Tag: politics

Rocket Lab wins contract to build two Mars smallsat planetary probes

9:13 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has won a contract to build two Mars smallsat planetary probe as part of a NASA project.

The project, led by the University of California, will have two probes dubbed Blue and Gold that will launch in 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The science goal is to place two spacecraft in Mars orbit to provide a more global look at is atmosphere. The financial goal is to show that smallsats built for less can do the same job as larger probes costing millions more.

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Brazil signs Artemis Accords

9:04 am

Brazil on June 15th became the first South American country to sign the Artemis Accords, designed to bypass the limitations placed on property rights created by the Outer Space Treaty.

U.S. policy requires any nation that wishes to participate in its Artemis program to go back to the Moon to agree to the accords. Brazil is now the eleventh country to sign, joining Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, and the United States.

Russia and China oppose the accords, which causes a problem for Russia as it desperately needs to partner with someone because it can’t on its own afford to build much. It is negotiating possible partnerships with China at its new space station as well as building a base on the Moon, but those agreements are not firm. And continues to send out feelers, including statements by Putin, calling for continuing cooperation with the U.S. in space.

Whether the Biden administration will make an exception for Russia in regards to the Artemis Accords remains unclear. That twelve countries have agreed to the accords however gives the U.S. greater leverage with those countries that have not yet signed.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Business that makes American flags blackballed by Paypal, Facebook, and Shopify

11:22 am

Banned by Paypal, Facebook, and Shopify.
The American flag: Banned by Paypal, Facebook, and Shopify.

Persecution is now cool! A Tennessee businessman who specializes in making carved wooden American flags to order, with almost any message requested, has been blacklisted by Paypal, Facebook, and Shopify, preventing him access to more than $35,000 of his own cash and causing a 90% reduction in business.

It began when, the day after the January 6th protests in DC, all three big tech companies took action to destroy Your American Flag Store,, a small business owned personally by carpenter James Staake and his family.

This past January, PayPal decided to demonetize James and his business by freezing revenue due him. In total, PayPal is holding more than $35,000 of James’ money. Now, James finds himself in an impossible situation – unable to fulfill orders because PayPal is freezing, rather than transferring, funds from James’ customers to James.
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Northrop Grumman launches three military satellites using Minotaur rocket

8:56 am

Early this morning Northrop Grumman successfully used a former Minuteman rocket repurposed as a commercial rocket dubbed Minotaur to launch three military reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office.

The rocket’s solid-fueled stages were in themselves amazingly old.

The 69-foot-tall (21-meter) rocket is based on leftover solid-fueled motors from the U.S. Air Force’s Minuteman missile program. Designers added two Orion solid rocket motors on top of the lower two stages of a Minuteman missile to turn the bomb carriers into satellite launchers.

The Minotaur 1 rocket’s M55A1 first stage motor was cast with solid propellant in 1966 by Thiokol, now part of Northrop Grumman. The SR19 second stage motor, produced by Aerojet, was filled with its solid propellant in 1983, according to a Northrop Grumman spokesperson.

The age of the first stage means it is likely the oldest rocket motor ever used on a space launch.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

18 SpaceX
16 China
8 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 26 to 16 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Black Congressman blacklisted by Congressional Black Caucus

11:31 am

Banned for not being black or lefitst enough
Congressman Byron Donalds, banned by the
Democratic Party’s Congressional Black Caucus
for not being the “right kind” of black.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats’ have got ’em! Congressman Byron Donalds (R-Florida) has discovered that simply being black is insufficient to qualify for the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Apparently he must also be a Democrat and flaming leftist who supports Marxist causes and the racist agenda of Critical Race Theory.

From the first link:

“Since starting in Congress, our office and the Congressman have engaged with several CBC members expressing his interest in joining, but all we’ve gotten is the cold shoulder,” Donalds’ Communications Director, Harrison Fields, told the Daily Caller. The CBC is denying Donalds entrance, individuals familiar with the caucus’s plans reportedly told Buzzfeed News.

