1% identified as an ethnic minority group.” The company boasts higher management, comprising “56.6% of Vice Presidents and above identified as female.”

Williams-Sonoma’s Equity Action Committee also appears to reward executives for making race, color, sex, or national origin a motivating factor in hiring and other employee practices. The Equity Action Plan tracked and set goals for the diversity of the company, board members, and board nominees. It then designed the “Associate Equity Network Groups” that benefit some workers and disfavor others, specifically white, male, and religious Americans.

In other words, this company demands race and sex be considered as a qualification for a job, regardless of the person’s skills, experience, or talent, and it also demands that whites and men be put on the back of the bus, considered last in all hiring decisions, merely because they are either white or male.
» Read more

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That sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers was simply feedback

9:01 am

In a short post today NASA noted that the mysterious sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers over the weekend was nothing more than simple feedback caused by an “audio configuration between the space station and Starliner” and that the sound stopped when that configuration was adjusted.

The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback. The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations

In other words, this is not a rare event, and from the beginning was not considered by the astronauts, ground engineers, or NASA management to be a matter of concern. The fix was apparently simple and straightforward, and is part of the work done whenever any new vehicle gets docked and tied into ISS’s systems.

It appears however to have caused many in the news media and in the space world to go nuts simply because it was linked to Starliner and Boeing. This is similar to the recent pattern of assigning all blame to Boeing whenever any Boeing-built plane has technical problems, even if that plane had been purchased by the airline decades earlier and its maintenance was solely the responsibility of the airline for that long.

Boeing is definitely a company in trouble, on many levels. We shouldn’t however look for problems there in the company when they clearly don’t exist.

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China launches “remote-sensing satellites” test satellites

8:51 am

China today successfully placed a classified “group” of “remote-sensing satellites” into orbit to test “new technologies of low-orbit constellations,” its Long March 4B lifting off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

That is all the information that China’s state-run press released. No word was released as to where
in China the lower stages crashed. As to the number of satellites launched, according to this independent site, the launch had nine payloads, which suggests but does not confirm nine satellites.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 55, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 70.

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Sunspot update: The Sun continues to boom!

12:02 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, taking NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere and adding my own analysis as well as some additional details to provide the larger context.

During August the Sun continued to confound the experts, with the number of sunspots not only greater than July’s high count. the August count exceeded the numbers from December 2001 (215.5 vs 213.4), the last time the Sun was this active.

None of the predictions by anyone in the solar science community had predicted this level of activity.
» Read more

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Due to thruster problem, the Mercury orbiter BepiColombo will arrive at Mercury almost one year late

9:05 am

The joint ESA and JAXA Mercury mission BepiColombo will now reach its destination eleven months late because its ion electric thrusters are producing less thrust than expected.

The spacecraft is actually made up of two orbiters, one built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the second built by Japan’s space agency JAXA. During launch and the journey to Mercury each is attached to a third spacecraft called the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which has the large electric ion thrusters used for making the mid-course corrections prior to and after each fly-by of the Earth (once), Venus (twice), and Mercury (six) before finally entering orbit around Mercury. It has already completed the Earth, Venus and three Mercury fly-bys.

In April 2024 engineers discovered that during a mid-course correction on April 26st the MTM’s thrusters failed to produce the desired thrust.

Engineers identified unexpected electric currents between MTM’s solar array and the unit responsible for extracting power and distributing it to the rest of the spacecraft. Onboard data imply that this is resulting in less power available for electric propulsion. ESA’s BepiColombo Mission Manager, Santa Martinez explains: “Following months of investigations, we have concluded that MTM’s electric thrusters will remain operating below the minimum thrust required for an insertion into orbit around Mercury in December 2025.”

In order not to lose the mission entirely, the science team has come up with a new trajectory that will have it fly past Mercury on its fourth fly-by on September 4, 2024 only 103 miles above the surface, 22 miles closer than originally planned. This will give it a larger slingshot speed boost to help make up for the under-powered thrusters. It will then make its planned fifth and sixth Mercury fly-bys in December ’24 and January ’25, the adjusted route having it arrive in Mercury orbit eleven months later than planned, in November 2026.

