Tag: politics

Federal court rejects lawsuit by Dish/Viasat against Starlink

9:11 am

A U.S. appeals court has rejected a lawsuit by Starlink competitors Dish and Viasat that had claimed a plan by SpaceX to deploy some satellites in a lower orbit would have “potential environmental harms when satellites are taken out of orbit; light pollution that alters the night sky; orbital debris; collision risks that may affect Viasat; and because ‘Viasat will suffer unwarranted competitive injury.'”

This decision was the second time the courts have rejected this lawsuit, which by Viasat’s own words above is expressly designed mostly to block a competitor, not protect the environment or reduce space junk.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Blacklisting is not enough, leftists now aim to get conservatives killed by police

11:48 am

The coming genocide
The left proves it really does want to round up its enemies and kill them

They’re coming for you next: Twice in the past two days Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has been swatted, with the police coming to her house armed and ready to fire because they had received a false report saying that a shooting had occurred there and that the situation was dangerous.

Two police officers rushed to Greene’s home in Rome, Ga., in response to a call they received at 2:53 a.m. The call, according to the Rome Police Department, was about “a male possibly shooting his family members and then himself.”

MSN reported that “the suspect, who called through an internet chat that appeared to be a suicide crisis line, falsely told police responders that a man ‘came out as trans-gender and claimed they shot the family’ at Greene’s address, the report said.” The caller gave his name as Wayne Greene and told police on the call: “If anyone tried to stop me from shooting myself, I will shoot them.” He also warned cops that “they would be waiting for us.”

At the house, there was, of course, no Wayne Greene. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene once again met the police officers at the front door, as she did in the early hours of Wednesday morning. They told her about the call and, according to the Rome Police Department, “confirmed this was a second false report.” The report added that the call can’t be traced, “due to the person(s) using a VPN.”

Called swatting, such false reports are expressly designed to harass the victim, and even get them killed should the police over-react and fire at the house out of fear of the non-existent gunman.

That this happened twice in two nights strongly suggests the caller truly wants this murder to happen. The caller even admitted to as much in a later recorded call to the police, in which the caller also admitted the motive was for political reasons. Greene’s political positions were unacceptable, and thus she must be removed:
» Read more

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FCC commissioner questions legality of FCC cancellation of SpaceX’s $900 million subsidy

9:15 am

On August 24th one of the four FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr, questioned the legality of FCC’s decision on August 10th to cancel the $900 million subsidy it had awarded SpaceX for providing internet capability to rural communities using Starlink.

The Federal Communications Commission denied Starlink nearly $900 million in rural broadband subsidies “without legal justification,” one of the regulator’s four commissioners said Aug. 24.

While the FCC was obligated to review subsidies provisionally awarded for SpaceX’s broadband service in December 2020, Commissioner Brendan Carr said the agency exceeded “the scope of that authority” when it rejected them nearly two years later.

…Carr said he was surprised to learn about the decision from a press release while he was on a work trip to Alaska, adding that it was made without a vote or authorization from the FCC’s Commissioners. [emphasis mine]

Carr also noted that the reasoning used by the FCC in its cancellation notice made no sense. For example, the FCC had referenced the cost SpaceX charges customers for buying the Starlink terminal, $599, in justifying the cancellation. Carr noted that “the FCC is not authorized to deny winning RDOF bids based on the price of equipment, ‘let alone based on an arbitrary one selectively applied to one winner.'”

When the cancellation was announced, I wrote that my first instinct was that it was solely political in nature, and that it stemmed from the growing animus in the federal bureaucracy and in the Biden administration to Elon Musk, combined with a lobbying effort by SpaceX’s competitors against Starlink. I think Carr’s statements this week confirm my instincts entirely. The cancellation was purely political.

Nonetheless, I think it a good thing the FCC cancelled this subsidy, which is really nothing more than welfare for big corporations. SpaceX doesn’t need it. The federal government doesn’t have the money. And the program itself is now clearly corrupt. The taxpayer would be better off if the entire subsidy program was shut down.

