Tag: politics

German govenment blocks Chinese takeover of startup satellite company

10:29 am

The German govenment today blocked the completion of a stock deal that would have transferred almost complete ownership of the startup satellite company KLEO Connect to a Chinese firm.

The cabinet agreed a decision by the economy ministry not to let Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology, which already has 53% of the company, acquire the 45% minority stake of German company EightyLeo, according to the sources.

KLEO Connect wants to establish a network of more than 300 small, low earth orbit satellites to be fully operational by 2028 along with the ground infrastructure to provide global communications services – similar to SpaceX with its project Starlink. [emphasis mine]

It appears this decision might be a bit late, considering that this Chinese pseudo-company, undoubtably working under the supervision of the Chinese communists, already owns a majority stake. That lateness however appears to be part of the German government’s decision in the last year to toughen its stance on China.

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Starship/Superheavy 2nd test launch likely delayed until next year by federal bureaucracy and White House

9:52 am

Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023
Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023,
when Elon Musk said it was ready for launch

They’re coming for you next: While answering questions from reporters at a conference yesterday on when SpaceX might get its next Starship/Superheavy launch license, FAA acting chief Polly Trottenberg said she hoped that license will be awarded by October, but then slipped in one minor additional detail that had not previously mentioned or required:

SpaceX would still need a separate environmental approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before a launch. Trottenberg did not say how long that might take.

Not surprisingly, the story from Reuters buries this detail, spinning the story to make it seem that the FAA is eager to help SpaceX launch. Similarly, this NasaSpaceFlight.com story (a space news outlet which has also tried to spin things to make the delays appear the fault of SpaceX) fails to even mention this detail.

SpaceX is now destacking Starship from Superheavy (live stream here).

I predicted in the spring that intransigence from the federal bureaucracy, controlled by the Biden administration, would likely delay this launch well past August, and likely into next year. I also said I would be thrilled if my cynical prediction turned out to be wrong.

Sadly, it looks like that prediction will be correct, and in fact might have actually been conservative. » Read more

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Pushback: The momentum builds against the Marxist American Library Association

12:20 pm

Emily Drabinski, now president of the ALA, proudly Marxist and queer
Emily Drabinski, president of the ALA and proudly
Marxist and queer

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in July I reported how the library commission of Montana had decided to withdraw its support from and membership in the American Library Association (ALA), not only because of the Marxist agenda being pushed by its new president, Emily Drabinski, but because of the ALA’s aggressive effort to insert pornography in school libraries.

At the time I wrote this:

[I]f more local library organizations followed through as Montana has, the ALA might finally feel the pinch and rethink its policies. Or if it didn’t, it would justify these libraries leaving its fold, as it does not represent them.

Since then there has been a rising flood of other states moving to break free from the ALA. In July, almost immediately after the decision in Montana, the secretary of state of Missouri, who oversees the Missouri State library, withdrew from the ALA, citing the organization’s public effort — pushed under Drabinski’s leadership — to block a “faith-based publisher from holding story hours in libraries.”
» Read more

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Real pushback: Defiance from all sides to New Mexico’s unlawful suspension of the 2nd amendment

1:27 pm

Michelle Lujan Grisham

When New Mexico’s Democratic Party governor Michelle Lujan Grisham suddenly declared on September 8, 2023 that she was unilaterally suspending the second amendment by outlawing for 30 days the right to carry firearms by any citizens in Albuquerque and its surrounding Bernalillo county, no one should have been surprised.

All Grisham was doing was following the many precedents set during the COVID epidemic, where nationwide governors routinely made unilateral and unlawful declarations violating the Constitutional rights of citizens, with no pushback at all. Grisham was merely following those precedents. To her, it was now okay for a governor to routinely declare a “health emergency” for any reason under the sun (in this case the violent shooting death of an innocent eleven-year-old boy), and declare any law she didn’t like to be null and void.

Grisham was simply demonstrating forcefully the worst lessons learned from the COVID panic. It taught power-hungry politicians that they could get away with any abuse of power they conceived, as long as they dressed that power grab as part of some sort of “health emergency.”

