Tag: politics

ISS’s international partners express interest in extending station’s life

9:42 am

While NASA has been considering the end of ISS, this week its international partners all expressed interest this week in extending its life beyond 2024.

During an Oct. 1 press conference at the 69th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here, representatives of three ISS partner agencies said they were open to extending the station’s operations to 2028 or 2030 in order to maximize the investment they’ve made in the facility as a platform for research and preparation for exploration activities beyond Earth orbit.

Jan Woerner, director general of the European Space Agency, said the issue could come up at the next triennial meeting of the ministers of ESA’s member nations, scheduled for late 2019. “At the ministerial meeting next year, the ministerial council, I will propose to go on with ISS as well as the lunar Gateway,” he said. “I believe that we will go on.”

At a separate briefing Oct. 2, Woerner emphasized the use of the station as a research platform and encouraged greater commercial activities there. “I believe we should use the ISS as long as feasible,” he said. “I always thought 2024 was the end, but now I learned it is 2028, and yesterday I learned it’s 2030. So, I will try to convince the ESA member states that ESA should be a partner in the future.” However, he noted that ESA could defer the decision on a post-2024 ISS extension until its following ministerial meeting in 2022.

Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japanese space agency JAXA, also emphasized the importance of making the most of the station. “I’d like to make the most of the present ISS,” he said. “We have to maximize the output of the ISS. Whenever the deadline comes to the ISS, we would like to participate in the ISS and maximize output.” He added, though, that there was not a pressing need for Japan to decide on an ISS extension. “JAXA is requesting budgets annually, so I think in that sense JAXA is quite flexible.”

Dmitry Loskutov, head of international relations at the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, said Russia already expected an extension. “We anticipate the continued functioning until 2028 or 2030,” he said.

While I can see many benefits for extending ISS, leaving it as a wholly government-run operation will reduce its effectiveness while increasing its cost. I also suspect all these agencies are lobbying for funding. If they can get money for both ISS and Gateway, it will increase their footprint in space significantly.

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Roscosmos cuts price for Soyuz rocket launch

9:24 am

Russia has announced it is now charging only $48.5 million for a Soyuz-2/Freget launch, a significant reduction in its previous launch prices.

The basic price to launch Russia’s Soyuz-2.1 carrier rocket with the Fregat booster will stand at about $48.5 million, the Russian launch service provider, Glavkosmos Launch Services, has said. “On the first day of the International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, our team announced the basic price to launch a Soyuz-2.1 carrier rocket with the Fregat booster. It comes to $48.5 million,” the company said in a statement, posted on Facebook.

The launch of the Soyuz-2.1 without the Fregat booster would cost about $35 million. “Therefore, the delivery of 1 kg of cargo by a Soyuz-2 rocket will cost $20,000-30,000… which is below the average market price,” the statement reads.

This makes the rocket competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, though (I think) it cannot place as much payload into orbit. This price drop also proves that SpaceX’s low prices are not merely “dumping,” as claimed by Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin. The Russians have now shown that they can launch at this price, just as SpaceX has. It merely took the competition from SpaceX to force them to cut costs for their customers.

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“Kill Kavanaugh” now tops Twitter feeds

9:21 am

They’re coming for you next: “Kill Kavanaugh” now tops Twitter search feeds, requiring only the typing of a “k” to get it near the top of any search, with “ki” placing at the very top of the search list.

Although many current tweets on the hashtag are critical of both the hashtag and Twitter’s double standards, earlier tweets use the hashtag unironically and uncritically. Several of these tweets have not been removed by Twitter, and the accounts that tweeted them do not appear to have been punished by Twitter in any way, despite the fact that some users say they have reported them.

It can be argued that some — but not all — of these tweets are metaphorical, calling for the nomination to be “killed” rather than the person, in the same way that a piece of legislation might be metaphorically “killed.” But refusing to take action against those tweets would still be an example of Twitter’s double standards: the platform has in the past permanently banned free speech maximalist users when they employed similar metaphors, using the least charitable interpretation of their remarks. This is the website that has silenced James Woods for tweeting a meme about soy boys that Jack Dorsey and his San Francisco menagerie argue could “impact an election.”

Twitter in general is a sewer of vicious hate and childish emotions, but that its management is willing to tolerate this kind of behavior from the left indicates they really support it.

The left, and the Democrats, are out for full and unopposed power, and they are willing to destroy anyone they perceive as getting in their way. Unfortunately, they have quislings like Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) helping them. The man would have built the gas chambers for the NAZIS if they had asked him.

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Three U.S. small space companies establish offices in Luxembourg

7:48 pm

Capitalism in space: Three U.S. small space companies have now established offices in Luxembourg in order to take advantage of the financial backing that nation is willing to afford.

