Tag: politics

Bigelow sues NASA for $1 million

9:22 pm

The commercial space station company Bigelow Aerospace has now sued NASA for $1 million, claiming that the agency has refused to pay it for work done.

Bigelow Aerospace said it entered into an agreement with NASA on the B330 project in August 2016 to perform and complete a certain long-term pressure leak test on its prototype. The purpose of the test was to demonstrate that the B330 meets NASA’s standards of construction and reliability.

According to the lawsuit, Bigelow Aerospace was required to perform a leak test on its module and “provide certain periodic test reports” to NASA. The reports were scheduled and were required to summarize the results of the test, specifically whether the B330 had met certain standards set by NASA. “Importantly, the Contract contains no requirement that Bigelow Aerospace had to provide NASA with continuous and/or raw” data, the lawsuit alleges.

Bigelow Aerospace said NASA breached its contract with the agency by refusing to pay the full amount to the company. The company said that its damages are in excess of $1 million because it had to hire attorneys to bring the lawsuit forward.

According to the suit, multiple attempts were made between January and February to demand payment. The lawsuit said that NASA’s attorney requested raw test data from Bigelow’s testing carried out under the contract as a prerequisite of being paid the amount owed. “However, this requirement was not a term of the Contract, and was an attempt by NASA to place additional requirements on Bigelow Aerospace that had not been part of the parties’ agreement,” according to the lawsuit.

Until 2016, when Bigelow’s prototype BEAM module was installed on ISS, this company seemed the world’s unmatched leader in the construction of private commercial space station modules. It had already flown two prototypes successfully, and then built BEAM for NASA in only two years for a mere $17 million.

Since then it seems Bigelow has been stalled by Washington politics and some insider maneuvering at NASA. In January 2020 NASA picked Axiom to build the first commercial operational private modules to be attached to ISS, not Bigelow. I wondered then why Bigelow had been bypassed by a company that had never built anything. Noting how Axiom had numerous NASA insiders in its management, many with links to Boeing, I concluded:
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Democrats go after Parler and its investors

11:33 am

Our modern Congress, as controlled by the Democratic Party
What the modern Congressional show trials will resemble,
as demanded by the Democratic Party

In February Democratic Party congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) and her fellow Democrats demanded the social media platform Parler provide Congress a detailed list of all its investors and creditors, while also demanding the FBI investigate the company.

The Democratic Party demands were based on an outright falsehood, that Parler was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government during the protests at the Capitol on January 6th.

In her letter, the congresswoman goes on to claim that Parler “allowed Russian disinformation to flourish on its platform prior to the November 2020 election, facilitating Russia’s campaign to sow chaos in the American electorate.”

“Individuals with ties to the January 6 assault should not — and must not — be allowed to hide behind the veil of anonymity provided by shell companies,” continued Maloney in her letter.

The problem with this fantasy is that the evidence shows that the public social media planning for the January 6th protest was done on all the platforms, not just Parler, with the bulk taking place on the more established older forums like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

Moreover, Parler this week responded to Maloney by pointing out that it had teamed up with the FBI — prior to January 6th — in order to track any posts that might suggest violence or illegal activity.
» Read more

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Georgia state legislature passes new election laws

9:03 pm

In what might be the first sign that at least one Republican-controlled state legislature has recognized that their state’s voting system is corrupt and prone to tampering, Georgia’s government has passed and signed into law a range of changes designed to make election fraud more difficult.

Most of the changes appear to me to be either minor window-dressing or watered-down reforms that will help but not alleviate the problem. One change however is major, significant, and will likely guarantee that control of the voting system will now be under the supervision of the state’s elected officials, not the appointed bureaucrats in the election board.

The bill removes the secretary of state as the chair of the state election board, making the position instead elected by the state General Assembly. This, effectively, turns the five-person board over to the state legislature, with the chairperson elected by both chambers and one member each appointed by each chamber. The bill also gives the state election board the ability to suspend county election officials, who are replaced by an individual picked by the board.

In other words, come the next election should Georgia’s elected state legislature be unsatisfied by how the election is run — such as when election bureaucrats willy-nilly illegally revised the law at their whim (as happened in many states in 2020) — it will be in a position to stop such shenanigans in their tracks.

More important, this signals a willingness of this state’s elected government to reclaim some of its Constitutional power, something that state governments have been casually giving away for decades in the naive belief that taking them out of the equation would prevent corruption. Hah! NOT.