You see, power is very habit-forming, and when you find you suffer no pain for abusing it it is then very easy to abuse it again, and again and again.

The response to Grisham’s unlawful abuse of power however suggested strongly that things are no longer going to follow the script of the COVID panic, when the public meekly went along. Instead, the uproar in the past three days has been astonishing, not so much from the ordinary citizens defying the ban, but from politicians and pundits from across the entire political spectrum.
» Read more

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The actual truth behind the so-called “hidden figures” of the early space race

9:57 am

It is Monday, and thus the news in the morning is somewhat slim. With this in mind I offer my readers some worthwhile history, a long review dubbed “The Portrayal of Early Manned Spaceflight in Hidden Figures: A Critique. The actual review is available here [pdf].

The review uses primary source material, the actual words of the engineers and managers who worked next to black mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA in the 1960s (both new and old writings and interviews), assessing the historical accuracy of Margot Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, which essentially claimed that Johnson was a central figure making possible the entire American effort land on the Moon, and whose credit was purposely squelched because she was black, and a woman.

Not surprisingly, you will find that claim to be absurdly false. Not only was Johnson only one of many who did the work, she was treated then fairly and with respect. If anything, her place at NASA was proof that the agency was a forceful part of the civil rights movement, working to give qualified people of all races a fair chance.

Thus, the effort of modern leftist revisionists, led by Barack Obama when he gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, to smear America and NASA in the 1960s as racist and bigoted in supposedly suppressing Johnson’s participation is not only unfair, it is an outright lie. If anything, her magnification to star status by today’s politicians, historians, and the entertainment industry has acted to discredit the work done by the many others who worked side-by-side with her, as co-workers.

If you’ve got the time, read the critique. It will not only teach you something about the behind the scenes effort that made the lunar landing possible, it will help you recognize the bigoted dishonesty that is so rampant in today’s intellectual and political culture.

Hat tip to reader Chris Dorsey for letting me know of this review.

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Two launches today, one by ULA and one by China

10:16 am

Today there were two successful launches. First China launched a remote sensing satellite using its Long March 6 rocket that lifted off from its Taiyuan spaceport in the south of China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters crashed inside China.

Shortly thereafter, ULA used its Atlas-5 rocket to place a reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

For ULA, this was only its second launch in 2023. The leaders in the 2023 launch race are now as follows, with China’s total corrected:

63 SpaceX
42 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 73 to 42. It also now leads the entire world combined, 73 to 67, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 67.

CORRECTION: Hat tip to reader John Foley (see his comment below), who noted that China’s total appeared to be one short. I went back and discovered I had missed a March 22, 2023 launch of a Kuaizhou 1A rocket from the Jiujian spaceport, placing four weather satellites in orbit. I have now added that launch to China’s total, and corrected the other numbers.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Law professor fired and escorted by police off campus for being conservative

1:29 pm

Law professor Scott Gerber
Law professor Scott Gerber

They’re coming for you next: In an ugly act of outright thuggery, Ohio Northern University (ONU) recently fired tenured law professor Scott Gerber, without any standard due process as required by its own procedures, and did so by having the campus police arrive unannouced in his classroom to escort him off campus.

As Gerber recounts, “Around 1 p.m on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was.”

Gerber was not given any concrete reasons after being told that he was being banned from campus, other than his lack of “collegiality.” He was directed to sign a separation agreement.

The reason for Gerber’s firing however appears quite obvious if you want to look. The university did not like his uncompromising and public opposition to ONU’s racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, which focus solely on favoring minorities in hiring and admissions while working to eliminate and remove any opposition to those racist policies. As he wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
» Read more

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Good news? FAA issues own report on April Starship/Superheavy launch

11:30 am

The FAA today closed out its own investigation into the April test launch failure of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, stating that it found “63 corrective actions SpaceX must take” before another launch license will be issued.

Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices.

It is not clear how many of these corrections have already been completed by SpaceX. The FAA made it clear however that it does not yet consider its requirements to have been met.