The government of Luxembourg announced Sept. 27 that CubeRover, Hydrosat and Made In Space will all establish facilities in the country, in many cases working with local universities and companies. The work those companies do in Luxembourg will range from development of robotic arms to small planetary rovers.

“The success of our development strategy for the space sector, including the recent launch of the Luxembourg Space Agency, is confirmed once more with the settlement in Luxembourg of three space companies that plan to employ up to 85 people in the Grand-Duchy by 2023,” said Étienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy of the Luxembourg government and the driving force for the country’s recent space initiatives.

The largest agreement, in terms of jobs created, goes to Made In Space. That company, best known for additive manufacturing work on the International Space Station, plans to work on a low-cost modular robotic arm for in-space applications, and will create up to 50 jobs in the country.

They did not mention what the terms are of Luxembourg’s financial support, but I suspect it is most helpful for these companies.

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Musk settles with SEC, pays fine, reduces control at Tesla for 3 years

7:43 pm

Elon Musk and Tesla have negotiated a settlement with the SEC, agreeing to each pay a fine of $20 million while Musk reduces his role with the company for the next three years.

Musk and Palo Alto-based Tesla agreed to pay a total of $40 million to settle the case, and he will give up his chairmanship for at least three years. The electric-car maker also is required to install an independent chairman and two new board members, though Musk will remain on the board, according to terms of the settlement.

Musk and Tesla will each pay $20 million to settle the case; both reached the deal without admitting wrongdoing.

I suspect this will not reduce Musk’s influence on Tesla very much. To me, this whole kerfuffle was the SEC acting like a bunch of mobsters, pulling its weight against someone it apparently doesn’t like. “Nice business you have there, Elon. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”

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UAE astronaut flight to ISS tentatively scheduled for April

7:28 am

Russia has now tentatively scheduled the flight to ISS of the United Arab Emirates first astronaut.

The first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 5, 2019, and will return to Earth on April 16, 2019, the ISS launch schedule, shared with Sputnik, has shown. According to the document, an astronaut will fly to the ISS on board the Russian Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft.

It has not been determined yet if Hazza Mansouri or Sultan Nayadi will take part in the mission. Both astronauts have qualified for it and have begun their training in Russia earlier in September.

Though the goal of this mission by the UAE government is to encourage a private space industry in their country, the mission remains wholly a government creature. What has not been released is how much UAE is paying the Russians for their flight.

Had the launch of the U.S. commercial crew spacecraft not been slowed by NASA and had been operational, either SpaceX or Boeing could have competed for this business. Expect them to do so in the future.

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China launches smallsat

7:10 am

One of China’s claimed-to-be private companies, Expace, today launched a smallsat into orbit using the Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueld rocket. .

Exspace, like OneSpace and Ispace, is considered private by the Chinese. I find it interesting however that all these private companies have remarkably similar names, and all appear to be doing military work. Even if they get private financing from Chinese investors and their management is formed independent of the government, we should not be fooled. These are wholly owned and controlled by the Chinese government. They do nothing without its knowledge and support.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race:

26 China
16 SpaceX
8 Russia
7 ULA
6 Europe (Arianespace)

China has widened its lead over the U.S. in the national rankings, 26 to 24.

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Roscosmos head meets with Chinese

7:25 am

The head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, held meetings this week with China, discussing possible future space cooperation.

Russia can’t really afford to do much right now on its own, but it also wants to negotiate the best deal it can with anyone it works with in space. These discussions are therefore specifically designed to give Rogozin some negotiating leverage when he meets with NASA’s head Jim Bridenstine on October 10.

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Next Long March 5 launch delayed again?

10:18 pm

There are indications in the Chinese press that suggest the next launch of China’s largest rocket, the Long March 5, will be delayed from its present November launch into 2019.

An online report by People’s Liberation Army Daily, a military newspaper, reports Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), as saying at a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday that the Long March 5B will not make its planned test launch in the first half of 2019.

“Due to the failure of the launch of the Long March 5 remote launch vehicle, the first flight of the Long March 5B carrier rocket will be postponed. The specific implementation time needs to be clarified after coordination with relevant departments,” Xiqiang said.

The November launch was to put up a test communications satellite. Should it slip into 2019, this would likely also cause delays in the launch of China’s first lunar sample return mission, Chang’e-5 (originally scheduled for 2017), the launch of China’s first Mars planetary mission in 2020, and finally the launch of the first module of China’s space station, also set for 2020.

All this once again indicates that the problems with Long March 5 were very serious, and might not yet have been addressed, even with a redesign of its engines.

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SEC goes after Musk

8:02 pm

The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed a complaint against Tesla in an effort to force Elon Musk out as head of the company.

The complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission came after a last-minute decision by Mr. Musk and his lawyers to fight the case rather than settle the charges.