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Cost overruns at Lockheed Martin threaten smallsat Lunar Trailblazer orbiter

8:56 am

NASA is now doing a review to decide if it will kill a smallsat lunar orbiter project, dubbed Lunar Trailblazer, due to cost overruns at Lockheed Martin.

Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at Caltech, said in a presentation at LEAG Aug. 24 that Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft subcontractor, notified NASA of “recent and projected future overruns” on the project in June. Neither Ehlmann, NASA nor Lockheed Martin quantified those overruns.

“As we brought this mission from paper to life, the engineering and design efforts exceeded our original estimate,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement to SpaceNews Aug. 25. “Our Lockheed Martin team continues to implement cutting edge digital production tools and seek out operational efficiencies to minimize any extra cost incurred over Lunar Trailblazer’s development.”

The wording in this Lockheed Martin statement is meaningless blather, with no specific details. The bottom line however is this: Lunar Trailblazer was meant to demonstrate that it was possible to build a small low-cost science probe, in this case a lunar orbiter, and do it for no more than $55 million. Apparently, Lockheed Martin didn’t take that objective seriously. Instead, it thought it could do what it has done for decades — as have all the old big space contractors — pay no attention to cost, go overbudget, and then have NASA pick up the slack. It appears NASA might not do it this time.

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Pushback? BLM murderer of retired black St. Louis police captain found guilty

12:09 pm

David Dorn: Some justice at last
David Dorn: Some justice at last

Two years after the BLM riots of 2020, the murderer of retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn has been found guilty.

A jury has convicted Stephan Cannon in the death of retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn in June 2020.

Cannon was found guilty Wednesday on charges of first-degree murder, first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, and three counts of armed criminal action. He is scheduled to be sentenced in the case on the morning of September 13.

Dorn had been killed by Cannon because Dorn had responded to a burglary alarm during those BLM riots and was trying to prevent the looting of a friend’s pawn shop. He was the ultimate blacklisted American, murdered because he stood for law, justice, and civilized behavior.

Dorn’s widow, Ann Dorn, also a retired St. Louis police officer, made it very clear in an op-ed shortly thereafter who she really blames for her husband’s death.
» Read more

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How SLS reveals the difference between state-run propaganda and real journalism

10:10 am

The cost of SLS

On August 29, 2022, NASA will attempt the first launch of a government-built, government-owned, and government-designed rocket in more than a decade. The rocket’s development took more than eighteen years, moved in fits and starts due to political interference and mandates, cost more than $50 billion, and has been both behind schedule and overbudget almost from day one. Along the way NASA management screwed up the construction of one multi-million dollar test stand, built another it will never use, mismanaged that test program, dropped a rocket oxygen tank, and found structural cracks in an early Orion capsule.

This dubious achievement, even if the launch and month-plus-long mission of the Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back is a complete success, is hardly something to tout. NASA claims it and this rocket will make it possible for America to explore the solar system, but any honest appraisal of SLS’s cost and cumbersome design immediately reveals that claim to be absurd. SLS can launch at best once per year, and in truth will likely lift off at a much slower rate. It will also eat up resources in the American aerospace industry from technology better designed, more efficient, and more capable of doing the job.

Worse, the generally sloppy management of this program, with numerous major errors in design and construction, raises serious questions about the safety of any future manned flight.

And yet, as this launch day approaches, the American established press is going ga-ga over SLS. Below are just a small sampling:
» Read more

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August 24, 2022 Quick space links

4:15 pm

Links courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

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There are no permanent political victories

12:43 pm

The fight for liberty never ends
The fight for liberty never ends

There has been much celebration in conservative circles today because of the victories in Florida yesterday in almost every school board election, sweeping leftists and Democrats from power.

Many of the winning candidates have been endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC, an organization that has been instrumental in flipping school boards from liberal to conservative across the country.

“We saw massive election victories all throughout the state of Florida tonight,” 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky told Breitbart News Tuesday. “It shows the desire of parents and residents across the country for some normalcy in our education system, and that means pushing against transgender ideology, critical race theory, critical gender ideology, and equity which destroys merit in education.”