The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica. SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch.

The timeline suggests FAA is demanding additional actions from SpaceX. The company submitted its own investigation report to the FAA on August 16th. The FAA then spent almost a month reviewing it, during which it almost certainly decided some of SpaceX’s corrections were insufficient. It has now followed up with its own report, listing additional actions required.

Remember, no one at the FAA is qualified or even in a position to do a real investigation. They are simply acting as a chess kibitzer on the sidelines, making annoying commentary based on less information than held by the players of the game (in this case SpaceX). Unlike a chess kibitzer, however, the FAA controls the board, and can force SpaceX to do its recommended moves, or declare the game forfeited by SpaceX.

If the FAA has required additional actions, we will find out in the next few days when SpaceX destacks Starship/Superheavy and rolls both back into the assembly building. It is also possible we instead shall have a few weeks of back-and-forth negotiations by phone, zoom, paper, and face-to-face meetings, whereby SpaceX engineers will be desperately trying to make FAA paper-pushers understand some of their engineering work which will eventually result in an agreement by the FAA to let SpaceX launch.

Remember, none of this kind of regulatory interference and investigation took place between SpaceX and the FAA during the Trump administration when SpaceX was flying a Starship suborbital test flight almost monthly. The heavy boot of regulation arrived soon after Biden. The two are closely linked.

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GAO blasts NASA for purposely failing to control the budget of its SLS rocket

10:21 am

In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.

This one sentence from the report says it all:

NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.

That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.

This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
» Read more

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Senate approves Biden’s FCC nominee, giving him a Democrat majority on FCC

9:48 am

FCC: now controlled by Democrats
The FCC, now controlled by the
power-hungry Democratic Party

Failure theater: The Senate yesterday voted 55 to 43 to approve Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee, Anna Gomez, thus giving the Democrats a 4 to 3 majority on the Commission.

This was Biden’s second nominee to the commission, with the first withdrawn when it was clear the Senate opposed the nominee.

Biden tried again in May with the nomination of Gomez, a State Department digital policy official who was previously deputy assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2023. A lawyer, Gomez was vice president of government affairs at Sprint Nextel from 2006 to 2009 and before that spent about 12 years at the FCC in several roles.

Gomez got through the confirmation process with relative ease, though most Republicans voted against her. Both parties seem to expect the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules now that Democrats will have a majority.

Imposing net neutrality is essentially socialism/communism for the internet. It will squash competition, cost a fortune, and eventually be used as well to squelch dissent online (which translates into silencing conservatives).

From the perspective of space, the majority on the FCC is likely very bad news as well, for several reasons. » Read more

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Judge to blacklisting Maine governor: The lawsuit against your COVID jab mandate will continue

3:00 pm

Democrat Janet Mills, a proud dictator

A federal district court judge ruled last week that a lawsuit by seven former health employees in Maine can continue, dismissing the absurd argument by Maine’s Democrat governor, Janet Mills, that even though these employees were illegally denied a religious exemption and got fired for not getting the COVID jab, the harm they have endured no longer exists because Mills eventually stopped enforcing her mandate and will repeal it later this month.

The lawsuit in question — Alicia Lowe, et al., v. Janet Mills, et al. — alleges that the State of Maine violated healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights by refusing to allow a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate. The healthcare workers argue that healthcare facilities should have offered reasonable accommodations for employees who objected to the COVID-19 shots for religious reasons.

Because of Mills’ vaccine mandate, which specifically barred any religious exemption, healthcare facilities were unable to offer a testing option for employees. As a result of this, several healthcare workers were fired after requesting a religious exemption to the mandate. Some of those workers have now filed a lawsuit against both members of the state government and their employers.

You can read the judge’s ruling here [pdf]. » Read more

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite

5:15 pm

China’s three-stage Long March 4C rocket today (early morning on September 7th in China) successfully placed a classified remote sensing satellite into orbit, lifting off from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert.

