Tag: politics

Soyuz capsule returns three astronauts safely, completing Mark Vande Hei’s 355 day mission

8:28 am

A Russian Soyuz capsule successfully returned three astronauts back to Earth today, thus completing Mark Vande Hei’s 355 day mission, the longest so far achieved by an American astronaut.

Vande Hei’s record is the fifth longest overall, behind four other Russians on Mir. Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov were the first to complete a year-long flight in 1987-1988. Sergei Avdeyev’s flight of 381 days on Mir in 1998-1999 is the second longest. Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest flight, 437 days in 1994-1995.

Now that Vande Hei is safely back on Earth, expect Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, to make some announcement in the next day or so further limiting cooperation at ISS. It is my expectation he will end the discussions between Roscosmos and NASA to exchange one-for-one flights on each other’s capsules. While the partnership to maintain and occupy ISS will continue, Rogozin will likely end any cooperation otherwise.

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China’s Long March 11 rocket launches three satellites

8:20 am

China today successfully launched what appear to be three technology test satellites using its Long March 11 rocket.

The three satellites Tianping-2A, Tianping-2B and Tianping-2C will provide services such as atmospheric space environment survey and orbital prediction model correction.

This is all we know about these satellites.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
8 China
4 Russia
2 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 17 to 8 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Vassar’s college newspaper retracts story because it quoted “too many whites”

1:30 pm

Vassar College: now run by clowns

The new dark age of silencing: The Miscellany News, the college newspaper at Vassar College, recently retracted an article not because it contained any errors of fact (which it did not) but because the article had simply interviewed too many white students in its reporting.

The article had been written to describe the controversy surrounding the school’s decision to have Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, speak at the school, and his decision to withdraw because of the uproar from students demanding he be blacklisted. From the newspaper’s retraction announcement:

We would like to use this statement to both emphasize our values of diversity and inclusion, and delve deeply into our editorial process and the resulting article in question, especially since we understand that many people in the Vassar community are unaware of the article’s removal. … In this article, we attempted to include a variety of quotes from students describing why there was protest to the announcement of him as speaker in the first place, and the students’ reaction to his withdrawal.

In prioritizing urgency over thoroughness, we made misguided and insensitive oversights with whom we were representing in the article and failed to provide in-depth reporting of the issue at large. The majority of our quotations came from white students and therefore we reduced the positions of students of color to a singular, tokenized perspective. After this was brought to our attention, the paper decided to remove the article online in an attempt to prevent further harm among the communities we misrepresented. [emphasis mine]

» Read more

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Surprise! NASA’s ’23 budget request asks for more money!

11:13 am

In releasing its budget request this week to Congress for the 2023 fiscal year, NASA did what it routinely does each year, ask for more money, this time asking for an 8% increase from what Congress appropriated last year.

NASA’s FY2023 budget request is $25.974 billion versus the FY2022 appropriation of $24.041 billion. NASA had requested $24.802 billion in large part to pay for the Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but Congress wasn’t willing to allocate that much. While supportive of Artemis and NASA’s many other science, aeronautics and technology programs, there is a limit as to how much Congress is willing to invest.

NASA is requesting not just another boost in FY2023, but in the “out years” thereafter, rising to $28 billion in FY2027, though much of that purchasing power likely will be lost to inflation.

…In essence, the agency wants more money for everything it is doing.

The budget request also asks again for Congress to terminate the SOFIA airborne telescope, which NASA contends is not producing enough science to justify its $80 million annual cost. Congress has repeatedly refused to do so in past years. As should be expected, Congress will likely not cancel SOFIA again, as it likes to spend money we don’t have.

The goal of the increased funding for Artemis is also to continue the SLS program for many years to come. Expect Congress to also fund this in the coming few years, though the long term future of SLS remains in doubt, especially if SpaceX’s Starship begins flying. Artemis won’t be cancelled by our spendthrift Congress, but Congress will likely decide to shift that spending to Starship and other private rockets rather than SLS as those private rockets come on line.

All in all, expect Congress to give NASA more cash, but not as much as the agency requests.

