India’s ISRO space agency yesterday successfully tested the engines to be used in the manned launch abort system for its manned Gaganyaan mission.
The actual manned mission has been delayed to ’24, at the earliest, as ISRO has decided to fly two unmanned test missions first.
Capitalism in space: The FCC yesterday approved SpaceX’s communications license for one or more Starship orbital launches, with a six month launch window beginning on September 1, 2022.
This FCC approval is not a launch license, which must be given by the FAA. It does tell us that SpaceX will not attempt the first orbital launch of Starship before the end of this month. It also tells us that the company likely plans on an aggressive test program from September ’22 through February ’23, assuming the FAA and the federal bureaucracy finally stops blocking that program.
The FCC today canceled a $900 million subsidy it had awarded to SpaceX in December 2020 as part of a federal program to help establish broadband service in rural communities.
The reasoning for canceling the award given at the link is very unclear. However, since the award a lobbying effort by Starlink’s competitors — teamed up with Democrats in Congress — to cancel the award has been on going. It now seems to have succeeded.
Another clue to explaining this cancellation is timing. The award was announced at the end of the Trump administration, when his appointees controlled the FCC. The cancellation took place during the Biden administration, with the FCC now controlled by Democrats who are increasing revealing themselves to be very hostile to private commercial space in general and Musk and SpaceX in particular.
Nonetheless, it seems absurd to give SpaceX any such subsidy, regardless of the politics. As I said in February 2021:
No one, including SpaceX, should get these funds. SpaceX is proving they aren’t necessary to get the job done (bringing fast internet service to rural communities). Moreover, the federal government really doesn’t have the cash, deep in debt as it is.
Sadly, just because the FCC cancelled its award to SpaceX we should not expect as modern taxpayers that the money won’t be spent. Expect the Biden administration to instead dole it out to its preferred vendors.
The user’s manual for today’s universities
Persecution is now cool! From June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022, students, teachers, and administrators on college campuses nationwide made 186 attempts to blackball or censor either other individuals for having wrong opinions or to cancel history and facts because that history or facts offended them.
These numbers come from a database, available to read here, is that is maintained by the news outlet The College Fix, which focuses on reporting on the corruption, intolerance, and bankruptcy that is now endemic on most American college campuses.
There have been 112 speakers, signs, statues and other targets completely canceled on campus during the last academic year, and another 74 attempted cancelations, according to The College Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database, which tracks such incidents. That amounts to a total of 186 campus cancel culture incidents from June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022. Put another way, there have been almost four campus cancel incidents per week over the past school year.
“For people who claim that cancel culture is a made up right-wing phenomenon, I invite them to scroll through page after page after page of our Campus Cancel Culture Database,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor in chief of The College Fix. “You can’t go a week without something on campus being memory holed, erased, fired, renamed or what have you,” she said.
Nor has there been any slow-down in new incidents. » Read more
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) yesterday opened an investigation into the purchase of InMarsat by Viasat, announced in November ’21, to see it that merger would “result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
This investigation will clearly delay the merger. It also appears somewhat counter-productive, considering that Inmarsat has been having trouble making money in recent years due to the market’s shift from its big geosynchronous satellites to constellations of smallsats in low Earth orbit, such as SpaceX’s Starlink. Viasat meanwhile has been desperately trying to block Starlink because of that very competitive threat.
By merging, these two satellite companies might survive and compete with the new orbital constellations. Otherwise, they might both go out of business, thus reducing competition. It seems the CMA will be shooting itself in the foot if it blocks this merger.
China today used its Long March-6 rocket to place sixteen satellites into orbit, all of which appear to be for military and civilian Earth observations.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
30 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 50 to 30 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 48.
According to an official of a company that helps track space junk, the scattered debris from the satellite destroyed by Russia in an anti-satellite test in 2021 has had numerous near collisions with multiple Starlink satellites.
In the Aug. 6 event, Oltrogge said there were more than 6,000 close approaches, defined as being within 10 kilometers, involving 841 Starlink satellites, about 30% of the constellation. It’s unclear how many, if any, of the satellites had to maneuver to avoid collisions.
This conjunction squall was exacerbated by a new group of Starlink satellites. SpaceX launched the first set of “Group 3” Starlink satellites July 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base into polar orbit, followed by a second set July 22. A third batch of Group 3 satellites is scheduled to launch Aug. 12.
The problem is only going to get worse, as this junk will be in orbit for quite some time.
Will the Trump raid finally wake Americans up?