This launch occurred prior to Japan’s H-2A launch, but I am only catching up with it now. As always, China’s state run press released little information, including where the first and second stages crashed inside China. All three stages of the Long March 4C use very toxic hypergolic fuels, so if those stages landed near habitable areas, there will be significant risk to bystanders.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 40. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 65.

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Japan successfully launches XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander

4:57 pm

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan today (September 7th in Japan) successfully used its H-2A rocket to place both the XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting XRISM has been successfully deployed. SLIM has not, as it needs to wait until after a second burn of the rocket’s upper stage about 40 minutes later. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing target on the Moon, where it will attempt a precision landing within a zone about 300 feet across.

This was Japan’s second launch this year, so it does not get included in the leader board for the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 64.

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Why are news organizations still asking advice from the COVID liars of 2020?

1:50 pm

Fauci: Washington's top liar
Anthony Fauci: Washington’s liar-in-chief

Two stories in the past week got some notice in the conservative press as it reported on the increasing ramp up of fear-mongering about a new COVID epidemic (coincidently timed to arrive just before the 2024 election) by politicians, health officials, and the mainstream press.

The first story produced a lot of coverage because it involved the embarrassing appearance of Anthony Fauci on CNN, who when challenged directly on the recent research that has found masks accomplish nothing (which by the way simply confirms decades of earlier research that told us the same thing) still claimed that masks worked, and that this evidence should be ignored. You can watch Fauci’s moment of tragic black comedy here. His key response is at best incoherent, and at worst an utter lie and a denial of plain facts.

“Yes, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level, for individual, when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong. But when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage. When you took it at the broad population level like the Cochrane study, the data are less firm with regard to the effect on the overall pandemic. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about an individual’s effect on their own safety. That’s a bit different than the broad population level.”

Fauci refers to the “many studies” proving his position, but of course he can’t name them because they don’t exist. Even during the worst of the Wuhan panic the few studies that came out claiming some efficacy of masks were all found to be weak or flawed or downright fraudulent. He also makes the patently stupid claim that masks still work on an individual level, even though he admits the evidence for more than a century shows they don’t work at all.

This is what Michael Cantrell at PJMedia had to say about Fauci’s rationalizations:
» Read more

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Starship and Superheavy: Ready for launch but still blocked by the White House

11:02 am

Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023

Elon Musk yesterday tweeted a short video showing Starship prototype #25 as it was stacked on top of Superheavy prototype #9, stating that both were now ready for their orbital test launch, the second attempt by SpaceX to launch this new rocket.

The image to the right is a screen capture from that movie, showing the full rocket ready to go. When it will go however remains a complete unknown, as Musk himself noted in the tweet: “Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”

In May I predicted that though Musk predicted at that time that SpaceX would be ready to do this launch in August, it would not happen then or likely for months afterward, because the FAA under the Biden administration is slow-walking all launch approvals for SpaceX, as I showed in detail in a later June essay.

It is now September. SpaceX didn’t meet Musk’s original August ready date for launch, but it only missed that target by about five days. And as I predicted, the FAA has also not yet approved the launch license.
» Read more

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Firefly wins three launch contract from L3Harris

9:25 am

Firefly today announced that the satellite company L3Harris has awarded it a three-launch contract as part of Space Force’s quick response satellite launch program.

Firefly will provide rapid launch capabilities for L3Harris to achieve direct access to low Earth orbit at a lower cost and support the responsive space needs of the U.S. government. The three missions will launch from Firefly’s SLC-2 launch site at the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The missions are scheduled for 2026, which makes sense as Firefly has yet to make its Alpha rocket operational. It has attempted two launches, the first a failure and the second reaching orbit but at an altitude lower than planned. Its third attempt, also a rapid response launch for the Space Force, was officially declared ready for launch within 60 hours, anytime within the next six months when the Space Force demands it.

A side note: It has seemed to me that in 2023 the launch of new American rockets by launch startups has slowed considerably. Why this is occurring is likely the result of many factors. First, two companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their first iteration of their rocket, and appear unready to launch again for several years, if ever. Second, we may be seeing evidence of the heavier regulatory fist under the Biden administration, making it more difficult for new rockets to get launch license approval.