From the second link, this statement from the CBC gives their vague explanation why Donalds has been blackballed:
» Read more

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Russian astronaut fired for opposing filming of movie on ISS

9:22 am

Krikalev on the shuttle to ISS flight in 1998
Sergei Krikalev on the first ISS assembly flight
by the space shuttle Endeavour in 1998.

According to one new story today, Russian astronaut, Sergei Krikalev, 62, was fired from his position in senior management within Roscosmos for opposing its decision to film for profit the first feature film on ISS.

Krikalev did not say why he was against the film but his stance was backed by former colleagues who said that taking a passenger would delay a flight for a cosmonaut. Roscosmos denied that Krikalev had been fired.

Krikalev is one of Russia’s most celebrated astronauts. He was the first person to fly in space who was born after Sputnik, was the first Russian to fly on the space shuttle, and was the first Russian (along with an American) to enter ISS’s first module soon after launch. Overall he has spent more than 800 days in space.

He also became the last Soviet citizen, stranded on Mir when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. When he launched, he was a citizen of the U.S.S.R. When he finally returned, that country didn’t exist, and he was now a citizen of Russia.

I interviewed him extensively for my book, Leaving Earth, because he was fluent in English due to his flights on the shuttle. What I learned was that Krikalev was then and probably still is an ardent communist. On that Mir flight he refused to be filmed in a commercial for Coca-Cola, arranged by Roscosmos to make some money. There was no way he would allow himself to be recorded in such a crass for-profit manner. Thus, I am not surprised he now opposes using Russian space facilities for a commercial movie, for profit.

I also found him to be a very thoughtful and analytical man, which also probably explains his opposition to this quickly arranged commercial flight. The film company is partly owned by Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, so there probably is some payoffs and corruption involved. It is also probably interfering with the Russian side of operations, as the story says Krikalev claims. These factors would cause Krikalev to speak his mind and argue against the flight, which likely angered Rogozin, who is apparently pocketing some cash from the film.

I suspect Krikalev is not fired, but has merely been sent to the doghouse for a short while. Roscosmos (and Rogozin) can’t afford the bad publicity of letting him go. It also needs his expertise in their operations.

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Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket launches military satellite

9:08 am

Early this morning Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket successfully launched a military satellite under a program aimed at demonstrating a quick launch capability.

This was the first Pegasus launch since 2019, and only the fifth in the past twelve years. According to the article, Northrop Grumman significantly lowered its price for this launch, charging the Space Force $28.1 million, about half of what it charged NASA for that 2019 flight. Whether this is an effort to make the rocket more competitive, or is simply Northrop Grumman selling off its inventory, will remain to be seen.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

18 SpaceX
16 China
8 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA
2 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 25 to 16 in the national rankings.

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China releases more images from Zhurong

12:34 pm

Zhurong looking north past its lander
Click for full image.

The new colonial movement: Three weeks after its Mars rover Zhurong rolled off its lander to begin its 90 day mission, China yesterday finally released the first high resolution images taken by the rover.

The images included a 360 degree panorama, taken while the rover was still sitting on the lander, an image of both the rover and lander taken by a mini-camera that was dropped from the bottom of the rover, a picture of some interesting nearby boulders to the east, and a picture looking past the lander looking north.

This last picture is above, reduced and annotated by me. The small flat but distinct hill to the north I think is the nearest pitted cone that could be either a mud or lava volcano. That cone is about 3.75 miles away, and though a very enticing target is probably too far away for Zhurong to reach, unless it survives for years past its planned three-month mission, as did the American rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

The closer small ridges and hills just to its right could be the east and west rims of the nearest large crater, about 650 feet wide with a distorted shape, that is visible in the high resolution orbital images taken by both Tianwen-1 and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This crater is about 1,600 feet away.

Based on these images it appears that once Zhurong rolled off the lander to the east, it immediately turned to the right to move several feet south, where it turned right again to move several feet to the west until it was just to the west of the lander, where it took the picture above. During that last move it dropped the small camera behind it so that it could take the picture showing both the rover and the lander.

These maneuvers and the rover’s position south of the lander and facing west suggest they are going to head to the west, where there are some nearby smaller craters and other interesting features. Whether they eventually go north, with that pitted cone a long term goal should the rover last longer than its planned mission through the end of August, remains entirely unknown.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist academic suspended by college for expressing her opinions

1:20 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Under modern leftist academic thought, soon everyone
will be witch who must be burnt.

