Tag: politics

Russian filmmakers describe their experience of filming a movie in space

9:06 am

Capitalism in space: The Russian actress Yulia Peresild and her director Klim Shipenko — who spent twelve days on ISS filming scenes for a science fiction movie — gave a press conference yesterday, describing their experience and what they accomplished.

They shot more than 30 hours worth of footage which will later be edited down to about 30 minutes. “We’ve shot everything we planned,” Shipenko said from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow.

The 38-year-old US-educated film director said cinema was ready to conquer space. “Cinema is looking for new forms. The cosmos is also ready to welcome various experimentalists,” said Shipenko.

He said his stint on the ISS was full of professional discoveries and added that he would never have been able to shoot on Earth what he had shot in space.

Both regretted that their work scheduled on ISS was so busy that they did not have enough time to look at the views out the station’s windows.

When this movie is finished I wonder if it will get a distribution deal in the west. I certainly would like to see it, and I am certain many other Americans will feel the same.

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Israel & UAE sign deal to work together on space projects

8:45 am

The new colonial movement: This week Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed an agreement calling for them to work together on a variety of space projects.

Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed a historic deal regarding space missions, Ynet reported on Tuesday, which will include collaborating on the Israeli rocket ship “Beresheet 2” space project bound for the Moon.

As part of the agreement, the two nations will work together on data-based development and research from the Israeli-French satellite Venus, while students from the UAE will work with Israeli students on a new satellite tracking the Moon.

The lack of general excitement over this agreement is truly astonishing. Remember, just a few years ago no Arab nation could dare reveal any partnership or even direct communication with Israel, out of fear of the violent reaction throughout the Islamic world. Now, the UAE can sign a deal where its citizens will work side-by-side with Israelis on several different projects, and the world barely notices.

More than anything, this disinterest signals the importance of the Abraham Accords engineered by the Trump administration. Those agreements, disavowed by the Biden administration, made this partnership possible.

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Senate committee: NASA must choose two companies to build manned lunar lander

5:09 pm

We’re here to help you! Despite offering NASA only $100 million more for the program, the Senate Appropriations committee has directed the agency to award a second manned lunar lander contract, in addition to the one it gave SpaceX in April.

On Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Senate Appropriations Committee — the largest U.S. Senate committee that oversees all discretionary spending legislation in the Senate — released a draft report of nine appropriations bills for the fiscal year 2022 which included funding for NASA, according to SpaceNews.

The appropriators, in the report, state that NASA’s HLS program is not underfunded, despite the agency’s previous claims to the contrary. As shown in the report, the bill includes $24.83 billion for NASA, which is just slightly more than the $24.8 billion that NASA requested, and a $100 million increase in funding for HLS.

“NASA’s rhetoric of blaming Congress and this Committee for the lack of resources needed to support two HLS teams rings hollow,” the report states. The committee added that “having at least two teams providing services using the Gateway should be the end goal of the current development program,” referencing NASA’s Gateway, a planned lunar space station.

It might be possible for the increase in funding to cover a second contract, if that contract was awarded to Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has made it clear that he would be willing to waive as much as $2 billion of the price for the contract, using his own ample funds to make up the difference. Whether that is enough to build it, with the $100 million the Senate appropriated, is unclear.

This bill of course has to pass the Senate, be approved as written by the House, and then signed by the President. These directives and budget changes thus might not end up in the final appropriations bill.

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Boeing to take Starliner apart, remove two valves

4:57 pm

Boeing has decided to take apart the Starliner capsule intended for its second unmanned demo flight to ISS to do a close inspection of two of the troublesome valves that caused the launch in August to be scrubbed.

The current guess at what caused the valve issue involves moisture that accumulated near some of the valves’ Teflon seal. But without any clear culprit, the company now plans to ship two of the valves to a NASA center in Huntsville, Ala., for a forensic CT scan, using machines similar the ones used on humans to detect diseases.

This action now means that the next launch attempt will likely be delayed until the middle of ’22.

The delay is costing Boeing money, not NASA, as the contract is fixed price and Boeing will not get paid additional money until it meets its next milestone, which is a successful demo flight to ISS.

