Hamas anti-Semitic bullies shut down physics class because the professor was Israeli

The seal of UNLV. The motto means
The seal of UNLV. The motto means “All
things for god’s country,” a motto UNLV
no longer follows.

Last month a group of Hamas anti-Semitic bullies invaded a classroom at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV) and shut down the lecture about black holes by a physics professor, simply because that professor, Asaf Peer, happened to be Israeli.

Peer, from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, actually invited the activists to remain to learn about black holes and then discuss “unrelated issues” after his lecture. But the demonstrators continued their antics, leading to the UNLV police to be called in.

When the police arrived, they refused to remove or silence the protesters so the lecture could continue. Instead, they decided that the First Amendment gave this mob the right to silence whomever they wanted. The police further decided that for Peer’s “safety,” his lecture must end and they would “escort” him off campus.

This led Professor Asaf Peer … to ask “What about my freedom of speech?”

How naive of Peer. Doesn’t he know that in today’s America, the First Amendment only guarantees the left the right to speak and shout and harass and riot and even kill? It also gives the left, and only the left, the right to silence and blacklist and ban any other speech, and if that doesn’t work it gives the left to right to use force and violence to shut up any dissent.

Or to put it more simply, their violence is speech, your speech is violence.

At the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, it is very clear this is how university officials and the police interpret the Bill of Rights.
» Read more

Another woman sues SpaceX for sexual discrimination and retaliation

On March 5, 2024 Michelle Dopak filed a lawsuit against SpaceX for sexual discrimination and retaliation, claiming the company paid her less than male workers, refused to promote her, and ignored her complaints about sexual abuse by her married manager that eventually led to a pregnancy.

Dopak said in the suit that in 2020, her manager offered her $100,000 to have an abortion, which she declined. She is suing the company for an unspecified amount of damages. Reuters was first to report the existence of the lawsuit. Dopak accused SpaceX of colluding with her former manager by allowing him to transfer $3.7 million in SpaceX stock out of his name to evade child support payments, according to the lawsuit obtained by Business Insider.

This suit is one now of several discrimination suits against the company. Unlike the others, however, if Dopak’s accusations prove true it would be the most damaging of all, since she claims the company itself took action against her to protect this manager. The other suits appear more frivolous on their face, issued by individuals claiming to have been fired by SpaceX for their opinions, when the facts strongly suggest they were more interested in causing trouble at the company then doing their job, and thus deserved to be fired.

UK government to invest £10 million in Saxavord spaceport

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

The government of the United Kingdom announced yesterday that it will directly invest £10 million in the Saxavord spaceport being built on one of the Shetland Islands, as shown on the map to the right.

Coming in addition to around £40 million of private investment, the government funding will allow SaxaVord to accelerate its capital works programme to ensure it is ready to support the first orbital launch.

That capital works program was forced to shut down last year when red tape at the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) delayed the licensing of Saxavord. It could be this grant has been issued partly to repay the losses the spaceport company experienced due to those bureaucratic delays. The timing kind of reinforces this speculation, as only yesterday Saxavord got its spaceport license approved, though other approvals remain pending.

All this news suggests strongly that the first test flight at Saxavord by the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg will occur later this year, as promised.

Meanwhile, the other spaceport in Sutherland must be wondering if it can get similar government aid, or if the government is now playing favorites.

Irish company wants to establish spaceport in Ireland

An Irish company, SUAS Aerospace, has announced a investment capital round to raise €5 million in order to establish a spaceport in Ireland by 2027.

The company has been lobbying for this spaceport since at least May 2023. It is based on the southern coast of Ireland at a facility dubbed the National Space Centre. This would likely be close to where the spaceport would be located, though this is unconfirmed.

SUAS Aerospace was founded in 2019 and is supported by the Enterprise Ireland. With initial investment of €1.1 million to date, SUAS has secured significant partnerships with major European Companies including Skyrora, T Minus Engineering, Pangea Aerospace and is part of a successful consortium awarded a €5m grant from Horizon Europe to develop interoperable (plug and play) rocket engine testing infrastructure for Europe.