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Japanese satellite startup Synspective raises $100 million

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: The Japanese satellite startup Synspective announced today that it has successfully raised $100 million in private investment capital.

The latest funding was led by Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), Nomura SPARX Investment, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), and Pavilion Capital Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) among others, as well as bank loans, and it is supposed to be ranked within the top ten largest startups in Japan. This puts our total funding value at US $200M (22.8 billion yen) since our founding.

The company plans to launch a constellation of 30 radar satellites by 2026, designed to do Earth resource observations.

Synspective had hoped to launch its first demonstration satellite in ’23 on a Soyuz rocket. That launch is presently threatened by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, though it is not clear if it has been cancelled.

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China successfully launches Long March 6A for the first time

9:55 am

China today successfully completed the first launched of its Long March 6A rocket, upgraded significantly from earlier versions of the Long March 6.

The launch also debuted a new launchpad at China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the country’s interior. The two payloads deployed appear to be technology tests, though China provided little information.

The launch of the Long March 6A also sported four solid rocket strap-on boosters. With these and the core first stage all crashing on land in China, there was no word whether any had any technology for controlling their landings.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
7 China
4 Russia
2 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 17 to 7 in the national rankings.

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Singapore signs Artemis Accords

9:46 am

Singapore announced yesterday that it has become the eighteenth nation to sign the Artemis Accords with the United States.

The full list of signatories: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Though the press announcement claims the accords are “grounded in the Outer Space Treaty,” this is only superficially correct. The real goal of the accords is to build a coalition of governments that wish to overcome the treaty’s restrictions on property rights in space.

Russia and China oppose the accords. Of the other big space-faring nations, France, Germany, and India remain uncommitted one way or the other. The Ukraine War could very well push all three to sign the accords, as their partnerships with Russia have largely vanished, and with them any incentive to stay out. Moreover, the U.S. has made it clear that for a nation to participate in its Artemis program it must sign the accords.

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Today’s blacklisted American: TV reporter fired for covering protest objectively

12:16 pm

Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter
Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter

The new dark age of silencing: A television reporter for the ABC affiliate in Seattle, KOMO, Jonathan Choe, was fired after he had covered, as accurately as possible, a peaceful Proud Boys demonstration in Seattle, including a photo montage of the event.

Choe, a reporter of 20 years, created a photo montage with sound from the march to end his day. In the clips, he included music from the rally that included a song called “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” Although Choe was unfamiliar with the tune, it is allegedly played frequently at Proud Boys rallies and similar gatherings.

“I wanted to simply capture a moment in time, with authentic visuals and sounds. It was clearly misinterpreted by some on-line,” Choe wrote.

Because of the uproar, Choe said his news director told him to take down all his social media related to the Proud Boys rally. He did so, but was fired the following day, he said.

By his own response to his firing Choe reveals that he himself buys into the racist, anti-American propaganda of today’s left, focusing much of his commentary on his race (he is Asian-American) and noting that though he has been a successfully journalist “for more than 20 years,” he has somehow “faced years of discrimination for my race and ethnicity.” The willful blindness of these statements is astonishing. How could Choe get a great job for a major television affiliate reporting the news if he was living in such a terrible bigoted nation (which by the way has recently twice elected a black man as president)?

No matter. He tried to do his job well and fairly, and a Twitter mob immediately descended upon him. His boss then cowered in fear, forcing Choe to first censor his work, and then firing him because the only thing that will satisfy a lynch mob is a lynching.

Of course, the lynching is not enough. » Read more

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The seeds of today’s madness were planted decades ago

9:58 am

Political journalist Doug Ross yesterday re-posted an essay he had written a decade ago, which had successfully predicted the crime wave we are undergoing today.

In it, he outlined how the growth in 2011 in government anti-poverty and welfare programs — which acted to further tear apart families — was going to lead to what he called “a true Obama Crime Wave” sometime in the early 2020s.