This new plan however means that the pictures taken this week during the Mercury fly-by will provide some nice high resolution details, far better than those produced by the earlier fly-bys.

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Rocket startup ABL lays off a significant number of staff

9:52 am

As a result of a launchpad fire that destroyed its rocket — just before it was going to make the second attempt to achieve orbit — rocket startup ABL has now laid off a significant but unstated number of staff in order to save money.

In a post on LinkedIn Aug. 30, Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said the company was laying off an unspecified number of people. He included the email he sent to company staff after an all-hands meeting to discuss the layoffs.

In 2021 the company had raised almost $400 million in private investment capital, but it is possible that the loss of its first two rockets, one mere seconds after launch and the second before the launch could even occur, has possibly caused some investors to pull their money from the company. It is also possible those investors also recognized that the increased red tape imposed on all rocket companies since the FAA instituted its new “streamlined” Part 450 regulatory rules in 2021 was likely going to delay the next ABL launch attempt so much it made investments in the company no longer viable.

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SpaceX resumes launches with a bang!

9:29 am

Within hours of the FAA clearing SpaceX to resume launches, the company did so most emphatically, launching twice in little more than an hour apart from opposite coasts.

First the company placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Then, one hour and five minutes later, the company launched 21 Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. That first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

This fast return to flight underlines the unnecessary delay of at least one day in launches caused by the FAA’s red tape. SpaceX had scheduled at least one of these launches the previous night — and was clearly ready to launch — but had to cancel it because the FAA stood in the way.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 69.

2024 is now the second year in a row the U.S. rocket industry has completed more than 100 launches, something it could not do for the first three-quarters of a century after Sputnik, when our precious government used NASA to run our entire space program. Now that freedom and capitalism has managed to wrest some control away from NASA, Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in, first requiring all space exploration be run under a “space program” controlled by NASA, and then passing the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 which forbid Americans from running private profit-oriented launches without government participation.

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FAA gets out of the way

8:54 pm

My heart be still! The FAA today cleared SpaceX to resume launches, after grounding its fleet for two days because a Falcon 9 first stage, flying on its 23rd launch and having successfully placed 21 satellites into orbit, fell over after landing softly on its drone ship in the Atlantic.

The FAA statement was short but to my mind illustrates again the growing effort of the administrative state to require Americans to obtain its permission to do anything at all.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle may return to flight operations while the overall investigation of the anomaly during (Wednesday’s) mission remains open, provided all other license requirements are met. SpaceX made the return to flight request on Aug. 29 and the FAA gave approval on Aug. 30.

That the FAA even grounded SpaceX for one second, and then required SpaceX to ask permission to fly again, is all unacceptable and a great abuse of power. There was no reason for this grounding at all. Even as the FAA announced it two days ago the agency admitted the failed landing posed no threat to the public. It should have immediately said the company had every right to continue flying.

Even though there are people at the FAA with good intentions, the overall trend there and everywhere within that Washington bureaucracy is to expand its power, to make demands of Americans in every way, and to insist it must be the gatekeeper for any action by any American. Only today for example the FDA declared unilaterally that all retailers now have to obtain photo ID from anyone under thirty who wishes to buy tobacco. It claims it has the right to mandate this based on a legislation passed in 2019, but without question this is a very liberal interpretation of that law, which merely raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21. I am sure it did not give the FDA the outright ability to declare such mandates without any review by anyone.

Power grabs like this are only going to get worse, unless Americans vote in new legislators and support them when they act to neuter these agencies. It remains however strongly doubtful whether most Americans are willing to do this. It would require a love of freedom and the risks it entails to abandon the regulatory state, and right now I don’t think most people have that kind of courage. They have grown used to having a big daddy acting to protect them, and appear willing to accept that gentle tyranny more and more.

