Tag: politics

Pragyan snaps first pictures of Vikram sitting on the Moon

8:28 am

Vikram as seen by Pragyan
Click for original image.

India’s space agency ISRO has released the first two pictures from the Pragyan rover showing the Vikram lander that bought both to the Moon safely.

The picture to the right is the close-up image, which shows two of Vikram’s science instruments. CHASTE is a probe that has been measuring the temperature of the Moon’s regolith at this spot, while ILSA is a seismometer for measuring the seismicity around the landing site.

Both spacecraft have been on the lunar surface now for one week, which means they are both halfway through their nominal two-week mission that lasts until lunar sunset, occurring on September 4th. Neither were designed to survive the 14-day-long lunar night, though engineers will attempt to kept both alive.

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Pushback: Court rules against East Lansing’s attempt to blacklist Christian for following his beliefs

1:38 pm

Country Mills Farms-banned!
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!

They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up on a August 2021 post, and is a victory, of a sort. As I reported then, after farmer Steve Tennes (shown to the right with his family) made the egregious error of stating his strongly held Christian belief that marriage is for a man and a woman only, and he would only rent his farm for such marriages, and not same-sex marriages, the city government of East Lansing decided to specifically write rules that would ban his farm from participating in its local farmer’s market.

The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.

The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.

The city’s new rules quite clearly stated it was illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.” You essentially had to agree to its queer agenda policies in all things, even if you were not in East Lansing or were doing business in a farm many miles away. And you better not express any dissent to those policies either!
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NASA reveals three year delay in its New Frontiers planetary mission program

9:21 am

NASA last week revealed that because of “budget uncertainty” it will not begin accepting project proposals in its New Frontiers planetary mission program this fall as planned, and will in fact not begin accepting new proposals until 2026.

At a NASA SMD town hall meeting July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, warned a potential extended delay in the release of the New Frontiers AO. “If the planetary science funding levels that are anticipated as a result of this tight budget environment are actually realized over the next two or so years,” she said, “it is unlikely we’ll be able to solicit New Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That delay was made official with the release of the community announcement.

The draft AO sought proposals for missions on six topics, as recommended by the planetary science decadal survey in 2011: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere.

The New Frontiers program previously funded the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission to Bennu.

The article at the first link above as well as the NASA officials quoted attempt falsely to blame the budget problems on the Republican House leadership, which insisted that the committee which reviews the NASA budget as well as the budgets of Justice and Commerce cut 28.8% from among those agencies in its 2024 budget review. That committee (as well as the Senate) however was very generous to NASA, essentially giving it the same budget as previously, with only a 1% cut, while slashing budgets for departments in Justice and Commerce to make up the difference.

The real blame for this delay in NASA’s planetary program almost certainly falls on the Mars Sample Return mission, which has seen gigantic budget overruns that are apparently swallowing the entire future planetary program. NASA’s planetary budget can’t pay for any other new planetary missions as long as it must pay for the cost overruns for the sample return mission.

This is no surprise, as we’ve seen this movie before. When Webb’s budget ballooned 20x, from its proposed $500 million to $10 billion, it essentially shut down the rest of NASA’s astrophysics program, delaying or cancelling all other space telescope projects for more than a decade. Now the planetary program is experiencing its own version of this same pain.

The problem is the Mars Sample Return mission itself. Its design has been haphazard and sloppy and constantly changing. It is also reliant on older technology ideas that will soon be made obsolete by Starship/Superheavy. NASA would be wiser to delay that project to await the development of the launch capabilities that will make it cost effective, and let a fleet of other missions happen instead.

I guarantee however that NASA won’t do that, because it will require some boldness. The philosophy in Washington remains the same: Do the same failed thing over and over again in the vain hope it might work next time.

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Bank of America blacklists Christian nonprofit for what appears to be political reasons

12:38 pm

Bank of America-eager to blacklist

They’re coming for you next: Despite operating two different bank accounts without problems since 2015, Bank of America suddenly shut down the bank accounts of the Christian charitable non-profit Indigenous Advanced Ministries in April 2023, with the bank’s letters announcing the shut down [pdf] exceedingly vague but suggesting that politics played a part.

The initial letters gave no specific reason for the closures, only stating that “upon review of your account(s), we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America.” A later letter said, without explanation, that Indigenous Advance “no longer aligns with the bank’s risk tolerance.” The nonprofit does not advocate for any political causes and has maintained the same mission since it first opened its account with Bank of America.