Third, it appears investor enthusiasm for this new industry has cooled, partly because of the first two reasons above as well as the poor stock trends of the new rocket companies that went public.

It is also possible the slowdown is simply the normal fluctuation one sees in any new industry with a relatively small number of players. This could simply be a pause as they gear up for a string of new launches next year.

Only time will answer this question. Stay tuned.

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September 5, 2023 Quick space links

2:39 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also provided me the link to the Chinese launch posted earlier.

  • Video outlining an alternative theory that dismisses the need for either Dark Matter or Dark Energy

    • The theory, MOND, was first proposed in the 1990s, but because of the desire to squelch and suppress any skepticism of the Big Bang, it has been routinely been ignored by all press services and poo-poohed by cosmologists. I tried several times to propose articles about it when I still wrote for magazines, and was consistently shot down. It could be it is finally getting more play because of the data from Webb.

 

 

  • Russia reveals plan to launch a new mission to Mars’ moon Phobos

    • Not only do few proposed Russian space projects ever happen, those that do take decades to get built, and sadly too many fail once launched. The last Phobos mission, Phobos-Grunt, never got out of Earth orbit, crashing to Earth shortly after launch in 2012. Russia announced a replacement mission shortly thereafter, with a target launch date of 2018. No launch ever occurred. This new proposal is likely not to fly for decades yet, if ever.

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Pushback: Doctor partly reinstated after health officials threaten him for stating obvious facts about COVID

1:31 pm

John Littell, persecuted for being a thoughtful doctor
John Littell, persecuted
for being a thoughtful doctor

They’re coming for you next: When the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) stripped Florida doctor John Littell of his medical license in March 2023 because he had publicly advocated the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients while questioning many of the government health policies being imposed during the epidemic, he immediate appealed.

I reported on ABFM’s attempt to blacklist Littell back in April, shortly after it took action against him. At the time it appeared the ABFM’s actions were prompted because he had spoken publicly about his successful use of ivermectin at a hospital board meeting, a meeting from which he was evicted.

Interviews with Littell went viral after he gave a speech at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board meeting last month in support of using Ivermectin to treat Covid and was subsequently removed by police after approaching a sympathetic board member. Since the video’s release Littell has amassed a large Twitter following and even appeared on Dr. Drew’s TV show to talk about what happened.

ABFM then sent him a letter “saying he’d been de-certified for ‘spreading false, inaccurate, and misleading materials about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccination, and treatment and mitigation of the virus.'”

Finally in response to Littell’s appeal in July ABFM decided to reinstate his license, but it also declared the license was retroactively de-certified for the previous three months, even though he had still being seeing patients because his license was supposed to be still active pending appeal.
» Read more

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The New York Times suddenly allows two scientists to admit the Big Bang theory might be wrong

9:09 am

Modern science
Modern science

The refusal by many in the scientific community to deny there is any uncertainty of science has been best illustrated for decades by the cosmologists who have put together the framework of the standard model for the creation of the universe, centered on the Big Bang, and their pitchmen in the mainstream press. Since the 1960s any skepticism of this model was generally treated as equivalent to believing in UFO’s, aliens, and the Face on Mars.

Thus, astronomers and astrophysicists did what necessary to protect their careers. Even if they had great doubts about the standard model and the Big Bang, they generally kept their mouths shut, saying nothing. Meanwhile, our increasingly corrupt press pushed this one explanation for the formation of the universe, treating the cosmologists who pushed it as Gods whose every word was equivalent of an oracle that must never be questioned.

This past weekend the New York Times suddenly admitted to the uncertainty surrounding the Big Bang, and for possibly the first time in decades allowed two scientists to write an op-ed that carefully outlined the problems with the standard model and the Big Bang theory, problems that have existed and been growing since the 1990s but have been poo-pooed as inconsequential and easily solved. Data from the Webb Space Telescope however has made that poo-pooing more and more difficult, as astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser make clear:
» Read more

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Japan reworking law that limits its space agency from awarding contracts to private companies

8:32 am

The Japanese government is now in the process of reworking the law that governs its space agency JAXA, in that this law has up to now forbidden it from using any of its budget to directly fund the work of any private companies.