I wonder if Ireland’s bureaucracy will be easier to work with than Great Britain’s.

SpaceX: We want to fly next Starship/Superheavy test launch on March 14, 2024

In a tweet yesterday SpaceX announced an update on its Starship webpage, outlining its plans for the third orbital test launch of its heavy-lift Starship/Superheavy rocket, with March 14, 2024 listed as the hoped-for launch date.

The update began with these cautionary words, “pending regulatory approval,” and then went on to describe details of the test flight:

The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.

I suspect the change in the splashdown location, from northeast of the main island of Hawaii, was instigated by the FAA for those “public safety reasons”. From SpaceX’s perspective, this is an easy give, as a slightly shorter flight makes little difference for this test, and it allows the company to test that Raptor engine by firing that de-orbit burn.

Will the flight occur on March 14th? The odds are high, partly because this SpaceX announcement is designed to put pressure on the bureaucrats at the FAA to finish their paperwork already. At the same time, bureaucrats sometimes love to stick it to private citizens, just for fun. We shall see.

If Trump wins in November, expect a real insurrection from Democrats

The Democratic Party: Fostering election tampering everywhere
The Democratic Party

The reaction by Democratic Party politicians and pundits to the Supreme Court ruling on March 4, 2024 — voiding the effort by Colorado to throw Donald Trump off its ballot — reveals some very fundamental realities that must be faced by all Americans. To put it bluntly: These Democrats have no intention of accepting a victory by Donald Trump in the upcoming election, even if he should win by a majority so vast that no amount of election rigging can disguise it.

The first reaction to that decision was a major tell. Jean Griswold is the secretary of state of Colorado who had taken Trump off the ballot, claiming he was an insurrectionist even though that was merely her opinion as Trump has not only never been convicted of that crime, he has not even been charged with it. Immediately after the court rejected her actions unanimously, she tweeted the following:

I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.

Spurred by her blind hatred of Trump, Griswold’s refusal to deal with reality here is disturbing, to say the least. First, the court made it very clear, unanimously, that the states don’t have this authority when it comes to federal elections. That she as a lawyer could not recognize the plain legal arguments here that were agreed to by even the most radical leftists on the court indicates how blind she has become to reasonable disagreement.

Second, Griswold clearly thinks she by herself, based on nothing but her opinion, has the right to determine who is or is not an insurrectionist. In a country where by law and a very long tradition all people are innocent until proven guilty, by what law does she think she has that right?

The bottom line is that Griswold reveals the mindset of the Democrat Party. They are mentally unprepared to accept a Trump election victory, no matter what, and will do anything to block his victory.

This mindset is further revealed by this CNN article published today, attempting to figure out other ways in which the Democrats can block a victory by Trump.
» Read more

Is the Saxavord spaceport in the UK about to finally get approved for launches?

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

According to the head of the Saxavord spaceport in the UK, it is finally poised to get all the necessary approvals from the government of the United Kingdom that will allow the first launches before the end of this year.

Following on from the CAA licence being granted just before Christmas, management at SaxaVord Spaceport is confident it will receive its ‘range licence’ later this month to finally become a “fully-fledged spaceport”. This second licence, also issued by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), allows rockets launched from SaxaVord to use the airspace.

Sounds great, eh? Except that the spaceport is still waiting approval from a local commission of its plan for allowing spectators to watch launches. In addition, no launch license has yet been issued to any rocket company. The German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is planning to take over one specific launchpad at Saxaford where it hopes to do as many as ten launches per year, with the first test launch later this year. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has not yet issued that license.

Another rocket startup, ABL, is also waiting CAA approvals. Its first test launch (which failed in January 2023) was conducted in Alaska, with a second launch planned there in the next month or so. If successful the company hopes to launch regularly from Saxaford, assuming the CAA gives it approval.