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Today’s blacklisted American: The massacred Alamo defenders were a myth, because they were white!

12:19 pm

The Alamo, censored

Today’s blacklist story really begins with with 70-year-old Phil Collins from the rock band Genesis. Though born and raised in England, Collins has been for most of his life a passionate aficionado of all things related to the battle of the Alamo in Texas in 1836. That passion caused him to accumulate in his life a gigantic collection of Alamo memorabilia worth 10 million pounds, including the rifle that belonged to Davy Crockett and the sword that belonged to Mexican general Santa Anna.

In 2014 Collins, who is in poor health, donated that entire 430-piece collection to the state of Texas, on the condition the state build a museum at the Alamo to exhibit it. That museum is scheduled to open next summer, and is expected to attract millions to the site.

So, who is being blacklisted? Well, it appears it is the Alamo itself, or at least the true history of that battle, where a Mexican army of 6,000 overwhelmed a small outpost manned by only 200 Texan volunteers. No prisoners were taken, all were killed. That butchery became the rallying cry for Texas independence from Mexico.

It appears that this story must no longer be told, even though true, because it celebrates the unwavering courage of the settlers from the United States who created Texas, while illustrating the cruel dictatorship of Mexico at that time.
» Read more

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Did China test a hypersonic weapon in August?

10:14 am

Long March 2C rocket
China’s Long March 2C rocket

On October 17th The Financial Times published a story claiming, based on anonymous sources, that one of China’s five launches in August tested a hypersonic weapon, which supposedly circled the globe to impact the Earth only 24 miles from its target.

The Financial Times story is behind a paywall, but not surprisingly it was picked up by much of the mainstream press, with the conservative press — as illustrated by this Daily Wire story — accepting the weapon as fact, while the leftist press — as illustrated by this CNN story — giving China the opportunity to deny the claim.

Did it actually happen? I have no idea. I would add however that I would not trust any story dependent wholly on anonymous sources, considering the unreliability of today’s press and the repeated evidence that numerous federal agencies in the military and intelligence communities routinely feed it disinformation for their own political purposes. These agencies, including the Space Force, want to encourage Congress to fund them, and creating a bogey man threat that the press can tout has for decades been the standard way to do it.

To get a better idea whether this hypersonic flight happened, let’s review the actual Chinese launches in August to see if any might be a likely candidate. For a launch to fit the description, there would have to be almost no information about its payload, and that payload would have to have not reached orbit, since the hypersonic test circled the globe once and then impacted the Earth.
» Read more

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First FAA hearing on Starship environmental assessment dominated by supporters

8:48 am

Capitalism in space: The FAA yesterday conducted its first of two virtual public hearings to allow public comment on its proposed environmental assessment that would allow SpaceX to launch orbital Starship missions from Boca Chica, Texas>

According to the story at the link, the comments were dominated by supporters, interspersed with the typical small number of anti-development environmental activists.

Over the course of more than three hours on Monday, members of the public who had registered in advance were given three minutes each to deliver their oral public comments on Starship and the draft. Most were in favor of SpaceX, though many positive comments appeared to originate from outside of Texas. A smaller number of people also voiced concerns about impacts on local ecosystems and species near Boca Chica.

The second hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Doctor banned from seeing patients because he has natural immunity

11:49 am

UC's ban of Kheriaty
The University of California’s action against Kheriaty.
Click for full image.

The modern dark age: The University of California has placed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty on administrative leave, preventing him from seeing any patients, because Kheriaty has sued the college for its vaccine mandate that refuses to recognize the documented stronger and safer effects of natural immunity over the COVID vaccines.

I was being placed on “Investigatory Leave” for my failure to comply with the vaccine mandate. I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear for a month. Rather than waiting for the court to make a ruling on my case, the University has taken action.

…[H]alf of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.

Kheriaty, who has had the Wuhan flu (along with his entire family) and now had natural immunity, opposes mandating a vaccine for such individuals because the costs far outweigh the benefits. As he writes:
» Read more

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Rocket Lab reschedules next launches

9:41 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has now announced that it has delayed its next two launches from mid-October to mid-November.