The best way for a representative democracy to limit corruption is to give as much responsibility as possible to the elected officials. At least if they do wrong the voters can vote them out of power. Appointed bureaucrats are immune from pressure by the electorate, and that is not a healthy situation for a democracy.

Other state governments, in Arizona and Pennsylvania for example, have their own reforms proposed, but Georgia is the only one to so far get the changes put into law. Hopefully many other states will soon follow. Such actions will be the only way to prevent the fraud that strongly points to a theft of the presidential election in 2020.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor suspended by university for having opinions

11:28 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Burn witches: What St. Joseph’s University really wants to do.

They’re coming for you next: St. Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania last month suspended math professor Gregory Manco from teaching for the vile crime of simply expressing opinions opposing the payment of reparations to blacks for something (slavery) that hasn’t existed in the U.S. for more than 150 years.

The university’s only statement upon taking this action:

“We thank our students for bringing to our attention a possible violation of our values. The University launched an investigation into a report of bias. The faculty member will not be in the classroom or in a coaching role while the investigation is conducted,” Director of Public Relations and Media Gail Benner wrote in an email to The College Fix. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the values of this university are that no one can express any opinion its leaders do not like. With such values, this university would feel right at home in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Moreover, the university’s actions are a direct violation of its own policies [pdf], which state:
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Lincoln and Washington, by Chicago’s Democratic mayor

12:41 pm

Lincoln banned as evil by Chicago politicians
Chicago Democrats to ban Lincoln.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em: Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Party mayor of Chicago, has begun the formal process for removing forty historical monuments in Chicago, including statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Her reasons for throwing these fundamental Americans into the scrap heap of history? Well, she created a committee to review 500 monuments in Chicago and ended up deciding that 40 should go. It has said this:

Reasons for making the list include promoting narratives of white supremacy; presenting an inaccurate or demeaning portrayal of Native Americans; celebrating people with connections to slavery, genocide or racist acts; or “presenting selective, over-simplified, one-sided views of history.”

…Besides five statutes of Lincoln, others on the list include the General John Logan Monument in Grant Park; the General Philip Henry Sheridan Monument at Belmont and Lake Shore Drive; a statue of Benjamin Franklin in Lincoln Park; the Haymarket Riot Monument/ Police Memorial at 1300 W. Jackson Blvd; the Italo Balbo Monument in Burnham Park; and the Jean Baptiste Beaubien plaque at the Chicago Cultural Center. [emphasis mine]

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ESA awards UK’s Orbex 7.45 million euros to fund rocket development

10:14 am

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded the new United Kingdom smallsat launch company Orbex 7.45 million euros to help fund the development of its Prime rocket.

This will supplement the 4.7 million euros that Orbex has raised from private capital.

The funds from the award will go towards the completion of spaceflight systems in preparation for the first launches of Orbex’s 19-metre ‘microlauncher’ rocket, Prime. €11.25 million of the total funding will be assigned to work undertaken in the UK, in particular the lightweight avionics designed in-house by Orbex in Forres, and the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software subsystem being designed by Elecnor Deimos, a strategic investor and partner of Orbex. The remaining €900,000 of the total funding package will support the development of the GNC for the orbital phase being developed by Elecnor Deimos for Orbex in Portugal.

If all goes right, Prime will make its first launch from Sutherland, Scotland, in ’22.

The contract award signals the shift at ESA that resembles what happened at NASA in the past decade, moving from designing and building its rockets and spacecraft to buying the product from private companies. While ESA might be providing a large bulk of the capital to develop Prime, it appears ESA is not involving itself heavily in the development itself, leaving that instead to the company.

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India’s SSLV new smallsat rocket fails during static fire test

9:20 am

According to sources inside India’s space agency ISRO, a static fire test of the first stage of its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) rocket was a failure, and that the planned April inaugural launch will likely be delayed.

“Oscillation was noticed after 60 seconds into the test and nozzle was blown out near the bucket flange where it’s attached with the motor at around 95 seconds”, sources in the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency said. It was supposed to be tested for a total duration of about 110 seconds, officials said.

The Indian Space Research Organisation had targeted to launch the first development flight of SSLV (D1) in April and may now in all probability have to revise this schedule.

Fixing the problem and repeating the test will likely delay the first launch by six months at least.