Saxaford submitted its license applications to the CAA in November 2022, with the hope launches could begin in 2023. It took the CAA however more than a year to issue the spaceport license, and it still has not issued the range license, nor has it issued RFA any launch licenses yet. For these companies to prosper the government approval process has got to be streamlined.

Amazingly Justice actually charges two leftist activists with felonies for defacing the display case holding the Constitution

Security guards watch as vandals of the Constitution preach their message
Rotunda security guards do nothing so that these
vandals of the Constitution can preach their message.
Click for video.

In a move that is astonishing considering the political favorism of the left by the Biden administration’s Justice Department, that agency has now charged the two leftist activists who defaced the display case holding the Constitution with felonies.

On Friday, the Department of Justice charged Donald Zepeda of Maryland and Jackson Green of Utah with felony destruction of government property, according to Fox News. Zepeda and Green have been accused of dumping red powder on the case that displayed the historic document. The incident occurred on Feb 14 and the DOJ said their stunt caused more than $50,000 worth of damages.

It is not clear what penalities these two thugs face should they be convicted. For all we know, Justice is merely prosecuting them now for effect, and will allow them to skip with light charges when the case comes to court.

Nor should be we surprised if these vandals end up walking free. » Read more

Blue Origin is targeting a first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander in 2025

Blue Origin's Blue Moon manned lunar lander
An early visualization of Blue Moon

According to one Blue Origin official, the company is now targeting its first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander, Blue Moon, for sometime in 2025, far sooner than previously expected.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months, according to the executive in charge of the development program. John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, provided an update on the company’s moon lander program on CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program on Sunday. “We’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” Couluris said. “I understand I’m saying that publicly, but that’s what our team is aiming towards.”

Blue Moon is shown in the graphic to the right. Though being built to provide NASA a second manned lander in addtion to SpaceX’s Starship, this first mission will simply bring cargo to the surface, as a test of the lander itself.

If Blue Origin can keep even somewhat close to this schedule, we will likely have two manned moon landers doing test flights at almost the same time.

A sidebar: Note the lander’s height, as well as the narrow footprint of its landing legs. New graphics of this lander from Blue Origin show the same high center of gravity with an even narrower footprint for the legs. One wonders why. Wouldn’t it make sense to have those legs deploy outward more?

This issue applies also to SpaceX’s Starship, which will also have a high center of gravity. When SpaceX’s rockets land on Earth (both Falcon 9 boosters and Starship), most of their fuel is gone so the bulk of the mass is near the bottom where the engines are, even though the boosters stand very high. On the Moon however these vehicles will be landing heavily loaded, with cargo and fuel. This raises a stability question that was illustrated sadly by the tipping over recently of Intuitive Machines Odysseus lander.

I am not an engineer, so I admit that my off the cuff analysis here is very questionable. Nonetheless, one wonders.

SpaceX almost completes dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy

According to a tweet from SpaceX, the company yesterday conduceted a dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy, ending the rehearsal at T-10 seconds so that no static fire test of Superheavy’s engines occurred.

Starship completed its rehearsal for launch, loading more than 10 million pounds of propellant on Starship and Super Heavy and taking the flight-like countdown to T-10 seconds.

Prior to all its launches SpaceX routinely does this kind of rehearsal, but always ends them at T-0 and a short engine burst. That it did not do so here suggests either some issue prevented it, or the company was doing tests of its propellant loading procedures. Either way, it is likely another dress rehearsal countdown will be required before the actual test flight can occur.

I also suspect the FAA is involved in this in some way, demanding certain actions by SpaceX before the agency issues the launch license. At the moment there is no word when that license will be issued, though Elon Musk keeps saying on X that it is coming “soon.”

Australian rocket startup gets government approval for its spaceport

Proposed Australian commercial spaceports

The Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has now received a spaceport licence from the Australian government, allowing launches to occur from its Bowen spaceport on the northeast coast of Australia, as shown on the map to the right.

The company describes the approval from [Ed Husic Federal Minister for Industry and Science], who is also the minister in charge of the Australian Space Agency, as a vote of confidence in Gilmour’s technical capability, paving the way for the launch of Australia’s first sovereign-made rockets, ‘bridging Country to Sky’. Gilmour Space has also secured approval from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, enabling the operation of the spaceport at Abbot Point.