Officials of the non-profit suspect hostility to its mission was the reason for the cancellations, however, and they have filed a consumer complaint [pdf] against Bank of America with Tennessee’s attorney general, demanding an investigation and noting that the sudden nature of the bank’s action caused a great deal of disruption and the non-profit.
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Update on ESA’s much delayed Space Rider X-37B copy

10:34 am

Link here. Space Rider is essentially aiming to be another re-usable mini-shuttle like the X-37B and the unnamed classified version from China. While all three are government-owned and government-run, the X-37B and China’s both were built expressly to do military classified missions. There has been no effort in either case to make them available for commercial flights.

The European Space Agency (ESA) however is developing Space Rider instead for commercial customers. It also appears the government-owned and government-run nature of Space Rider is one of the main reasons it will not fly its maiden mission this year, and won’t fly until late 2025, at the earliest.

“As an outcome of the previous ministerial council of 2019, the Space Rider received quite significant financial support to cope with Phase C and D activities. However, the participating states contributed in a way that was not possible — due to the need to comply with the Geo-return mechanism — to keep the industrial consortium as it was operating up to that moment [end-2019],” Galli said.

ESA’s Geo-return mechanism was established to boost fairness among member states, ensuring that the nations that invest in the agency will generate a “fair return.” In a nutshell, participating states in an optional development program should receive industrial contracts in a proportional way with respect to their contribution to that program to ensure that money invested benefits the countries that actually contributed to that program. That is to say for example, if you put 30% of the funds into the program, you are expected to receive as close as possible to industrial contracts accounting for 30% of the overall program.

As the program must abide by the Geo-return mechanism, Galli explained that the initial consortium involved was required to significantly be rebuilt “in compliance with the available funds and their member state relevant origin. … This caused first a not negligible delay in setting up the new industrial consortium… that was finally concluded only in late 2020 with the signature of the new contract with the prime contractors. And then, a so-called bridging design phase was needed on the subsystems affected by the change of industrial supplier, resulting in a longer-than-expected completion of the design phase.

In other words, Space Rider can’t just sell payload space to anyone. Only private businesses in those nations who help finance it can bid, and the customers don’t match well with the ESA’s nations that had been doling up the money. The consequence apparently has been a lot of complex negotiations and jury-rigging to make the two match, all of which has nothing to do with producing a viable product that makes money.

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Reality strikes: Democrats in Democratically-controlled cities complain about the consequences of Democratic Party policies

1:34 pm

The Democratic Party, always failing but always voted for
The Democratic Party, though always failing it remains
the only party the voters in these cities can support

You get what you vote for: The utter disaster of the Marxist policies of the modern radical Democratic Party are now coming home to roost in numerous cities across America, making them all increasingly “unlivable” in ways that are savage, violent, and devastating. Crime is up, shoplifting is now a sports event, and murderers go free while local prosecutors indict ordinary citizens for simply defending themselves.

These facts are not news however. Since the 1960s Democratic Party policies have routinely done damage to the livability of American cities. What makes this collapse in civilization now even more significant however is who is noticing, as shown by three recent articles in the past week.

Let’s start with Minneapolis, where numerous videos document a formerly pleasant midwest city that has now become a hellhole.
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SpaceX completes successful 6-second static fire test of Superheavy

11:28 am

screen capture during static fire test
Screen capture during static fire test

SpaceX today successfully completed a full 5-second static fire test of all 33 Superheavy Raptor-2 engines as well as the deluge system of the launchpad at Boca Chica.

The link goes to the live stream, which is still on-going. The static fire test occurs at about 42 minutes, if you wish to see it.

According to the narrators of the live stream, Elon Musk tweeted that the static fire was a success. It certainly appeared to go for the full five seconds, and it certainly appeared more robust than the previous test. We will have to wait however for confirmation that all 33 engines fired as planned.

The company clearly appears just about ready to do an orbital test flight. Too bad the Biden administration still stands in the way. There is yet no word on when the FAA will approve a launch license, and the decision of the Justice Department yesterday to file a bogus discrimination lawsuit against SpaceX strongly suggests the White House is working hard to figure out ways to squelch this private effort by an American citizen and his company.

Hat tip to Jay, BtB’s stringer.

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Both Vikram and Pragyan functioning as planned on the Moon

9:29 am

Pragyan on the Moon
Click to see full movie.

According to tweets from India’s space agency ISRO, both the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover are functioning as planned on the lunar surface, with the rover successfully activating its two science instruments.