According to sources, the government plans to add a provision to the JAXA Law — the basis for establishing JAXA — to set up a fund to provide long-term, large-scale financial support to the private and academic sectors, and to submit a draft revision at an extraordinary Diet session this autumn.

In the past, JAXA has put money into two private companies out of its own income earned from intellectual property and other sources, and the investment per company was limited to several tens of millions of yen. In March, the Liberal Democratic Party proposed that a fund of ¥1 trillion be established over 10 years.

It appears this limitation might explain why Japan trails so badly in the aerospace sector. JAXA has been forbidden to award contracts to private companies. It has been required by law to do all the work itself.

I suspect one of the two private companies it has sent money to was Mitsubishi, which in turn been a major contractor in building JAXA’s H-2A and new H-3 rockets. The system however has not resulted in rockets that are competitive and inexpensive, which is why Japan has garnered little market share.

If the revision in the law allows JAXA to award development contracts to private companies as they develop their own rockets and spacecraft, owned not by JAXA but by them, then we may see a change.

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JAXA schedules last H-2A rocket launch, carrying X-Ray telescope and lunar lander

9:06 am

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has finally rescheduled the launch of its XRISM X-Ray telescope and its SLIM lunar lander launch for September 7, 2023, lifting off using the last flight of its H-2A rocket.

The previous launch attempt several weeks ago was scrubbed due to high winds. This new launch date has a window of seven days, which means if weather scrubs the September 7th launch they will be able to try again immediately within that window.

The white dot on the map to the right shows the targeted landing site of SLIM, which is testing the ability of an unmanned probe to land precisely within a tiny zone of less than 300 feet across.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of the H-2A rocket and its replacement having not yet flown successfully (its first launch failed in March), Japan after this launch will be in the same boat as Europe, without a large rocket and lacking the ability to put large payloads into orbit.

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Endeavour Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts safely splashes down

8:53 am

SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule safely splashed down shorty after midnight last night in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, completing a six month mission for two Americans, one Russian, and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE astronaut, Sultan Al Neyadi, flew as a paying passenger, obtaining his flight through the private space station company Axiom, which in turn purchased the ferrying services to and from ISS from SpaceX. The Russian flew as part of the barter deal that NASA presently has with Russia, with each flying astronauts on the other nation’s capsules at no cost in order to make sure everyone knows how to use them in case of emergency.

Several additional details: First, in the post-splashdown press conference SpaceX officials revealed they are presently building a fifth manned Dragon capsule to add to its fleet, and are also aiming to fly each as much as fifteen times. This suggests they are anticipating a lot of business hauling both NASA and commercial passengers into space.

Meanwhile, the Russian-launched crew on ISS that launched last September and includes American Frank Rubio is targeting a return-to-Earth on September 27, 2023. If so, they will have completed a 371 day flight, or almost thirteen months. This I think is the second longest human flight so far in space, exceeded only by Valeri Polykov’s fourteen-and-half month mission in the 1990s.

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Engineers had Vikram do short flight hop prior to shutting down

8:36 am

Indian engineers revealed today that prior to putting the Vikram lander to sleep for the long lunar night, they had the lander use its rocket engines to do a short up and down flight. From the first link:

“On command it (Vikram lander) fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm away,” ISRO said in an update on ‘X’.

Before doing the hop engineers stored Vikram’s instruments and rover ramp, then redeployed them afterward to gather a tiny bit of new data before putting everything into hibernation.

The hop test proved that Vikram’s engines could be restarted even after being on the Moon for almost two weeks, and thus could potentially be used on a future sample return mission. It also suggested a future mission could choose to change its landing site periodically by use of its landing engines.

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ESA successfully test fires upper stage engines of new Ariane-6 rocket

12:02 pm

Despite delays in test firing the first stage engines on ESA’s new Ariane-6 rocket, it has successfully tested fired the rocket’s upper stage engines in Germany.