Not all is unicorns and rainbows however. First, it appears Gilmour began negotiating for this approval two years ago, so the government took a looong time to say yes. The other spaceport on the map has been awaiting for a launch license for about the same length of time, and has still not gotten it.

Gilmour also wants to do its first test launch of its Eris rocket in the next few months, but it is still awaiting its launch license from the Australian Space Agency. We are therefore about to find out whether Australia’s government can issue that permit in the next few months, or will instead emulate Great Britain, and bog things down with endless red tape.

JPL requests proposals from the private sector for Mars exploration

Capitalism in space: JPL, which is the lead agency running NASA’s very troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, has now issued a request for proposals from the private sector for doing a variety of Mars missions.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a request for proposals Jan. 29 for “commercial service studies” for future robotic Mars mission concepts. The studies, with a value of $200,000 or $300,000, would be carried out over 12 weeks. The studies are intended to examine four specific design reference missions to explore commercial opportunities to support Mars exploration: delivery of small payloads of up to 20 kilograms to Mars orbit, delivery of large payloads of up to 1,250 kilograms to Mars orbit, services to provide high-resolution imaging of the Martian surface and communications relay services between Mars and Earth.

Missions to provide imaging or communications from Mars orbit could quite easily be provided by numerous private companies. Delivering payloads to the Martian service is exactly what SpaceX proposes with Starship, and is also what several lunar lander companies have now been doing.

Up until now, JPL has always built everything in-house, or if it didn’t it designed and managed everything very closely. The result with MSR is a project that is now poorly managed, vastly over budget and behind schedule, and very likely to fail. This proposal suggests JPL is now recognizing that private enterprise might be able to do it better, as NASA has now proven with its shift from being the builder to becoming merely a customer.

If so, this proposal might be indicating the first step at JPL and NASA in imposing a major change in MSR itself, coming as it does just days after the release of an inspector general report about that project’s many problems.

Texas approves SpaceX land swap

Despite a concerted effort by a small group of activists to stop it, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission yesterday approved a proposed land swap that would give SpaceX 43 acres of state park land in exchange for receiving 477 acres in a nearby wildlife refuge.

The commission said that the land swap “would create a tenfold return,” allowing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to begin planning for a new state park that would give the public access to fishing, kayaking, hiking and other outdoor activities.

…The 43 acres it would give to SpaceX are “noncontiguous,” with the commission noting that most of the acres “do not connect to each other or to areas offering public access at Boca Chica State Park.”

“These smaller, noncontiguous tracts do not provide beach access and are dotted among private properties or immediately adjacent to SpaceX’s facilities, meaning they aren’t readily available for public use and provide less cohesive wildlife habitat than offered by a connected and consistently managed tract of conservation land,” the announcement reads.

The opposition came from the same activist groups that have been attempting by lawfare in every way to shut SpaceX down. They claim in the article at the link that “SpaceX has a history of being a bad neighbor, wreaking havoc on the communities and habitat nearby,” but there is zero evidence of this. Even Fish & Wildlife was forced in its own environmental report to admit that there was no reason to block Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica. And the general community is enthused about the presence of SpaceX because of the billions of dollars of new investment and tens of thousands of new jobs it has brought to the Brownsville region.

These activist groups are simply another visible expression of the irrational hatred the left now holds for Elon Musk, because he has dared defy the left in a number of ways. Sadly, these groups routinely get strong help from every media source (also part of that left), always getting quoted and always getting treated as if they are a major political force in the region, when only a tiny minority in south Texas is on their side.

Real pushback: Faced with a legal requirement to end its DEI programs, University of Florida shuts them down

Martin Luther King Jr
A real victory for Martin Luther King Jr

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In the past year there have been a variety of bills in state legislatures attempting to rein in or eliminate the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and departments at state universities. Some have been relatively weak feel-good, failure theater efforts, such as those that merely “ban” the teaching of these ideas, something that the leftist academics in charge easily get around by simply renaming the programs.