The image to the right, taken by Vikram, shows the rover as it completed its roll down the ramp onto the lunar surface. This is a screen capture from a movie showing that roll down, which you can see by clicking on the picture. Since then it has moved another 26 feet from the lander.

I must add once again that Vikram did not land “on the south pole”, as too many so-called news organizations have been falsely claiming. It landed at about 69 degrees south latitude, quite a distance from that pole, in a flat region with no permanently shadowed craters. It is not specifically looking for water, though its instruments might help explain the orbital data that suggests there are areas on the surface of the Moon where hydrogen is somehow present.

If so many news outlets can’t seem to get these very basic facts about this mission correct, one must ask what else do they get wrong routinely? I don’t ask, because I always assume their information is wrong, check it constantly, and find repeatedly that they get numerous basic facts incorrect, especially when it comes to reporting on politics.

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China launches remote sensing satellite using rocket from pseudo-company

9:00 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy completed another successful orbital launch today, using its Ceres-1 rocket solid-fueled rocket carrying a remote sensing satellite and lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest interior of China.

As with the pseudo-company’s previous launch, the state-run press made no mention of the company in its reporting, underlining the fact that it really is simply another government-controlled entity that simply adds private investment and the profit-motive to its operations.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed within China.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

57 SpaceX
37 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 66 to 37. It also leads the entire world combined, 66 to 60, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 57 to 60 in successful launches.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Real estate company fires a mother for expressing her opinions

3:43 pm

Janet Roberson and her family
Janet Roberson and her family

They’re coming for you next: A California mother of three, Janet Roberson, was fired only days after she stood up at her local school board and objected to the queer curriculum the board was forcing on young children. This is what she had said:

Janet Roberson spoke at a Benicia Unified School District (BUSD) meeting on April 20, where she expressed concerns about the district’s sexual education curriculum that she said taught “gender confusion, not gender clarification” because it told 10-year-old students they could choose their own gender and receive puberty blockers. She said teaching “vulnerable children that lifetime dependence on medical care is a viable option is completely unacceptable and evil.”

“Children are being asked to identify their pronouns and this is now part of the ten-year-old curriculum,” Roberson said of the curriculum. “This forces a gender discussion beyond the scope of the state requirements and complicates an already overburdened classroom environment.”
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Biden’s Justice Department sues SpaceX

9:51 am

The corrupt and very partisan Justice Department of the Biden administration today sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and illegal immigrants because it restricts hiring to “U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The lawsuit states SpaceX “failed to fairly consider” and “refused to hire” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US citizens and lawful residents. Additionally, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US citizens and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a statement.

Justice is demanding compensation and back pay for anyone “deterred or denied employment”, as well as civil penalties.

This suit is utter garbage and puts SpaceX between a rock and a hard place. I guarantee if SpaceX had hired any illegal or refugee who was not yet a legal citizen, Biden’s State Department would have immediately sued it for violating other laws relating to ITAR (the export control laws mentioned) which try to prevent the theft of technology by foreign powers.

The Biden administration considers Elon Musk an opponent, and since it is now moving to indict and even imprison all political opposition, it is no surprise it is beginning to use lawfare against him. As I have written repeatedly, it has almost certainly pressured the FAA to slow walk any launch license approvals for SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. This lawsuit today simply provides further evidence that my prediction will be right that the next orbital test flight of that rocket will be delayed months.

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North Korea fails again to get a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit

9:33 am

According to a report in North Korea’s state run press, a launch attempt of its new rocket Chollima-1 rocket failed to reach orbit at dawn today, its payload of a classified military reconnaissance satellite falling into the ocean.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang reported that the National Aerospace Development Administration launched the new Chollima-1 rocket “at dawn” August 24 from the Sohae Satellite Launch Center. The first and second stages worked as planned, but “the launch failed due to an error in the emergency blasting system during the third stage flight” according to KCNA.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency identified the satellite as Malligyong-1, a military reconnaissance satellite and reported the launch time as 3:50 am local time (2:50 pm August 23 EDT).

The flight path can be found here. An earlier attempt in May failed also, but the cause was not specified. South Korea did recover the first stage and satellite from the May failure, claiming later the satellite had “no military utility.”

I expect South Korea to once again attempt recovery operations, but because the rocket traveled farther I also expect the chances of any recovery of material to be more unlikely.

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Blacklisted 12-year-old appeals lower court decision saying he has no free speech rights

1:18 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again.