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Rowan Atkinson on free speech

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A different way to enter the weekend. This speech by this comedian was given about a decade ago as part of a campaign to change British law to get the word ‘insulting’ removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act, as part of the Crime and Courts Bill. The campaign succeeded, but it appears the modern police and governments (from both sides of the political spectrum) in Great Britain have recently decided to ignore it. If you are conservative and criticize illegal immigration or Islam, those governments have decided that this speech is now illegal. I like this quote most of all:

“For me, the best way to increase society’s resistance to insulting or offensive speech is to allow a lot more of it. As with childhood diseases you can better resist those germs to which you have been exposed.”

Too bad we appear to have decided to abandon this wise philosophy, not only in regards to speech, but to infectious diseases as well.

Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.

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The battle between a Brazil judge and Starlink/X escalates

9:55 am

After Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre De Moraes froze Starlink bank accounts in Brazil in order to guarantee payments of fines he imposed on X because it refused to obey his commmand to censor some users, Elon Musk has responded defiantly and with force.

Starlink said Thursday that it will challenge De Moraes’ decision regarding the company’s bank accounts. “The order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink is liable for the fines levied against X. It was issued in secret and without giving Starlink any of the due process guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. We intend to address the matter legally,” the company argued.

De Moraes’ deadline to appoint a new legal representative of X ended at 8.07 pm Thursday and, as expected, it was not complied with. In this scenario, the next step would be to suspend the social network in the country, for which there is still no deadline. X said in a statement that it would not comply with the judge’s “illegal decisions” aimed at “censoring“ De Moraes’ ”political opponents.”

“When we tried to defend ourselves in court, the minister threatened to arrest our legal representative in Brazil. Even after his resignation, he froze all his bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were rejected or ignored. Minister Alexandre De Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unable or unwilling to confront him,” X underlined while announcing it would be disclosing the judge’s confidential decisions against the company. X “does not comply with illegal orders in secret,” the company stressed.

“We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Justice Alexandre De Moraes is demanding that we violate Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that,” the company added.

Musk has also pointed out that Starlink is an entirely different company than X. Musk has said that since its bank accounts are presently frozen, it will provide its users service for free, since “Many remote schools and hospitals depend on SpaceX’s Starlink.” He however soon expects De Moraes to shut down this service soon as well. He has also called De Moraes an “”an outright criminal” whom he expects to end up behind bars someday for his censorious and illegal rulings.

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NASA names revised crew for next manned Dragon mission to ISS

9:34 am

NASA today named the two astronauts who will fly on the next manned Dragon mission to ISS, to be launched on September 24, 2024 for a six month mission, where they will be joined by the two astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner in June but now will return with them when their Freedom capsule returns in February 2025.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission. Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.

With Starliner now scheduled to return on September 6th and Freedom not arriving until around September 24th, there will be an eighteen day period when Wilmore and Williams will have a limited and more risky lifeboat option on ISS. If an incident should occur that requires station evacuation there is room to squeeze them inside SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule presently docked there, but they will return without flight suits. Their Dragon flight suits will not arrive until September 24th, on the next Dragon. The suits they used on Starliner will not work on Dragon.

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Starliner to return unmanned on September 6

8:44 am

NASA today announced that Starliner will undock from ISS on September 6, 2024 at about 6:00 PM (Eastern) and will then land six hours later at White Sands in New Mexico.

The announcement touts Starliner’s ability to fly autonomously, but based on what we know this is really not something to brag about. All Dragons do this routinely whether they are manned or not. Starliner required an upload of software to reconfirgure it for this, since it had originally been configured for a manned return and apparently that original software was not designed for an unmanned return.

In other words, the spacecraft as presently designed doesn’t have the ability to switch from autonomous to manned in a simple manner.