The filing by the SEC in federal court in Manhattan threatens to deal a severe blow to the Palo Alto, Calif., electric car maker. Its brand and Mr. Musk are closely intertwined, and analysts have said the company’s roughly $50 billion market value is driven by Wall Street’s appreciation for Mr. Musk’s vision and skill as an innovator.
SEC Sues Elon Musk for Fraud, Seeks Removal From Tesla

Tesla wasn’t named in the suit as a defendant, but the SEC is seeking to bar Mr. Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder and its top executive, from serving as an officer or director of any U.S. public company. Tesla shares, which have been under intense pressure amid questions about the firm’s financial strength and Mr. Musk’s behavior, tumbled 9.9% to $277 in after-hours trading Thursday on Nasdaq.

This is very bad news for Tesla. However, it might be good news for SpaceX, as Musk has admitted to being very overworked. If he is forced from Tesla, he will have an enormous load removed from him.

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ULA picks Blue Origin rocket engine for Vulcan first stage

3:38 pm

Capitalism in space: ULA has chosen Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine to power the first stage of its next generation rocket, which they are now calling Vulcan-Centaur.

Two BE-4 engines will be used to power the Vulcan first stage. The press release does not mention anything about how they plan to recover these first stages. Earlier announcements had said that they would separate from the rocket stage and parachute down to be capture before hitting the ground.

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Local Texas city council votes to keep spaceport

4:03 pm

The Midland, Texas city council today voted to renew its contract with the company managing its spaceport there.

The council voted 6-1 to renew its contract with SilverWing Enterprises, an aerospace consulting company that manages Midland’s spaceport license. The one vote came from Spencer Robnett, who has been public with his belief that the spaceport needs to be shut down.

“Yeah I don’t think it would ever have a chance in Midland,” Robnett said. “I do think the space business and space technology and aerospace sector is evolving. There’s a lot of money being invested in it by billionaires, Bezos, Musk, and Branson. Unfortunately we don’t have a billionaire in Midland chasing aerospace investment. We’ve got a small economic development corporation that takes direction from the city council.”

Robnett might have a point. Midland’s spaceport had been the base of operations for XCOR’s Lynx, and with XCOR bankrupt and gone there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest by anyone else in flying any rockets from there. Part of their problem is their location, which is far from the coast and would likely limit the launch options in order to avoid populated areas.

The question has to be: What does Midland offer to rocket companies that other spaceports don’t? Until they can provide an answer to that question, the money the council is spending on this spaceport is probably going to waste.

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Millennials are staying married; thus divorce rate plummets

9:08 pm

Good news the future’s children! New data shows that millennials are returning to more traditional marriage patterns, staying married longer and thus causing the divorce rate to plummet.

New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.

…the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages. Rather, it’s evidence that marriages today have a greater chance of lasting than marriages did ten years ago. “The change among young people is particularly striking,” Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, said of Cohen’s results. “The characteristics of young married couples today signal a sustained decline [in divorce rates] in the coming years.”

The news is not all good. The drop in the divorce rate is partly there because of the non-stop behavior of baby boomers to get divorced, repeatedly. Their behavior warps the stats, and makes a mediocre marriage stat by Millennials appear better than it is. Nonetheless, the change in behavior between these two generations is a very good sign. And it will be an especially good thing for the innocent children that result from these more stable marriages, which in turn will be better for society as a whole. One of the reasons American culture has become more crude and unstable in the past few decades is strongly linked to the raising of children in broken homes. Give children a stable home and numerous studies have found they will grow up more stable and mature, and thus help make society itself more stable.

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Australian agency pushes Australia to join NASA Gateway project

3:32 pm

The new colonial movement: An Australian government agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), has put forth a space roadmap for that nation that includes a push for them to participate in NASA’s lunar orbiting Gateway project.

“And when you look at a moon base, the support systems of oxygen, water, food – and the general support systems around it – is something that nobody has ever done before,” he said. “When we looked around Australia, these are areas where Australia has as much skill as anyone else. Things like dry farming capabilities, remote mining capability, the fact that CSIRO perfected the titanium dust that you can 3-D print from … there are a whole range of things where we can potentially contribute.” It is an interesting fact that Australia has exceptional expertise in 3D printing titanium. This is even more interesting when you consider that on the moon – according to Dave Williams – there is an oxide that is very similar to titanium that could be reduced to a titanium dust, with oxygen as a by-product.

“Realistically, NASA will lead the whole thing. But they will be looking for partners, and the idea will be to identify which niche areas Australia should try to push its industry into, and try to get support for and to make it work,” he said.

Essentially, they are proposing that Australia get in on the Gateway boondoggle by focusing on and then offering to provide peripheral support services.

Much of this is bureaucratic twaddle, not to be taken too seriously. At the same time, it does outline for Australia areas where there are needs, and where their private space companies could make money.

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Has Aerojet Rocketdyne lost engine race with Blue Origin?