Morrison and his parents enlisted the non-profit legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for his first amendment rights, but in June Judge Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”

You can read her convoluted ruling here [pdf], which required her to ignore numerous previous Supreme Court rulings that have specifically protected student speech exactly like Morrison’s. Moreover, her decision is also based on the fraudulent premise that people are supposed to be protected from speech that offends them. If people have the power to silence any speech because it hurts their feelings then no free speech exists at all. We will live in a totalitarian nightmare worse than anything dreamed up by George Orwell.
» Read more

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Space junk that ESA demo mission intends to de-orbit as been struck by another piece of space junk

9:44 am

In a strange bit of irony, an abandoned payload adapter from a mission launched a decade ago that a European Space Agency (ESA) mission was planning on capturing and de-orbiting has been hit by another piece of space junk, creating additional bits debris around it.

The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 pounds (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit. Space tracking systems found new objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a “hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn’t appear in tracking systems.

The ESA mission, dubbed Clearspace-1, intends to launch in 2026 and use four grappling arms to grasp the payload adapter, after which both shall be sent to burn up in the atmosphere. Its goal is to demonstrate technology for removing space junk. This event, creating extra debris pieces around the payload adaptor, puts a kink on that mission while also underlining the need for such technology.

Mission engineers now have three years to figure out what, if anything, they need to do to deal with the extra debris. The good news so far is that it appears the payload adapter remains intact, its orbit has not changed, and the surrounding debris appears small enough to pose “negligible” risk.

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India successfully lands Vikram on the Moon

9:10 am


Click for interactive map.

India this morning successfully placed its Vikram lander, carrying its Pragyan rover, on the surface of the Moon in the high southern latitudes.

I have embedded the live stream below, cued to just before landing.

The next challenge is getting Pragyan to roll off Vikram, and spend the next two weeks exploring the nearby terrain. The mission of both it and Vikram is only planned to last through the daylight portion of the 28-day-long lunar day, so it is not expected for either to survive the lunar night. Both will make observations, but the main purpose of this mission has already been accomplished, demonstrating that India has the technological capability to land an unmanned spacecraft on another planet. That the landing was in the high southern latitudes added one extra challenge to the mission.

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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

9:56 pm

Russia tonight successfully used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a new Progress freighter to ISS, lifting off from its Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

57 SpaceX
36 China
12 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 65 to 36. It also leads the entire world combined, 65 to 59. SpaceX by itself is still in a neck-in-neck race with the rest of the world (excluding American companies), now trailing 57 to 59 in successful launches.

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I will NOT wear a mask, part two

5:16 pm

Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:

It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.

No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.

And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.

They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.

I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
» Read more

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Space Force awards multi-satellite contracts to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman

9:26 am

Capitalism in space: In what is a landmark deal indicating the complete shift by the military from building its own satellites to letting private enterprise do it, the Space Development Agency (SDA) of the Space Force yesterday announced it has awarded Lockeheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each a contract to build and operate 36 satellites.

The 72 satellites will make up a portion of SDA’s network known as Tranche 2 Transport Layer. SDA is building a large constellation called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Northrop Grumman’s contract for 36 satellites is worth approximately $733 million. The agreement with Lockheed Martin, also for 36 satellites, is worth $816 million, SDA said.

What makes this contract different than previous military satellite contracts is that the military will do relatively little design. It has released the basic specifications, and is asking private enterprise to do the work for it. It is a customer, not a builder. When the military attempted its own design and construction, the job would take sometimes a decade or more, cost many billions (with cost overruns), and often failed. This new constellation is targeting a 2026 launch, only two years from now.

The constellation will also be more robust than the gold-plated giant satellites the military would build previously. Rather than rely on a single do-it-all satellite which is easy to take out, the constellation has many satellites, and can easily compensate if one or even a few are damaged or destroyed.

This shift was one of the fundamental reasons the military wanted to create a separate Space Force. As part of the Air Force the office politics within that branch of the military had been impossible to make this shift. Too many managers in the Air Force liked building big gold-plated satellites. Once the Space Force took over those managers were taken out of the equation.

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Russian engineers pinpoint approximate crash site of Luna-25

9:07 am

Russian engineers have pinpointed the approximate crash site of Luna-25 on the Moon as the 42-mile-wide crater Pontecoulant G, located at about 59 degrees south latitude, 66 east longitude.

Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics have simulated the trajectory of the Luna-25 mission, figuring out where and when it crashed into the moon’s surface, the institute said in a statement on Telegram. “The mathematical modeling of the trajectory of the Luna-25 spacecraft, carried out by experts from the Ballistic Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, made it possible to determine the time and place of its collision with the moon,” the statement reads.

According to the institute, the spacecraft fell into the 42-kilometer Pontecoulant G crater in the southern hemisphere of the moon at 2:58 p.m. Moscow time on August 19.

The planned landing site, in Boguslawsky Crater at 73 degrees south latitude and 43 degrees east longitude, was many miles away.

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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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Axiom raises $350 million in private investment capital

11:53 am

Axiom's space station assembly sequence
The assembly sequence for Axiom’s space station while attached to ISS.
Click for original image.

Axiom announced today that in its most recent round of funding it raised an additional $350 million in private investment capital, almost tripling the private capital it has obtained in total.

Axiom Space announced today that it secured $350 million in its Series-C round of growth funding, lifting the total funds raised to over $505 million from investors and achieving more than $2.2 billion in customer contracts.

To date, Aljazira Capital and Boryung Co., Ltd., have anchored the round, paired with support from an array of diverse backers that include deep-tech venture capital funds and strategic brand partners, positioning Axiom Space as second to SpaceX for the most amount of money raised by a private space company in 2023, based on available pitchbook data.

The press release also reaffirms the company’s planned schedule for its space station project, with the first module launching and attaching to ISS in 2026. The graphic shows the assembly sequence, with the rear docking port the one linked to ISS. When assembly reaches the stage of the fourth image it will then be able to separate from ISS and fly independently in 2031. That last number however is one year later than NASA’s previous predictions for the retirement of ISS, suggesting Axiom knows something NASA has not yet told us.

Hat tip to Jay, BtB’s stringer.

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Watch the landing attempt of Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander on August 23, 2023

9:39 am


Click for interactive map.

After separating from its Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module on August 17, 2023, India’s Vikram lunar lander has been slowly making orbital adjustments in preparation for its landing attempt on August 23rd.

I have embedded the live stream of that landing attempt below. As it is scheduled for 6:04 pm (India time), in India, in the U.S. that landing will occur in the early morning hours of August 23rd.

Following the failed crash on the Moon of Russia’s lunar lander Luna-25 yesterday, this landing attempt is likely to garner a lot more interest. It is also India’s second attempt, having failed in 2019 when its Vikram lander ran out of fuel before landing and crashed.
» Read more

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China’s Long March 4C rocket places Earth observation satellite into orbit

9:14 am

China yesterday used its Long March 4C rocket to put what that country’s state-run press calls an “Earth observation satellite” into orbit, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the interior.

No word on whether the rocket’s first stage crash landed near habitable areas, as China’s disposable first stages often do.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

56 SpaceX
36 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 64 to 36 in the national rankings, while the entire world combined 64 to 58. SpaceX alone now trails the entire world (excluding American companies) 56 to 58.

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Luna-25 lost after crashing on Moon

9:37 am

During its last major orbital burn, Luna-25’s engines apparently fired for longer than planned so that, instead of placing it into a lower orbit, the spacecraft was de-orbited and sent crashing onto the lunar surface.

The Russian space agency noted that all measures regarding the location of the spacecraft and establishing communications with it on August 19 and 20 yielded zero results. “Preliminary analysis results suggest that a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion maneuver led the Luna-25 spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist following a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roscosmos stated.

This is a tragedy for Russia, as this mission hoped to re-establish it as one of the major players in the exploration of the solar system. Instead, we once again have a data point suggesting significant quality control problems within Russia’s aerospace industry. Its misplaced focus on providing government jobs rather than actually building and quickly flying spacecraft and rockets results too often in failure.

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Regulatory problems for Saxavord spaceport in Shetland?

9:53 am

In a short statement reported in the local Shetland press, the under-construction Saxavord spaceport in Scotland has apparently laid off some construction workers, claiming it has done so “because the project was so far ahead of schedule.”

The statement however also alluded to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which must issue a launch license before any launches can occur.

SaxaVord Spaceport said: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receiving its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority. We are looking forward to hosting vertical rocket launches in the coming months.”

The application for this launch license was submitted in November 2022. It appears that the CAA still needs a year or more to approve any launch license, a slow and endless process that if not corrected will make launches from the United Kingdom completely unprofitable.

Saxavord had hoped to get its first launch off this year, by fall. It now appears that will not happen.