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Pushback: Teacher fired for daring to attend rally on January 6th wins lawsuit

1:52 pm

Jason Moorehead at the Washington Monument rally on January 6, 2021
Jason Moorehead at the Washington
Monument rally on January 6, 2021.
Click for original image.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Jason Moorehead, who was fired for being in Washington on January 6, 2021 to attend a Trump rally at the Washington Monument (never getting within a mile of the Capitol and thus never participating in any way with any violent events there), has now won a wrongful termination suit from the Pennsylvania Allentown School District as well as two school board members.

On Aug. 16, a jury awarded Moorehead $131,500, most of which will come from the district. Two school board members, Lisa Conover and Nancy Wilt, are liable for $6,000 and $500 respectively. Moorehead had not specified a desired dollar amount for “loss of earnings, loss of career, reputational damage, mental and emotional pain and suffering,” and punitive damages.

Moorehead’s lawyer AJ Fleuhr said in statement that he and his client were happy “a federal jury recognized that the Allentown School District violated Jason Moorehead’s First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and political affiliation,” and that the named board members had “maliciously and wantonly attacked him.”

» Read more

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Has the FAA grounded SpaceX?

9:59 am

The FAA statement yesterday seemed quite clear — that the agency was grounding all SpaceX launches until the investigation into the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage was completed. That clarity was further accepted by numerous news organizations today, all of which clearly described in their reporting the FAA’s action as a grounding of further SpaceX launches for an unspecified amount of time, from days to weeks. (See here, here, and here for just a few examples.)

Nonetheless, there are strong indications that the FAA’s grounding will be very short. For example, though no dates are presently firm, SpaceX continues to list at least two Starlink launches as well as the Polaris Dawn private manned mission as targeting launches over the next few days, with one Starlink launch still aiming for a 10:18 pm (Pacific) launch tonight from Vandenberg. That liftoff might be tentative, but that SpaceX is still pushing for that launch date suggests it is trying to pressure the FAA to back off.

And SpaceX has good reason to expect that pressure to work. The FAA has already admitted there were no public safety issues from the first stage failure. In the past it has allowed launches to proceed under that condition, even if the investigation was on-going. SpaceX is almost certainly making this point known to the FAA, if its managers don’t know it already. We will find out I think by the end of today.

Even if the FAA backs down, that it even attempted any grounding in this situation was an egregious abuse of its regulatory power. There was no rational reason for it to even hint at doing so, even based on its own regulations as well as its statutory authority. If the goal was to do its job and not to harass SpaceX and Elon Musk, it would have immediately announced that no grounding was required because no issues of public safety were involved in the failure. Instead, it pushed its power, forcing SpaceX to push back.

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NASA leans toward launching Europa Clipper as scheduled, despite transistor issue

9:26 am

Though the final decision will be made in early September, NASA revealed today in a short post that management is leaning towards launching the multi-billion Europa Clipper mission as scheduled on October 10, 2024, despite a very recently discovered transistor issue where the transistors were not properly hardened in construction for the harsh radiation environment surrounding Jupiter.

The next major milestone for Clipper is Key Decision Point E on Monday, Sept. 9, in which the agency will decide whether the project is ready to proceed to launch and mission operations. NASA will provide more information at a mission overview and media briefing targeted for that same week.

The Europa Clipper mission team recently conducted extensive testing and analysis of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft. Analysis of the results suggests the transistors can support the baseline mission. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence suggests NASA officials have weighed the option between launching on time with a limited ability to do science once at Jupiter versus delaying the launch years to fix the transistors, and are now favoring the former option. The cost of delay would be high and long, and NASA officials might believe the bad press for that option would be much greater than a mission that only achieves its bare minimum results. For example, to admit publicly that NASA installed transistors that were not space-hardened when that necessity has been known about since the 1960s would be as embarrassing to the agency as it was for Boeing when it discovered it had installed flammable tape in its Starliner capsule. NASA management might be leaning to letting a flawed multi-billion dollar project launch, knowing its capabilities are quite limited, in order to avoid that embarrassment.

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Chinese pseudo-company launches six satellites from off-shore barge

9:12 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy today completed a launch of six satellites, its Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from a barge off the coast of northeast China.