While the outrage and fury has only begun to rise over the unjustified raid of the home of former President Donald Trump yesterday by the FBI, ordered by Biden Justice Department with a warrant issued by an Obama-supporting judge with ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex operation, nothing about that raid was anything new or startling. For the past seven years, since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Democratic Party and its supporters have increasingly acted like Nazi storm-troopers, willing, able, and eager to crush their opponents at every opportunity, and to do so cruelly and with great viciousness.
I therefore ask, shouldn’t we have exhibited the same amount of rage and fury for the hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Americans these same thugs have harassed and ruined since 2016? Why did it take a raid on Trump to finally bring that rage to the forefront?
Two Americans committed suicide because of Biden administration persecution after they dared protest the questionable election of Joe Biden on January 6th. What about them?
Scores of conservative FBI agents in the past two years have been fired from their jobs, simply because they did not agree politically with the Democrats. What about them?
What about the arrest by the FBI of a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, simply because he had also protested on January 6th the questionable election of thug Joe Biden? Or the threats of violence and murder against Supreme Court justices by leftist Democratic Party allies?
What about the effort by Biden’s labor board to shut down the conservative outlet The Federalist, simply because its founder sent out an anti-union joke?
What about the former Trump lawyer whose career was destroyed, simply because he was a former lawyer of Trump?
These stories are only a small sampling of the political abuses of power exercised by Democrats and the Biden administration time after time against their political opponents in just the last eighteen months. The list is long and painful to read.
» Read more
Both Russia and a pseudo-commercial Chinese company today completed launches.
Russia used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a military reconnaissance satellite for Iran, along with 16 Russian smallsats. The rocket was originally going to launch a South Korean satellite, but that launch was cancelled due to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
In China, the pseudo-company Galactic Energy used its four-stage Ceres-1 rocket to place three Earth observations satellites into orbit. Because three of the rocket’s four stages use solid rocket motors, they were likely reworked from military applications. Thus, Galactic Energy does nothing without the full approval and supervision of the Chinese government. It might have been funded privately, and focused on making profits, but it really owns nothing it builds.
Nonetheless, this was its third successful orbital launch, making it the most successful of these Chinese pseudo-companies. It is also developing a Falcon 9 clone rocket dubbed Pallas-1, which it hopes to launch next year.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
34 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 49 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 49 to 47. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch later today should strengthen this lead again.
The leade
Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Simone Gold, one of the thousands of doctors who strongly objected to the federal government’s COVID policies during the Wuhan panic, has begun a six month jail sentence for “trespassing” during the January 6th 2021 protests at the Capitol.
While US officials tried to smear and marginalize Gold and her group, her actual jail sentence was linked to her participation in the January 6, 2021 Trump rally in the US Capitol. According to Gold, she proceeded to the Capitol building on that date, where police let her into the building with a group that did not use force; and she spoke to the crowd inside about medical freedom.
As a result, she was charged with trespassing, and sentenced to jail time. [emphasis mine]
The new Sri Lankan government, at the request of India, has rescinded the permission granted by the previous government that would have allowed a Chinese satellite tracking ship to dock at one of its ports.
In a written request, the Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry told the Chinese Embassy in Colombo not to go ahead with the visit, said an official involved in the process. “The Ministry wishes to request that the arrival date of the vessel Yuan Wang 5 in Hambantota to be deferred until further consultations are made on this matter,” the request says.
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe assured political leaders on Friday that the visit will not go ahead as planned.
The previous government, recently overthrown by a citizen revolt because of its green policies that produced starvation and bankruptcy throughout the nation, had agreed to the docking, changing years of cooperation with India. Apparently the new government has decided to renew that Indian alliance.
India in turn wishes to limit China’s ability to spy on its own satellites and operations in space.
Delayed years because of India’s panic over the Wuhan flu, the first launch of that country’s new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) failed today when the rocket’s fourth stage apparently did not fire its engines properly.
The problem appeared to be the SSLV’s terminal stage, called the velocity trimming module (VTM). According to the launch profile, the VTM was supposed to have burnt for 20 seconds at 653 seconds after launch. However, it burnt for only 0.1 seconds, denying the rocket of the requisite altitude boost. Two satellites onboard the rocket – the primary EOS-2 Earth-observing satellite and the secondary AzaadiSAT student satellite – separated from the vehicle after the VTM burnt.
As a result, the two satellites were put in an orbit that was too low, which quickly decayed, destroying both.
Since this launch failed, I do not count it in the launch totals for 2022.
Considering that this was SSLV’s first launch, it was in that sense a test, and a failure therefore is not unexpected. India’s real problem is that the launch was delayed so long because of the Wuhan panic, thus allowing other competitors to catch up and pass India. While it is certain ISRO will try again, and eventually succeed, it will not get the market share it would have had, had it launched in 2020 as originally planned.