“The 1776 Project PAC hopes to take these successes across the country,” he said.

The sense I get, similar to the same sense I got when the Republicans finally regained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 — after decades of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule — is the false belief that yesterday’s victories at these school boards puts an end to bad and oppressive COVID policies and the teaching of the queer agenda and the racist and Marxist program dubbed critical race theory.

And as happened after 1994, the victories yesterday do no such thing. » Read more

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Indian research project for China’s space station threatened by Chinese-India military conflict

11:21 am

A science instrument from India, slated to fly on a Chinese rocket to China’s Tiangong-3 space station, is now threatened by the military tensions between the two nations.

The project, called Spectrographic Investigation of Nebular Gas (SING), also involves collaboration with the [India] Institute of Astronomy [IIA], Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been designed and developed by research students at the IIA. The plan is to have it ready by the year end so that it can be launched in the summer of 2023. Though the plan is on schedule, scientists at the IIA are now consulting with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as well as the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on whether they are in the clear to go ahead with the project.

Chinese and Indian troops have been engaged in a prolonged stand-off in eastern Ladakh. The two sides have so far held 16 rounds of Corps Commander-level talks to resolve the stand-off, which erupted on May 5, 2020, following a violent clash in the Pangong lake area.

It appears the Indian government is having second thoughts about this cooperative project. After decades of naive trust in the communists from both Russia and China, it seems India has finally realized the communists really have little interest in helping India, being more focused on using it for good PR while it steals Indian technology. Moreover, India now realizes that China has become a dangerous neighbor, willing to use its newfound power violently at the border between the two countries.

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Two Chinese pseudo-companies pursuing suborbital tourist market

9:35 am

Link here. One company is apparently copying Blue Origin’s New Shepard, though its capsule’s exterior looks more like a copy of SpaceX Dragon capsule.

The other company however is doing something very unusual for a Chinese space operation. It appears to be designing something original, not a copy of some American achievement.

Space Transportation’s goal is to develop a suborbital spaceplane capable of carrying tourists on suborbital flights. The winged system is very different from Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, which is currently in flight test.

A larger Space Transportation vehicle would be a high-speed transport that would fly between distant locations on Earth in less than two hours.

…The company released very little information about the six launches it conducted this year. It’s not even clear where the flights took place, although Wikipedia indicates they might have been conducted from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

If successful, Space Transportation will have have done something almost unprecedented for China, building something from an entirely original design.

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China launches hi-res Earth observation satellite

9:14 am

China today used its Long March 2D rocket to place a new version of a smallsat Earth observation satellite into orbit. Dubbed the Beijing-3B, it appears to be an upgrade of a design first launched last year.

The launch site was in the interior of China, and for certain dumped its first stage onto that interior.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

37 SpaceX
33 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 33 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 52 to 51.

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Pushing back harder: Blacklisted oral surgeon Skoly amends lawsuit against Rhode Island to note CDC new guidelines

11:47 am

Oral surgeon Stephen Skoly, blackballed by Rhode Island
Oral surgeon Stephen Skoly, blackballed by Rhode Island

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Because officials in the state of Rhode Island continue to blacklist oral surgeon Stephen Skoly because of his refusal to get any COVID shots for health reasons, his lawyers have now filed an amended lawsuit, noting that Rhode Island’s shot mandates are now recognized as “irrational” by the CDC itself and should cease immediately.

This is a follow-up of an earlier blacklist story. In August 2021 Skoly had been forced to shut down his dental practice — serving 800 patients monthly — because the state had imposed a mandate requiring him to get COVID shots, even though he had already gotten COVID and had natural immunity, had serious health issues that made getting the shots unwise, and was willing to protect his patients with a high level face shield.

In February 2022 Skoly sued, and then expanded his suit in May 2022 when the state refused to grant him unemployment insurance for the time period his practice had been shuttered.

Skoly’s lawyers, from the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), have now amended the lawsuit again, noting that the CDC now recognizes that natural immunity gives as good if not better immunity than the COVID shots. And yet, Rhode Island is still demanding healthcare workers get the jab. From amended complaint [pdf]:
» Read more

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