The test of the full upper stage – including the new Vinci engine and a smaller Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) – took place on a purpose-built test bench at German Aerospace Center DLR’s engine test centre in Lampoldshausen, Germany.

Vinci, the upper stage engine of Ariane 6 fed by liquid hydrogen and oxygen, can be stopped and restarted multiple times – to place satellites into different orbits and then de-orbit the upper stage, so it is not left behind as hazardous debris in space. The APU makes it possible for Vinci to restart in space, by maintaining adequate pressure in the fuel tanks and preventing bubbles in the fuel lines. The APU uses small amounts of liquid hydrogen and oxygen from the main tanks – replacing a system which relied on large quantities of tanked helium.

A last hot-fire test is scheduled before final qualification of the Ariane 6 upper stage, with the aim of testing its operation for different types of missions, as well as in degraded conditions.

Meanwhile, the next attempt to do the same with the first stage in French Guiana is scheduled to take place on September 5th.

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SpaceX launches 13 satellites for the Space Force

10:32 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully completed its second launch for the Space Force, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and placing another thirteen satellites of its Tranche-0 constellation into orbit.

The first stage completed its thirteenth mission, successfully landing back at Vandenberg.

This flight was SpaceX’s 61st in 2023, which matches the record it set last year, doing it in only eight months. With four months still left to go in the year the chances of SpaceX meeting its goal of 100 launches in the year still remains a possibility.

Furthermore, this was the 70th successful launch for the United States this year, which matches the record that the nation had set in 1966, and had been the record for the country until last year, when American companies (with help of one government launch) completed 85 launches. It seems last year’s record will be smashed without much problem.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

61 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 70 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 70 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 61 to 62, with another Starlink launch is now scheduled for tomorrow.

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India successfully launches its first solar observation satellite

11:44 pm

India’s space agency ISRO tonight (September 2, 2023 in India) successfully used its PSLV rocket with six strap-on boosters to place in orbit its first solar observation satellite, Aditya-L1, lifting off from its coastal Sriharikota spaceport.

The spacecraft will eventually maneuver itself to the L1 point about one million miles closer to the Sun, where it will make continuous observations of the star’s visible hemisphere, using seven different instruments. Its observations will supplement those of the SOHO solar observatory (also located at the L1 point), which was launched in 1995 and is long overdue for replacement, or at least some redundancy.

For India, this was the seventh launch in 2023, which ties its previous annual launch high achieved in both 2016 and 2018. The country however has three more launches tentatively scheduled for this year, though none has as yet a specific launch date.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

60 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 69 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 69 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 60 to 62. SpaceX however has launches scheduled for September 2nd and 3rd, so these numbers are likely to change.

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Real pushback: School district immediately cancels ban on prayer when threatened with lawsuit

1:27 pm

The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again
The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the officials at West Shore School District in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to the presidents of the various booster clubs at its schools ordering them to “halt prayers at future banquets, and at any other school-sponsored activity” and claiming falsely that “student-initiated prayers at school events are illegal,” two non-profit free speech legal firms, First Liberty and the Independence Law Center teamed up to immediately send a letter to the district challenging that order:

First Liberty and our friends at the Independence Law Center quickly sent a letter to district officials asking them to immediately rescind that threatening letter. Our legal team offered to help draft a new letter and policies to ensure the district would not illegally discriminate against students and staff.

We explained in our letter that the First Amendment prohibits a school district from acting in a hostile manner toward religious belief.

To my readers this story is familiar. What has normally happened next in the past few years — since censorship and blacklisting has become all the rage by those in power — is that the government officials either ignore the letter or publicly defy it. Sometimes they double down and actually fire someone for exercising their First Amendment rights. What follows next is of course a lawsuit, which almost routinely ends in a crushing defeat for the school that costs it significantly in damages.

This story however ended quite differently:
» Read more

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Pushback: Class action discrimination lawsuit filed against Gannett newspaper

1:34 pm

The Gannett logo abandoned in 2011
This Gannett logo was abandoned in 2011, for
one that eliminated any mention of equal employment.
We now know why.