2:59 pm

Aerojet Rocketdyne financial documents suggest that it has given up the bidding competition with Blue Origin to supply a rocket engine for ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

The latest financial release from aerospace manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne reveals that the company spent none of its own money on development of the AR1 rocket engine this spring. Moreover, the quarterly 10-Q filing that covers financial data through June 30, 2018 indicates that Aerojet may permanently stop funding the engine with its own money altogether—a sign the company has no immediate customers.

Although Aerojet will continue to receive some funding from the US military through next year to develop its large, new rocket engine, this money won’t be enough to bring it to completion. Instead of having a flight-ready engine for use by the end of 2019, the filing indicates that Aerojet now intends to have just a single prototype completed within the time frame.

Essentially this means ULA will have no choice but to pick Blue Origin’s engine, unless the Air Force pulls its weight and demands it take Aerojet rocketdyne, even if that means a significant delay before Vulcan can launch.

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Bill increases funding to FAA space office, adds other provisions

7:27 am

A bill about to be approved by Congress increases funding to the FAA Office of Commercial Transportation while also requiring that office to create several new regulatory positions.

The bill authorizes a significant increase in spending for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, from the $22.6 million it received in fiscal year 2018 to a little more than $33 million in 2019, growing to nearly $76 million in 2023. Appropriators, though, have not matched that authorized increase for 2019, with House and Senate versions of spending bills funding the FAA offering just under $25 million for AST.

The reauthorization bill includes several policy provisions associated with commercial spaceflight as well. One would require the FAA to designate an official within its air traffic organization to serve as the single point of contact for working with the head of AST on airspace issues associated with commercial launch activity.

Another provision establishes an “Office of Spaceports” within AST intended to support commercial licensing of launch sites and develop policies to promote infrastructure improvements at such facilities. It also requires AST to develop a report within one year of the bill’s enactment on spaceport policies, including recommendations on government actions to “support, encourage, promote, and facilitate greater investments in infrastructure at spaceports.” It directs the Government Accountability Office to prepare a separate report on ways to provide federal support for spaceports.

The bill creates a category of commercial spaceflight vehicles known as “space support vehicles” that cover parts of launch vehicles systems flying for other purposes, such as training or testing. Such vehicles would include the aircraft used by air-launch systems. The bill allows commercial flights of space support vehicles without the need for a full-fledged airworthiness certificate from the FAA.

It is hard to say if these provisions will help or hurt the growth of commercial space. It does appear that Congress’s goal was to help, but their methods always include more spending and greater bureaucracy.

The article also reviews a number of bills not yet agreed to by Congress that would address the regulation of Earth observation satellites as well as satellite servicing. It quotes a number of industry experts supporting the laws being proposed, but once again, it is unclear if those laws would help or hurt. My previous review of one of these laws presently working its way through the House was decidedly mixed. It will clarify and simplify many of the regulatory problems that presently exist, while creating more bureaucracy.

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Democrats have abandoned the presumption of innocence

12:49 pm

Link here. As I’ve said numerous times in the past year, they’re coming for you next. As carefully documented in the article, no longer does the Democratic Party believe that everyone should be innocent until proven guilty. Now their standard is everyone who opposes their agenda is automatically guilty of any crime any Democratic Party supporter lodges against them.

Any accusation must be accepted, no matter how flimsy, unprovable, or blatantly partisan. If a Democrat says you are guilty of any crime, your career must be ruined and you must be hounded from public life.

Meanwhile, if a Democrat such as Keith Ellison in Minnesota, presently running for that state’s attorney general, is creditably accused of abusing his girlfriend, with good documentary evidence to back up the accusation, we must ignore it completely. All Democrats are always innocent, and any attempt to make them accountable for anything they do is unacceptable.

If we the public accept this standard, the American experiment in democracy is dead. The Democrats will have an endless and unchallengeable veto on everything.

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Russia considering getting out of Gateway

9:26 am

The new colonial movement: In expressing a desire not to play a secondary role in its next space station, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said today that Russia might pull out of its partnership with NASA in building its Gateway lunar station.

Russia agreed last year to work with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on plans for the moon-orbiting Deep Space Gateway, which will serve as a staging post for future missions.

But the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said Russia might exit the joint program and instead propose its own lunar orbit space station project. “The Russian Federation cannot afford to play the second fiddle role in it,” he was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency, without much further elaboration.

A spokesman for Roscosmos said later that Russia had no immediate plans to leave the project.

Russia’s problem is that they simply don’t have the cash to build their own lunar station. They could build a new station of their own in Earth orbit, and that might be what they end up doing. In fact, based on the knowledge they gained from both Mir and ISS, they might be able to design that station for short interplanetary flights, such as to the Moon and back, once built.

If I was Rogozin, that is exactly what I would do. Get out of NASA’s boondoggle, and build something in Earth orbit that will really demonstrate interplanetary travel.

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