China’s state-run press once again illustrated how fake these pseudo companies are, in that it made no mention of the company in its official report, stating simply that the launch was completed by “China.” The companies might raise investment capital funds and sign contracts and make profits, but in the end they only do what they are told to do by the Chinese communists, and at any point those communists can confiscate the company for the government’s own purposes.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 69.

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FAA grounds SpaceX because of first stage landing failure early today

1:36 pm


“Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”

They’re coming for you next: Once again the FAA has expanded its harassment of SpaceX by now grounding the company from any further launches while it “investigates” the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage last night. The FAA statement is as follows:

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 8-6 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 28,” the FAA said Wednesday in a statement. “The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a droneship at sea. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”

The FAA’s actions against SpaceX since Biden became president have consistently been unprecedented and biased against the company. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Woman arrested in Arizona for publicly criticizing a public employee

12:55 pm

They’re coming for you next: While making a public comment criticizing the town’s attorney at the local city council meeting for Surprise in Arizona, Rebekah Massie was ordered to either shut up or be arrested by the town’s mayor, Skip Hall, because the council does not allow citizens to make such criticisms during the public comment period.

When she had the audacity to note quite correctly that she was entirely within her first amendment rights to say whatever she wanted, Hall then had her arrested.

I have embedded the video of this event below. It is egregious beyond words.


» Read more

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Musk: Starlink will be made available to all cell phones in emergencies

9:34 am

Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will make its Starlink internet constellation available to anyone with a cell phone should they need it during an emergency in remote areas.

The SpaceX CEO made the comments in an X post as the company, in partnership with T-Mobile, currently seeks approval from the Federal Communications Commission to operate its direct-to-cellular Starlink technology commercially. SpaceX says the satellite-based service would provide supplemental cell coverage to Americans from space that would close mobile “dead zones.” Cellular service providers AT&T and Verizon have raised concerns about the technology, including that it would disrupt their own mobile networks.

In a letter to the FCC on Friday, SpaceX said the service would connect first responders in a variety of environments and would be able to send wireless emergency alerts to everyone — not just T-Mobile customers — in places where there is no earth-based cellular coverage.

While this offer is morally correct, it is also good politics, as it acts as icing on the cake to encourage the FCC to approve that T-Moble license request. At the moment the technical details for making the proposal happen remain murky, but SpaceX’s willingness to offer this emergency service at no charge, something its competitors have apparently not, cannot hurt it in its negotiations with the FCC.

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Judge: Vanderbilt student protester who violently took over a building can be prosecuted

1:40 pm

Leftist protesters break into Vanderbilt building
Anti-Israel protesters assault a security guard (grey jacket)
at Vanderbuilt. Click for full video.

The lawless left: A judge ruled this week that Vanderbilt student protester Jack Petocz, who was one of three who violently attacked and injured a security guard in the process of taking over a building on March 25, 2024, was not exercising his first amendment rights and can be prosecuted for assault and face an almost yearlong prison sentence.

Judge Lynda Jones ruled during a preliminary hearing on Thursday that there was probable cause, and told Petocz he’s facing a possible jail sentence of up to 11 months and 29 days for the assault charge. Jones said Petocz may face more time if state prosecutors charge him with aggravated criminal trespass, a Class E felony.

It appears that Petocz was arguing that he was merely exercising his first amendment rights in breaking into the building and occupying it.
» Read more

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NASA IG: NASA’s effort to build new SLS mobile launcher is an epic disaster

12:20 pm

SLS's two mobile launchers, costing $1 billion
NASA’s bloated SLS mobile launchers

According to a new report [pdf] from NASA’s inspector general, both NASA and its contractor Bechtel have allowed the cost and schedule for the new larger SLS mobile launcher (ML-2) (on the right in the graphic) to go completely out of control, with the first launch on that platform to be delayed again until 2029.