  • Fact: There are a record number of Americans dependent upon government anti-poverty programs thanks to the Obama Democrats
  • Fact: Expanded access to welfare and food stamps greatly increases the number of children born to unwed mothers
  • Fact: Single-parent families correlate to higher crime rates
  • Conclusion: with the unprecedented increase in welfare, food stamps and unemployment, we will also see an unparalleled increase in violent crime within the next dozen or so years.

Obama and his Democrat sycophants in Congress will have created hundreds of thousands of single-parent families. These kids, born out-of-wedlock, will find themselves trapped in lives of criminality at far higher rates than kids from two-parent families.

Fast forward a dozen years, give or take a couple, and we will see a true Obama Crime Wave. I predict that we will see an unprecedented increase in crime. In fact, you could call it historic.

And the question is not whether it will happen. The question is just how bad it will be.

Ross’s prediction in 2011 was of course guaranteed to be right, as good social science research since the early and mid-twentieth century had shown that if you raise children in broken homes, chaos ensues when they reach adulthood.

I think however that Ross and most previous researchers have missed half the equation. Broken homes certainly produce adults who don’t know right from wrong, and thus become hardened and violent criminals.
» Read more

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ISRO pinpoints cause of August ’21 failure of India’s GSLV

9:59 am

India’s space agency ISRO has completed its investigation of the failure of the third stage of its GSLV rocket during an August ’21 launch, identifying a leaky valve as the cause.

The leakage in the Vent and Relief Valve is being attributed to the damage in the soft seal that could have occurred during the valve operations or due to contamination and valve mounting stresses induced under cryogenic temperature conditions.

“The committee has submitted comprehensive recommendations to enhance the robustness of the Cryogenic Upper Stage for future GSLV missions, which includes an active LH2 tank pressurization system to be incorporated to ensure sufficient pressure in the LH2 tank at the appropriate time before engine start command, strengthening of Vent & Relief Valve and associated fluid circuits to avoid the possibility of leakage along with the automatic monitoring of additional cryogenic stage parameters for giving lift-off clearance,” Isro said.

India entire space industry almost completely shut down for two years due to its panic over the Wuhan flu. This launch was part of its effort to resume launches, and the failure only added to that shutdown.

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FAA again delays decision on environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility

1:32 pm

Surprise, surprise! According to an FAA email sent out today, the agency has once again, for the fifth time, delayed its decision on the environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica Starship launch site.

From the email:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is updating the release date for the SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) on the Federal Infrastructure Permitting Dashboard (Permitting Dashboard) and project website. The FAA plans to issue the Final PEA on April 29th. The planned April 29, 2022 release date will allow the FAA to review the Final PEA, including responses to comments, and complete consultation and coordination with agencies at the local, State, and Federal level. All consultations must be complete before the FAA can issue the Final PEA.

This date is now listed on the FAA’s SpaceX-Starship webpage. Nor is the decision a surprise. Expect the FAA to continue this charade month-to-month until after the November election, when the Biden administration will then feel free to block SpaceX’s effort in Boca Chica completely.

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Pushback: Lawsuit by teacher fired for his opinions to be heard by VA Supreme Court

11:49 am

Peter Vlaming, fired for his opinions
Peter Vlaming

Peter Vlaming was a successful French teacher in the West Point School District in Virgina in 2018, until he was fired for refusing to use male pronouns demanded by a female student.

In 2018, one of Peter’s female students decided to identify as male.

Peter went out of his way to accommodate this student. He said he would use the student’s preferred male-sounding name and avoid using pronouns.

But Peter simply could not use male pronouns for a female student because it would contradict his core beliefs. This was about more than just pronouns; it was about what pronouns mean. In speech, after all, pronouns identify us as either male or female.

Peter couldn’t in good conscience use male pronouns to identify a female student. At the same time, he made it clear that he wanted to work with the student by avoiding pronouns that may cause offense.

But that wasn’t good enough for the school district. It didn’t care about how Peter treated the student. It was on a crusade for conformity. It wanted to force Peter to speak words he disagreed with by using pronouns for the student—even when that student was not present. [emphasis in original]

» Read more

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