Other states imposed stronger legislation, threatening to cut the budgets of these colleges if they didn’t eliminate the programs. A few states have actually followed through.

Florida however took the strongest action under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis and its Republican controlled state legislature. It passed legislation that not only banned the teaching of these programs, it cut their budgets as well. No threats of budget cuts, the budgets of DEI programs were cut, right off the bat.

The University of Florida on March 1, 2024 demonstrated the effectiveness of this strong action.
» Read more

In the NASA budget now approved, Congress demonstrates once again its utter bankruptcy

Negotiators for both the House and Senate have now released a federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year that includes NASA’s budget, and in doing so clearly illustrates by that NASA budget how utterly incompetent, irresponsible, and useless this Congress continues to be.

First of all, this budget is for this fiscal year, that actually began six months ago in October 2023. That Congress can’t come up with a budget on time has not only become routine, those budgets continue to arrive later and later, or not at all.

The budget itself was an attempt to fix things, because it actually is a detailed budget made up of six appropriation bills that the House began developing last year, rather than a massive omnibus bill that no one had reviewed or read. The goal with each bill was to reduce actual spending across the board — as much as 28.8% — not simply slow the growth of that spending.

However, that effort this year has been a failure. The use of continuing resolutions to keep the government running at previously high levels for the first six months of this fiscal year has largely defeated that effort. Do not expect the budget to shrink in 2024 in any major manner at all.

The budget for NASA also gives us a good window into Congress’s bankruptcy.
» Read more

Watch video from Varda’s return capsule as its comes back to Earth

I have embedded below video taken from inside the capsule of the commercial startup Varda from its release from the Rocket Lab service module throughout its descent back to Earth.

The capsule had been launched in June 2023, carrying equipment to manufacture HIV drugs in space and then return them to Earth for sale. Even though the company had begun negotiations with the FAA and the Air Force two years prior for landing that capsule in the Air Force’s test range in Utah, those agencies blocked its planned return in the September of 2023, and was only able to do it last month. This mission is demo flight, with three others now scheduled.

For the video, Varda included a window looking up outside the capsule, and a camera to film everything that occurred outside that window during descent, release of parachutes, and impact on the ground. It is quite fascinating, as you can see that the capsule initially tumbles, then as the atmosphere thickens its aerodynamic shape causes it to stablize with its heat shield at its bottom.
» Read more

German rocket startup ships suborbital test rocket to Australia for launch

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse has now packed its SR75 test rocket for shipment to Australia for a suborbital test flight taking off from Koonibba Test Range on that nation’s southern coast.

The launch at Koonibba will also assist HyImpulse as they continue development of their SL1 Orbital Launcher. The SL1 Orbital Launcher will use ten of the SR75 rocket motors to lift payloads of up to 600kg to low earth orbit and could be launched from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex [part of Koonibba] in the future.

The launch campaign is scheduled to begin from mid-April with both companies targeting a launch at the end of April through to early May subject to regulatory approval. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase immediately raises concerns, as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, with laws based on Great Britain’s. In Great Britain the red tape from those laws has acted to stymie all launches, destroying one company (Virgin Orbit) and threatening the viability of two spaceports. In Australia there have been indications that such red tape is doing the same to new spaceports on the northern coast. We shall see if that April launch happens. If it is delayed because of “pending regulatory approvals” it will confirm that the Australian government is as much a problem as Great Britain’s.

Hyimpulse is one of three German rocket startups, with Rocket Factory Augburg and Isar Aerospace the other two. It however has been very quiet in the past few years, with the other two companies garnering the most publicity as they prepare for their own first test launches. This story suggests however it might actually be the first to fly, despite the lack of news reports about it.

SLIM put back to sleep for second lunar night

Engineers at Japan’s space agency JAXA have put their SLIM lunar lander back to sleep on February 29, 2024 with the hope it might survive its second night on Moon.