NASA projects the ML-2 will cost over three times more than planned. In 2019, NASA estimated the entire ML-2 project from design through construction would cost under $500 million with construction completed and the ML-2 delivered to NASA by March 2023. In December 2023, NASA estimated the ML-2 project would cost $1.5 billion, including $1.3 billion for the Bechtel contract and $168 million for other project costs, with delivery of the launcher to NASA in November 2026. In June 2024, NASA established the Agency Baseline Commitment (ABC)—the cost and schedule baseline committed to Congress against which a project is measured—for a ML-2 project cost of $1.8 billion and a delivery date of September 2027. Even with the establishment of the ABC, NASA intends to keep Bechtel accountable to the cost and schedule agreed to in December 2023.

Despite the Agency’s increased cost projections, our analysis indicates costs could be even higher due in part to the significant amount of construction work that remains. Specifically, our projections indicate the total cost could reach $2.7 billion by the time Bechtel delivers the ML-2 to NASA. With the time NASA requires after delivery to prepare the launcher, we project the ML-2 will not be ready to support a launch until spring 2029, surpassing the planned September2028 Artemis IV launch date.

This quote actually makes things sounder better than they are. Bechtel’s original contract was for $383 million, which means the IG’s present final estimate of $2.7 billion is more than seven times higher. The contract was awarded in 2019 and was supposed to be completed by 2023, in four years. Instead, at best it will take Bechtel a decade to complete the job.

The IG notes that this contact was cost-plus, and considers this the main cause of these cost overruns. It also notes that NASA has had the option to convert the contract to fixed-price, but has chosen not to do so.

Possibly the most damning aspect of the IG report is its conclusion, which essentially admits that nothing can be done to fix this problem.
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D-Orbit newest orbital tug deploys four smallsats

10:24 am

The Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit has now successfully deployed four smallsats from its newest tug, having been launched on August 16, 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The tug still has one more satellite to deploy, after which it will remain in orbit as it also carries four additional customer “hosted” payloads that are using the tug itself as their service module.

This is D-Orbit’s second demo mission, the first flying in 2023. It also appears be completely successful, which puts this company in an excellent position to garner future contracts from many small satellite companies. It is also a partner in a $256 million Italian project to test in-orbit robotic satellite repair.

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SpaceX blasts its satellite competitors for lobbying the government to shut down Starlink/T-Mobile partnership

9:45 am

SpaceX on August 22, 2024 responded harshly to the effort by its satellite competitors to get the FCC to shut down the planned partneship of Starlink and T-Mobile, whereby Starlink will fill the gaps in T-Mobile’s coverage.

You can read SpaceX’s letter here. Its language however is quite blunt:

While the petitions from AT&T, Verizon, DISH/EchoStar, and Omnispace lack technical basis or legal merit, their game is clear. AT&T and Verizon seek to hamstring their competitor T-Mobile by talking out of both sides of their mouths, on one hand demanding without technical support that T-Mobile and SpaceX operate at unnecessarily low power levels that will force Americans to sacrifice service, while giving their own partner AST a free pass. AT&T goes so far as to claim to have conducted a secret study it refuses to show the Commission to support suppressing SpaceX’s out-of-band emissions to an interference-protection level ten times below the limit sufficient to protect terrestrial networks, while allowing its partner AST to exceed that limit.

DISH/EchoStar repeats its demand to siphon proprietary information from SpaceX to aid its own flailing ambitions, while stoutly refusing SpaceX’s repeated requests to engage in actual good faith coordination the way a company with actual technical concerns would.

And although it still has no commercial satellite service anywhere in the world, Omnispace continues to make unfounded claims of prospective harmful interference to prop up a decade-old spectrum play that it fears will lose financial value if American consumers can enjoy ubiquitous mobile connectivity using the PCS G Block downlink.

Fortunately, none of these unfounded arguments present any reasonable basis to delay swift grant of SpaceX’s request to bring ubiquitous mobile connectivity to American consumers.