SSLV is being designed by ISRO to compete against companies like Rocket Lab in the emerging smallsat market and is thus much cheaper and faster to assemble and launch.

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A data-based broad look at the entire COVID epidemic, one year later

2:24 pm

The Scream by Edvard Munch
The Scream by Edvard Munch

One year ago I posted an essay entitled COVID-19: the unwarranted panic. At that time we had just begun a “15-day-lockdown” to slow the spread of the virus, a lockdown that has ended up lasting a year with literally no signs of ending, even though vaccines for the coronavirus are now available and are being administrated widely to millions.

In that essay I reviewed four early science studies that provided some solid initial data about the coronavirus, all of which strongly suggested that it was not the plague many government healthy officials at that time were proclaiming it to be. Instead, these studies showed that it was only a threat to the elderly sick, that it was relatively harmless to a young population, and that the death rate was low, likely well below 1% and possibly very comparable to the flu.

These data strongly suggested to me that lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and restrictions on the freedom of the healthy and young were all a bad idea. Better to follow the traditional response to past such epidemics in which you quarantine the sick, protect the vulnerable (the elderly), and allow everyone else to go about their lives as normal.

We did not do this, however. Instead, as a society we chose in the past year to do the exact oppose, imposing strict lockdowns, mandating social distancing and mask use everywhere, while quarantining the healthy. We did this based on the worst scenarios and models put forth by health officials, who firmly believed COVID-19 was far worse than any past epidemic, and required a new, radical, and much harsher response.

I now want to ask, one year later: Whose conclusions about the seriousness of COVID-19 were more accurate? Was it just another type of flu, though maybe somewhat worse, as I posited, or was it the deadly pestilence predicted by the world’s health authorities?
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Anyone who worked for Trump

12:09 pm

The cancelled Bill of Rights
A document no one in Washington believes in.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em: It is now very clear that anyone who worked for President Trump during his term in office is now being blackballed by the political class in DC and in the media.

[R]esumes are gathering dust, book manuscripts are being rejected, and corporations are being threatened with boycotts if they hire members of Trump’s team. “They are being blocked everywhere,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union.

It’s “natural for the party that lost the White House, just as we saw after the Bush and Obama administrations, to spend a few months in the wilderness, so to speak,” added Brian Walsh, a partner at PLUS Communications.

But this time feels different, and many critics have said it is deserved. “They took a wrecking ball to the ‘swamp.’ Why would the ‘swamp’ want them back?” a top K Street lobbyist asked. [emphasis mine]

I find the highlighted quote especially ironic, in that I think Trump’s biggest failure is that he did not take a wrecking ball to the “swamp,” never truly cleaned house, even when it was patently obvious — especially in agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department — that a housecleaning was desperately needed.
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Yutu-2 & Chang’e-4 complete 28th lunar day on Moon

8:42 am

The new colonial movement: China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 and its lander Chang’e-4 have successfully completed their 28th lunar day on the far side of the Moon, and have been placed in hibernation for the long lunar night.

According to this article from China’s state-run press, Yutu-2 has now traveled 683 meters (2,241 feet) since its landing. In the past two lunar days the rover has traveled about 180 feet, continuing its journey to the northwest away from Chang’e-5. Their pace continues to be about 80 to 100 feet per lunar day.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: The oppressed fight back at Boise State

11:47 am

The good black half of this student
A typical slide from a critical race theory class.

They’re coming for you next: Forced to attend a bigoted critical race education class at Boise State University where a white student was apparently treated like scum, it appears other students there taped the session and forwarded it to the Idaho state legislature.

The results were somewhat gratifying.

[A]dministrators have abruptly suspended all of the school’s general education classes called “University Foundations 200: Foundations of Ethics and Diversity.”

“We have been made aware of a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values,” states a March 16 memo from President Marlene Tromp to the campus community. “This is never acceptable; it is not what Boise State stands for; and we will not tolerate this behavior,” Tromp stated. “…Given the weight of cumulative concerns, we have determined that, effective immediately, we must suspend UF 200.” She goes on to note that academic leadership will determine next steps “to ensure that everyone is still able to complete the course.”

Tromp’s decision came around the same time as Idaho lawmakers passed a state education budget that takes away about $409,000 from Boise State University because of its social justice curriculum, Idaho Ed News reports. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words provide us the real reason Boise administrators suspended these race lectures. » Read more

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