“Although the probability of failure will increase due to repeated severe temperature cycles, SLIM plans to try operation again the next time the sun shines (in late March),” the update from JAXA read, automatically translated from Japanese to English by Google.

Like Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar lander, SLIM’s overall mission was a success, as it proved it could land automatically within a very small target zone and do so softly enough that it could send back data to Earth. The failures and problems experienced by SLIM, such as having a nozzle fall off causing it land sideways are simply fixes that can be instituted on future missions.

NASA shuts down Goddard $2 billion demo refueling program

After more than a decade of work and more than $1 billion spent, NASA yesterday shut down a Goddard Space Flight Center program, dubbed On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1), that would have attempted to refuel a defunct the Landsat-7 satellite.

This Space News article details the program’s long history:

OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a launch of between March and June 2027.

The program was originally conceived by Frank “Cepi” Cepollina, who had run the program in the 1980s to use the shuttle and standard parts on satellites to successfully repair the Solar Max satellite, and then headed the program at Goddard that ran all the repair missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. It was his correct contention that designing satellites and spacecraft with standard modular parts would not only allow for replacement and repair, it would reduce the cost of getting into space while increasing increasing profit margins.

The problem was that Cepi’s operation was a government program, divorced from cost controls and profit. Unlike the many private orbital tug companies that are now building and flying the same technology, developed quickly and for relatively little, the Goddard program experienced endless delays and cost overruns. In the end, private enterprise has overtaken the government, and made this program superfluous. Kudos to NASA’s management for making the hard decision to shut it down finally.

Local county now in full support of SpaceX land swap

According to a local Cameron county judge, who had previously expressed opposition, county officials including himself are now in full support of the proposed land swap, giving SpaceX 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park land in exchange for 477 acres at a national wildlife area about 10 miles away.

A special meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to vote on this land swap is now scheduled for March 5, 2024 in Austin, and it appears it is ready to approve. That meeting however should be entertaining, because it also appears that the small minority of leftist activists organizations in the area that oppose everything SpaceX is achieving are organizing carpools to attend the meeting. Expect them to perform the typical shennigans of the left, screaming and shouting and attempting to take over the venue to prevent the vote.

What these activists of course refuse to recognize, or simply don’t care, is that the change of opinion by local officials is because the local community and in fact the majority of Texans support what SpaceX is doing. It has revitalized the Brownsville area, bringing billions of new investment capital and tens of thousands of new jobs to the region. It has also demonstrated repeatedly it is being a good steward to the environment at Boca Chica, and will do much as a launch site to help preserve the coastal wildlife there, just as NASA has done at Cape Canaveral for three quarters of a century.

SpaceX and China complete launches

Two successful launches today, first from China and then from SpaceX.

First, China launched what it called a”high-orbit internet services” satellite into orbit, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No word where the rocket’s four strap-on boosters or core stage crashed in China.

Then SpaceX launched another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage successfully completed its 11th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

19 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined 22 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX remains tied 19-19 with the rest of the world, excluding American companies.

Air leak in Russia’s half of ISS continues and has increased slightly

Zvezda module of ISS
The Zvezda module, with aft section indicated
where the cracks have been found.

The leak in the Russia half of ISS continues to bleed air from the space station and has even increased slightly in recent months, though both NASA and Roscosmos say the rate of loss is tiny and poses no danger to the station’s inhabitants.

“There is no threat to the crew or the station itself,” [Roscosmos] said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies. Roscosmos’ statement followed comments by Joel Montalbano, NASA’s station project manager, who noted Wednesday that the leak in the Russian segment has increased but emphasized that it remains small and poses no threat to the crew’s safety or vehicle operations.

As indicated by the graphic to the right, the air loss is suspected to come from stress fractures in the Zvezda module, the station’s second oldest and one in which many dockings have occurred over the past two decades. Russia had suspended dockings in this port shortly after the leaks and cracks were detected, but have apparently resumed those dockings recently. One wonders if this new activity is contributing to the increase in loss of air.