The FCC has not yet responded to any of these demand letters. Nor has it yet issued the waiver SpaceX had requested in June 2024 allowing its Starlink system to operate beyond its licensed radio frequencies in order to facilitate cell surface with T-Mobile.

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NASA reveals technical problem during solar sail deployment of test mission

9:32 am

NASA today revealed that a technical problem occurred during the deployment of a demonstration solar sail mission launched in April on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket.

Upon an initial attempt to unfurl, the solar sail paused when an onboard power monitor detected higher than expected motor currents. Communications, power, and attitude control for the spacecraft all remain normal while mission managers work to understand and resolve the cause of the interruption by analyzing data from the spacecraft.

The goal had been test the boom deployment of a 860 square foot sail from a cubesat only about 4 feet in size.

The concept of the solar sail is simple: Use the pressure produced by sunlight to maneuver and fly controlled throughout the solar system. The idea has been tested successfully several times, with the Japanese IKAROS test solar sail and the Planetary Society’s Lightsail-2 the most successful. Sadly almost all other attempts to test this idea have had technical problems of one kind or another.

Ironically, one test solar sail proved that such a deployment from a cubesat could be done very cheaply, unlike NASA’s effort above. Brown University students in 2023 used cheap off-the-shelf parts to launch a smallsat sail that successfully deployed and was then used to lower the satellite’s orbit in order to de-orbit it more quickly. Total cost, $10,000. And it worked.

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The fall of DEI accelerates

12:50 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! In the past two months it has become very clear that if Americans are willing to stand up to the left and its Marxist bigoted agenda, Americans will win.

Since late June, five different university systems have shut down their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. Each is listed below, in chronological order:

And this list does not include the University of Florida, which in March shut down its own DEI office because the state legislature not only banned such offices, it cut the budgets of them.

Though it is true these states are all solidly conservative with legislatures largely controlled by Republicans, this fact on its face proves that voting can make a difference, with Florida the biggest proof. Unlike the other states, Florida had for decades been a swing state between the Democrats and Republicans. Voters however changed that in the past decade, so that today the state legisilature is solidly Republican. The result has been a definitive policy shift acting to eliminate these racist Marxist programs from state-financed universities.

There is no reason similar changes cannot be forced in other battleground states. Nor should we consider it impossible in the coastal states (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc) where Democrats maintain full control. DEI concepts are inherently racist and divisive, and serve only to encourage anger, resentment, and hate across all ethnic groups. Ordinary voters recognize this routinely, when they make the effort to look.

Nor are things changing solely in the unversities because of the willingness of voters to force change. The boycott of Bud Light because of its endorsement of the queer agenda last year is having profound impact on corporate culture. In just the last few months a number of major companies have announced the elimination of their own DEI departments and programs, also listed below in chronological order:

The first three stories are from NPR and CNN, which explains the effort of the headlines to blame the evil “pouncing” of conservatives for this action (thus also implying that conservatives are bigots) . In truth, what these leftist news outlets refuse to recognize is that DEI programs are bigoted by their very nature, designed to favor some races over others merely because of skin color. These programs thus violate numerous civil rights laws, not to mention basic human morality and fair treatment. In addition, it appears the customers of all these companies, not simply conservatives, made it clear they would stop buying these products if company management did not take action to shut down these DEI policies.

Faced with a public backlash and the real threat of lawsuits and legal action against them, these companies are now recognizing that it makes no sense legally, financially, and morally to promote such things.

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Increasingly, Americans are no longer willing to make believe that DEI and Marxism has a rightful place on the intellectual landscape. These ideas are garbage and downright evil, and it is a great tragedy that American academia allowed them to flourish on campuses for the past half century. The public is now beginning to make it clear that such ideas need to be sent to the ash heap of history, and legislators, academic administrations, and corporate managements are being forced to listen.

The trend is very obvious. If people actually pay attention and make it clear they will no longer tolerate the imposition of these bigoted leftist policies, those policies can be canceled and eliminated. One simply has to have the courage to fight, as Donald Trump said with such defiance immediately after getting shot.

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