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In what is certainly going to the beginning of a wave of lawsuits, five current and former Gannett employees, all white, have filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming its quota policies instituted in 2020 following the death of George Floyd are racist and discriminatory, favoring minorities over whites simply because of their race.

In the lawsuit, plaintiff Steven Bradley says he was fired from a management job at the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper in Rochester, New York, and then passed over for a different position with Gannett because he is white. Bradley in April filed a similar lawsuit against Gannett in New York state court. The status of that case was unclear.

Another plaintiff, Logan Barry, says he was in line for promotion to a leadership position at the Progress-Index in Petersburg, Virginia. After Gannett acquired the newspaper in 2019, the job went to a Black woman with fewer qualifications, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs accused Gannett of violating a federal law prohibiting race discrimination in contracts. They are seeking to require Gannett to eliminate the 2020 policy, along with lost pay and benefits and other money damages.

» Read more

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Webb takes infrared image of Supernova SN1987A

10:04 am

Annotated infrared image from Webb
Click for original image.

The Webb Space Telescope has taken its first infrared image of Supernova SN1987A, the closest supernova to Earth in five centuries at a distance of 168,000 light years away in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud.

The annotated image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows that supernova remnant as Webb sees it. Most of the structures identified here have been observed now for decades as the material from the explosion has been expanding outward. However,

While these structures have been observed to varying degrees
by NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the unparalleled sensitivity and spatial resolution of Webb revealed a new feature in this supernova remnant – small crescent-like structures. These crescents are thought to be a part of the outer layers of gas shot out from the supernova explosion. Their brightness may be an indication of limb brightening, an optical phenomenon that results from viewing the expanding material in three dimensions. In other words, our viewing angle makes it appear that there is more material in these two crescents than there actually may be. [emphasis mine]

I highlight that one word because it is unnecessary, and is only inserted to punch up Webb’s abilities for public relations purposes. Moreover, the rest of the text of the full press release at the link is even worse. It provides little information about the evolution of this supernova since its discovery more than three decades ago, but instead waxes poetic again and again about how wonderful Webb is.

Though Webb certainly has much higher resolution than the earlier infrared space telescope Spitzer and can do far more, this tendency of NASA press releases to use these superlatives only devalues Webb. The images themselves sell the telescope. No need to oversell it in the text.

Meanwhile, the significance of SN 1987A is not explained. Since the development of the telescope by Galileo in the early 1600s, there has been no supernova inside the Milky Way. SN 1987A has been the closest, so it has been photographed repeatedly in multiple wavelengths to track the evolution of the explosion’s ejecta. Webb now gives us a better look in the infrared, though in truth the small amount of new details is actually somewhat disappointing.

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Firefly notifies Space Force that it is ready to launch military payload at a moment’s notice

9:39 am

As part of a military program to improve the speed of launching payloads, Firefly and its payload provider Millennium have now notified the Space Force that both are ready to launch a satellite any time in the next six months, and do so fast.

Although this mission has been promoted as a 24-hour call-up, it is being planned in multiple stages and the companies have spent months rehearsing and preparing. The intent of the demonstration is to help the Space Force and the space industry contractors figure out processes to accelerate the planning and execution of national security missions.

Firefly and Millennium are now officially in a six-month “hot standby phase.” At any point during that time the Space Force will give the companies an alert notification, kicking off a 60-hour window to transport the payload to Firefly’s launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. conduct fueling operations and integrate it with the Alpha rocket’s payload adapter.

Space Force officials will then issue Firefly a launch notice with the final orbit requirements. Firefly will then have 24 hours to update the trajectory and guidance software, encapsulate the payload, transport it to the pad, mate to Alpha, and stand ready to launch at the first available window.

It appears that SpaceX has already done a similar thing with a fast classified launch several years ago, announcing the contract award and launching a classified payload within weeks. This new test is likely to show Firefly’s ability to do the same.

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