Eating their own: Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) in California has suspended the vice president of its extended learning program, Joyce Coleman, because she made comments about the World War II Japanese internment camps that apparently offended some Asians.

Apparently Coleman, who only started her job at SBCC six months ago, made her comments during a March Equal Opportunity Advisory Committee meeting in connection with the formation of “a new campus affinity group on behalf of Asian-American Pacific Islanders.”

The complaint alleges Coleman, who is Black, reportedly greeted news of the new group’s formation with the words, “About time,” and then described having visited an internment camp for Japanese and Japanese American people during World War II and wondering why the prisoners there “did not just leave,” given how small the fence was. By contrast, Coleman allegedly noted, Black American slaves formed the Underground Railroad and actively resisted.

Some campus faculty and staff took offense to what they described as “victim blaming,” charging that she inflicted “great harm” by her words and actions.

My heart be still. Her words offended someone. What a tragedy! She obviously must be fired immediately and forbidden to work anywhere in America ever again. The suspension is certainly insufficient!

The irony here is that Coleman is herself a proud modern leftist who thinks all whites are bigots and must be punished. For example, during a presentation she gave at a college book club, she had the group watch…
» Read more

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“The Endless SLS Test Firings Act”

9:46 am

The Senate passes a law! In the NASA authorization that was just approved by the Senate and awaits House action was an amendment — inserted by Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) — that will essentially require NASA to build an SLS core stage designed for only one purpose, endless testing at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The Stennis-specific provision says NASA should “initiate development of a main propulsion test article for the integrated core stage propulsion elements of the Space Launch System, consistent with cost and schedule constraints, particularly for long-lead propulsion hardware needed for flight.”

So what exactly is a “main propulsion test article,” and why does NASA need one? According to a Senate staffer, who spoke to Ars on background, this would essentially be an SLS core stage built not to fly but to undergo numerous tests at Stennis.

My headline above is essentially stolen from the Eric Berger article at the link. Because this ground test core is not funded, at best it would likely not be ready for testing prior to ’27 or ’28, at the earliest. By then who knows if SLS will even exist any longer, replaced by low-cost and far more useful commercial rockets. Thus, if this Wicker amendment survives, Stennis might be testing a core stage endlessly for a rocket that no longer exists.

And even if SLS is flying, what point is there to test a core stage that never flies? None, except if you wish to create fake jobs in Mississippi for your constituents, as Wicker obviously is trying to do.

Fortunately the bill is merely an authorization, and has not yet passed the House. Much could change before passage, and even after passage money will need to be appropriated to create this fake testing project.

Unfortunately, we are discussing our modern Congress, which has no brains, can’t count, and thinks money grows on trees. I would not bet against this fake testing program becoming law.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches 4 satellites

9:23 am

Using its Long March 2D rocket China today placed four satellites into orbit, two to observe the Earth, one to study asteroids, and one a technology test satellite.

No word on where the rocket’s first stage booster landed within China.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

18 SpaceX
16 China
8 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA

The US still leads China 24 to 16 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: College endorses segregation against whites, turning former coffee shop into blacks-only haven

11:21 am

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed by Beliot College.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: unilaterally repealed by Beliot College.

The new bigotry on American campuses: Beliot College in Wisconsin has decided to turn a former campus coffee shop into blacks-only haven, thus re-introducing Jim Crow segregation by treating blacks as a privileged race and all other ethnic groups and races as inferior and thus deserving of discrimination and second-class facilities.

In March, the private institution announced the Java Joint would be closed in order to become “a haven for Beloit College’s Black students.”

The gathering space was praised by Jada Daniel, the current Black Student Union president. “We hope to create a safe space for Black and Brown students, where we have a comfortable place to study,” said Daniel on the school’s website. “Daniel said BSU plans to host Soul Food Sundays, poetry readings, and other events during the year, following COVID safety guidelines,” the website says.

Meanwhile, when questions were raised about this clearly discriminatory policy, the school refused to comment, even as its own website said this:
» Read more

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