National Science Foundation decides to fund only one giant telescope

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided that its astronomy program does not have sufficient funds for building both the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, and will decide in May which one it will choose.

The GMT and TMT—both backed by consortia of universities, philanthropic foundations, and international partners—set out to build their next generation instruments in the early 2000s. But this privately funded approach, which during the 20th century produced the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in Chile, stumbled when it came to multibillion-dollar projects. Although design work and mirror casting forged ahead, both projects failed to amass enough funding to complete construction. (A dispute with Native Hawaiians over the Hawaii site has also slowed the TMT.)

I predict that this decision puts the final nail in TMT’s coffin. That telescope was on schedule in 2015 — when construction was set to begin — to be already operational now, well ahead of GMT. The opposition in Hawaii by a minority of leftist protestors, who also had the backing of the state government (run entirely by the Democratic Party), blocked that construction even as the building of GMT’s mirrors proceeded.

Almost a decade later, while TMT sits in limbo, unbuilt, GMT is nearing completion, with its last mirror presently being fabricated and construction at its site now more than half done. It is expected to be finished by 2028, and is almost certainly going to get that NSF funding.

As I noted however in July 2023,

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and [GMT] will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

The great tragedy of TMT is that the astronomers themselves at the project were not willing to fight that tiny minority of protesters, whose protests were based on the essentials of critical race theory that makes whites the devils and all other minorities saints. As academics trained in these insane ideas, the astronomy community accepted this bigoted premise, and out of guilt allowed those protesters to rule.

Russia launches weather satellite plus eighteen smallsats

Russia yesterday successfully launched a new weather satellite as well as eighteen smallsats, including one for Iran, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in the far east of Russia.

The rocket’s stages crashed in several designated drop zones within Russia and the Arctic Ocean.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

18 SpaceX
9 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined 21 to 18 in successful launches, while SpaceX by itself is now tied with the the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 18 all.

Inspector General: Mars Sample Return mission in big trouble

The present plan for Mars Sample Return

Though the audit published today [pdf] by NASA’s inspector general of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission partnership tries to couch its language positively, the conclusion one reaches by reading the report is that the project is a mess and will almost certainly not fly when scheduled in 2029, and might even get delayed so much that the Perseverance rover on Mars — an essential component of the mission plan — might no longer be operational at that time.

First the budget wildly out of control.

The trajectory of the MSR Program’s life-cycle cost estimate, which has grown from $2.5 to $3 billion in July 2020, to $6.2 billion at KDP-B in September 2022, to an unofficial estimate of $7.4 billion as of June 2023 raises questions about the affordability of the Program.

In addition, the audit noted that this is not the end, and that based on another independent review the budget could balloon to $8 to $11 billion before all is said and done. (I will predict that as presently designed, that budget will likely reach $15 billion.)
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Today’s blacklisted American: “Progressive” leftists in Seattle can’t even take a joke, blackballing four comedians

Cancelled comedians
Click for original video.

They’re coming for you next: Not surprisingly, a comedy club located in the heart of Seattle, in the very same CHAZ neighborhood (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) that leftist Antifa thugs took over in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, has cancelled the scheduled appearance of four comedians, apparently because all four were considered too moderate and not “progressive” enough for that radical community of close-minded fascists. As rationalized in an email to the comedians, comedy club officials explained:

Capitol Hill is known for its progressive values, and we’ve received significant feedback expressing concerns about the alignment of these upcoming shows with the neighborhood’s ethos. This feedback includes concerns from local advocacy groups that are deeply embedded in our community and work towards upholding its values.

Given the feedback and to avoid any potential negative impact on both our club and the artists involved, as well as to maintain the harmony within our community, we believe the most responsible course of action is to not move forward with the shows for Dave Smith on April 11th, Luis J Gomez for May 31st-June 1st, Jim Florentine for September 20th-21st and sadly Kurt Metzger on October 11th-12th as well.

The email also added most dishonestly, “We truly value the art of comedy and the diverse perspectives it brings to our lives.”