A two-week window is planned for the first launch — from Nov. 11 to Nov. 24 —when its Electron rocket will deploy two satellites into low-Earth orbit. The company aims to deploy two more satellites in the second launch for the mission after Nov. 27.

Both launches are scheduled to take place at the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula.

The announcement does not provide an explanation for this delay. However, Rocket Lab had originally scheduled these launches for August/September, but lockdown restrictions in New Zealand due to its panic over COVID-19 had forced it to trim its launches there by half for the rest of the year. Rather than do five as planned, the company is only going to do two, and it appears those two are the launches now set for November.

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China gets failed satellite to proper orbit

9:19 am

A Chinese satellite launched in late September that failed to reach its designated orbit after deployment has now reached that correct orbit.

During the launch of the Chinasat 9A mission in June 2017, the Reaction Control System (RCS) of the rocket stopped working during the coast phase, which resulted in a sub-planned payload release. The satellite, however, used its onboard propulsion to reach the desired orbit even with the rocket underperforming.

In September the limited information released by China suggested the launch had been a success but the satellite failed after deployment. Based on this new information, the launch in September only became a success now, as the failure was in the rocket’s upper stage.

China has not revealed the purpose of this satellite, though it is part of a program known to launch satellites for testing cutting edge technology.

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NASA document: Starship orbital flight in March ’22

9:11 am

Starship orbital flight date?
Click for full image.

According to a NASA proposal to observe and measure the temperatures on Starship’s thermal protection during its return to Earth from orbit, that flight is now tentatively scheduled for March ’22.

The graphic to the right highlights the pertinent language in the poster presentation.

It must be noted that the poster might not be telling us when Starship will first launch, but when the designers of the camera system will be ready to film. The two are different. Still, the slowdown in flight testing at Boca Chica by SpaceX since July suggests there may be some truth to this date. That date also seems more reasonable now in connection with the FAA’s regulatory pace, which still needs to provide the final approval of SpaceX’s environmental reassessment of its Boca Chica launch site.

It also seems to me that the March ’22 date would be very convenient for NASA, as it almost certainly guarantees that Starship will reach orbit after SLS, thus avoiding for the agency a very big public relations embarrassment. I would not be surprised at all if the Biden administration and NASA’s top administrators, led by Bill Nelson, are purposely pressuring the FAA to make sure that Starship orbital flight is delayed until after the first SLS test flight, now expected in the January/February time frame.

There is also the possibility that SpaceX’s targeted launch dates were unrealistically optimistic. The company had a lot of work it needed to do prior to launch on its orbital launch facility at Boca Chica, and that work could not go forward while test flights and static fire tests were taking place. Pausing those tests has allowed the launch facility work to move forward aggressively.

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Monaco’s government establishes “Bureau of Space Affairs”

9:27 am

Capitalism in space: Monaco’s government announced this week that it has created a Bureau of Space Affairs, aimed at encouraging commercial space operations within the country.

By setting up a ‘one-stop-shop’ for aerospace-related matters, and reporting to the Digital Platforms and Resources Department (under the authority of the Minister of State), the Principality is taking its first steps towards supporting the growth and development of these companies by streamlining administrative procedures, and will also act as the welcome office for any prospective aerospace-related businesses looking to set up in Monaco.

At the international level, the Office of Space Affairs will represent the Princely Government in the relevant international organizations, in co-operation with the Department of External Relations and Cooperation. The Office of Space Affairs will interact with its counterparts in other countries for knowledge sharing, to foster economic cooperation, and to benefit Monegasque companies in aerospace and related fields.

Such government agencies are popping up in third world countries worldwide, with almost all having goals focused on helping and encouraging the booming private commercial marketplace and attracting it to their countries. This is great news.

That these countries are also competing worldwide for this business is also great news. It will discourage them from trying to take control, as government agencies are wont to do and as NASA did in the U.S. in the 1970s. Instead, the competition will force them all to keep their bureaucracies as streamlined as possible, so as to attract as many businesses as possible.

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