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Commercial spaceport in Australia signs its first launch contract

9:42 am

Australia map showing ELA spaceport location
The red dot marks ELA’s location, on the north coast of Australia.

Australia’s first commercial spaceport, Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), has signed a multi-launch contract with a South Korean startup rocket company, Innospace, with the first launch targeting April 2025.

Though Innospace successfully launched a suborbital test flight in March, it has not yet launched a rocket to orbit. Meanwhile, ELA is negotiating with a number of other rocket companies, but it also appears it is having problems with the administrative state in the U.S.

The South Korean company is first off the blocks as it is not subject to the strict technological transfer regulations applied by the United States.

[ELA’s CEO Michael] Jones says delays to the signing of a Technological Safeguards Agreement (TSA) between Canberra and Washington is holding up several potential US customers. “We’re still waiting with bated breath for the TSA, despite a bilateral announcement by Biden and Albanese in Japan in early June that the deal was done and dusted,” he explains. “We were all expecting it to be released by the end of the financial year and the process of being endorsed by Parliament begun”.

A pattern of delay and intransigence in Washington, blocking commercial space, does seem to be developing since Joe Biden took over as president.

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Luna-25 takes first image of lunar surface

9:07 am

Luna-25's first lunar image
Click for interactive map. Zeeman is located on the lower left.

Russia’s state-run press today issued the first picture taken by Luna-25 after entering lunar orbit two days ago. That picture, to the right and cropped and reoriented to post here, shows part of Zeeman Crater at 75 degrees south latitude and 135 degrees west, on the far side of the Moon. From the TASS announcement:

“The Luna-25 spacecraft, flying in a circular orbit as the Moon’s artificial satellite, has taken pictures of the lunar surface with television cameras of the STS-L system. The image, taken today at 08:23 Moscow time, shows the southern polar crater Zeeman on the far side of the Moon. The coordinates of the crater center are 75 degrees south and 135 degrees west,” the state corporation said. Roscosmos said the Zeeman crater is of great interest to researchers. Its rim rises eight kilometers above its relatively flat floor.

The picture shows Zeeman’s southern rim to the left, with its pockmarked crater floor to the right. The crater the lander is targeting, Broguslawsky Crater, sits in the opposite hemisphere of Zeeman, slightly closer to the south pole but on the Moon’s near side.

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Today’s blacklisted American: California city harasses Rabbi for having guests over for dinner

1:20 pm

Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray
Beverly Hills: Where Jews are forbidden to pray

They’re coming for you next: The headline above is literally true, though you need to know a bit about Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, to understand what I mean exactly.

The story is this: Because Rabbi Levi Illulian, like all Orthodox Jews, routinely invites friends and acquaintances to join his family for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch at his home during the weekly Saturday Sabbath, officials in Beverly Hills in California sent him a “notice of violation” on June 12, 2023, telling him that these dinners must cease, and ordered him to “terminate all religious activities” that included any “non-residents.” It also threatened him with civil and criminal proceedings if he didn’t stop praying with friends in his home.

It appears that the city’s actions were instigated by the complaints of one unnamed neighbor. As described in the letter [pdf] sent by Illulian’s lawyers to the city in response to its notice of violation, after receiving those two complaints in February and March about parking, trash, and noise, the city instituted an investigation that involved stake-outs of Illulian’s home and the use of drones over his property (without a warrant) in which city officials “not only tallied the number of individuals and cars coming and going from the Home, but also photographed Rabbi Illulian’s guests.”
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Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander separates from its propulsion module; Luna-25 in lunar orbit

9:08 am


Click for interactive map.

The two probes aiming to land in the high southern latitudes of the Moon in the next week are now both in lunar orbit and preparing for their planned landings.

First India’s Chandrayaan-3: With its propulsion module having completed the job of getting Chandrayaan-3 from Earth to lunar orbit, the Vikram lander today separated from that module in preparation for firing its own engines on August 23, 2023 and landing on the Moon.

Vikram needs to make several orbital adjustments before that landing attempt.

Second, Russia’s Luna-25 probe entered lunar orbit yesterday, where it will spend the next few days making its own orbital adjustments before attempting its landing on August 21st.

Vikram carries a small rover, Pragyan. Luna-25 is only a lander, though it has a scoop and will do analysis of the lunar soil below it. Neither is landing “near the south pole”, as most news sources are saying. They are landing at latitudes comparable to landing in the Arctic on Earth, on the northern coast of Alaska. As such, neither will find out anything about the question of remnant ice in south pole’s permanently shadowed regions.

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