What a crock. » Read more

“Thar’s gold in them there asteroids!”

Actually, the “gold” in the quote refers less to the actual element and more to the potential wealth lurking within the resources available in many asteroids in space. I base this optimistic assessment, which is looking at the very long term and not the near future, based on the following chart, just published in a new white paper report [pdf] dubbed “Asteroid Mining: Key to Large-Scale Space Migration or Rocky Road?” The chart itself comes from this October 2023 research paper.

The estimated resources in the metallic asteroids, compared to Earth

Except for gold, the estimated abundances in metallic asteroids of all these important minerals exceeds the entire reserves contained on Earth, by many times. And even though the asteroid reserves of gold do not exceed that of Earth, that in-space gold is likely far easier to access and mine. As the report notes:
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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations at Boca Chica

Link here. After two separate but aborted dress rehearsal countdowns, the rocket has been destacked with Superheavy rolled back to the assembly building.

After two Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) aborts, SpaceX opted to destack Ship 28 before removing Booster 10 from the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM). The Booster has since rolled back to the Production Site, while Ship 28 conducted standalone testing on Pad B, opening with a Spin Prime test on Monday.

A March launch of Flight 3 for Starship is still possible, pending the completion of full stack testing and approval from the FAA.

While the aborts suggest some technical issues occurred that need addressing, the destacking and additional work could also be for other reasons. The FAA has still not issued a launch license, and is demanding certain actions before doing so. It could be that the company is being forced to make certain upgrades on these prototypes it would have rather left to the next test launch with more advanced prototypes.

Either way, it now appears that a March launch is possibly threatened.

ULA begins stacking Atlas-5 rocket for launching the first manned mission of Starliner

ULA has begun to assemble the Atlas-5 rocket that will hopefully launch Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to ISS, presently targeting a late April lift-off.

The rocket’s main stage was transferred from the nearby Advanced Spaceflight Operations Center to the integration facility Wednesday, Feb. 21, where it will await integration with the rocket’s upper Centaur stage and Starliner. The spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the orbiting laboratory for a short stay of about one to two weeks before returning to a landing site in the southwest United States.

The late April date appears to be a slight delay from previous announcements.

FAA announces it has rubber-stamped SpaceX’s investigation of the November Starship/Superheavy test launch

The FAA yesterday announced that it has completed its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the November Starship/Superheavy test launch and has approved the company’s conclusions.

The Federal Aviation Administration has concluded its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the second Starship launch in November, with the regulator saying Monday that it accepted the “root causes and 17 corrective actions” identified by the company.

While this means the investigation is now closed, SpaceX must implement all the corrective actions and apply for a modified launch license before it can fly Starship again. “The FAA is evaluating SpaceX’s license modification request and expects SpaceX to submit additional required information before a final determination can be made,” the regulator said in a statement Monday.

You can read a SpaceX update of its investigation here. As previously reported, when Starship vented the extra oxygen carried to better simulate a payload it caused “a combustion event” and fires that cut off communications.

This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup. The flight test’s conclusion came when the spacecraft was as at an altitude of ~150 km and a velocity of ~24,000 km/h, becoming the first Starship to reach outer space.

Despite SpaceX’s report, which states the company “has implemented hardware changes” to prevent a reoccurance, the FAA has still not yet issued a launch license. Based on these updates and Elon Musk’s own prediction, it appears a license will be forthcoming in the next two weeks, matching my December prediction of a March launch. Expect SpaceX to quickly launch, as it has “more Starships ready to fly,” and it wants to fly them fast in order to refine the engineering so as to move to operational flights.

It is also possible that the FAA will continue to slow-walk its approvals, and SpaceX might be left hanging for more than two weeks. Had the government not been involved, all signs suggested that SpaceX would have done its third test flight in January, and would have now been gearing up for its fourth flight. That was the kind of pace SpaceX set when it was doing its first Starship test flights during the Trump administration. The government under Joe Biden’s presidency however is not allowing that kind of launch pace.

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