Tag: politics

Europe to put instrument on Japanese rover being launched and landed on the Moon by India

9:49 am

The new colonial movement: The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed an agreement with Japan’s space agency JAXA to put a science instrument on a Japanese rover that will be launched by India to the Moon and landed there on an Indian lander.

Under the deal, ESA would provide instruments for the Japanese rover, which would be used in the exploration of the Moon’s south pole under the mission targeted for 2024. … The lunar endeavour between the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and JAXA is called the Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) which aims to launch an Indian lander and a Japanese rover to the Moon.

In the next three years a lot of landers and rovers are planning to land on the Moon, most built by private American companies flying NASA and private payloads, but also joined by probes being sent by Russia, China, and now this Japanese-Indian-European mission. Even if only half succeed, the exploration of the lunar surface will still be quite busy.

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Ukrainian rocket development for Nova Scotia spaceport unhindered by war

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: The development of a Ukrainian rocket dubbed Cyclone 4M for of any satellite customers who choose to launch from a planned Nova Scotia spaceport has not been delayed by the Ukraine war.

“Everything is stable with respect to our team in Ukraine,” said Steve Matier, president of Maritime Launch Services. “The facility there is fine, the staff is fine and at work. . . . We’re continuing to finance their development of the launch vehicle.”

The Cyclone 4M rocket Maritime Launch Services plans to use is designed and built by Ukrainian state corporations Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash in Dnipro. Known as Space City, Dnipro is located in central Ukraine. The city of about a million people was shelled in mid-March by Russian forces and the airport runways and terminal were hit by missile strikes, according to Ukrainian government statements.

This story illustrates the strong possibility that the recent success the Ukraine has had on the battlefield has served to prevented any serious long term damage to its aerospace industry and its partners in the west. Those partnerships if anything look stronger, with the work in the Ukraine apparently able to continue as planned, with only slight delays.

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Commercial Orbital Reef space station passes NASA’s design review

9:30 am

Proposed Orbital Reef space station

Capitalism in space: A proposed commercial space station dubbed Orbital Reef and being built by a partnership led by Sierra Space and Blue Origin has passed its NASA’s design review, allowing for construction to now begin.

The review, conducted as part of a $130 million development contract from NASA, found no issues with the station’s design.

This commercial partnership also includes Boeing, Redwire, Mitsubishi, Genesis Engineering, and Arizona State University, and plans its launch before 2030 when ISS will be retired. This quote from the article I think is important:

“We’re going as fast as we can,” Steve Lindsey, chief strategy officer at Sierra Space, said during a panel at the Goddard Memorial Symposium March 25. “We don’t want to have a gap like we did with crew back in the last decade.”

Three other private space stations are also under construction or being planned, all hoping to be operational prior to ’30. If even two of these launch, the 2030s will be very exciting indeed.

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NASA postpones next SLS dress rehearsal countdown attempt to next week

11:06 pm

NASA officials today said that they have postponed their next attempt to complete the first dress rehearsal countdown of the SLS unitl next week, thus allowing the private commercial manned Axiom launch to ISS to proceed on April 8th.

The rocket will remain at the launch site as the engineering teams assess the issues that caused two scrubs and several launch count down holds.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Whites aggressively blocked from attending health dept meeting

1:14 pm

Jim Crow celebrated in Seattle!
The return of Jim Crow, this time celebrated in the north, in Seattle!

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Seattle health administrators purposely organized an employee Zoom training session for minorities only, then aggressively banned any white staffers from attending, and then lied repeatedly about their actions and the segregated and illegal nature of the session.

The subject of the session was in itself bigoted, as it made the claim that dieting is a white racist strategy to harm blacks.

The King County Department of Human Resources announced the remote workshop, “Anti-Blackness and Diet Culture,” in an all-staff email newsletter. It was part of the county’s Balanced You program, which focuses on staff wellness. Tacoma-based Liberating Jasper, which conducted the workshop, claims dieting is harmful to black people, and that “Western ideals of attractiveness and health are steeped in whiteness.” It even implies that obesity can be healthy.

Despite claims to the contrary, the workshop intentionally excluded white people. Indeed, the event was promoted both publicly and privately for “BIPOC employees only.”

For those not educated in the left’s alphabet lexicon of races and genders, BIPOC stands for blacks, indigenous people, and people of color. It is designed to create a group of favored minorities while excluding the sexual perverse, which in other contexts the left will gladly celebrate.

What makes the story especially offensive is not this bigoted session and the desire to ban any whites from attending, but the extent in which government officials repeatedly lied about their intentions to discriminate against whites. This story was revealed by Seattle radio host Jason Rantz. Over and over again his office would challenge officials, who would make some absurd claim, and over and over again Rantz would prove this an outright lie, using internal emails obtained by Rantz’s investigation.

For example, one white attendee was specifically removed from the Zoom meeting because of his race.
» Read more

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UAE wants to prioritize private enterprise for its space effort

10:17 am

Capitalism in space: According to officials of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) space agency, that nation is working to encourage the growth of a private space industry, funded initially using government money, in its effort to become a major world player in space.

“We’ve spent well over Dh1.5 billion ($408 million) on building capacity within the space industry over the last eight years and we’re more than doubling that over the next decade.”

Laws and regulations, including permits, which would allow interested companies to set up base in the UAE, are already available through a space law passed in 2019.

Companies would also have access to funding from a new initiative launched by the space agency, called Space Analytics and Solutions, which has a budget of Dh20 million. The programme aims to help start-ups build space-based applications that focus on food security, climate change, infrastructure and the oil and gas industry.

The space agency hopes that as these companies progress, they would become less reliant on government funding.

While the UAE’s Al-Amal Mars orbiter was mostly built and launched by foreign companies, it hopes its next major mission, to send an unmanned probe to seven asteroids, will be built almost entirely by companies run by UAE citizens, something they claim they have achieved with an upcoming smallsat Earth observation satellite.

The article also mentioned as an aside that the UAE has ended its 2019 agreement with Virgin Galactic to allow it to launch from the UAE. Instead, it is negotiating with Blue Origin “to set up spaceports.”

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More than 4,000 people apply to Japan’s JAXA space agency to become astronauts

10:05 am

In its first new recruitment effort in thirteen years, JASA has received more than 4,000 applications from people eager to become astronauts flying to ISS.

A record number of people applied as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for the first time dropped the requirement that candidates have a university education. The change was made in the hope of recruiting people with a wide range of experience.

However, applicants were required to have at least three years of work experience as of late March, with some academic qualifications being considered as meeting this requirement.

It is unfortunate that the Japanese people do not have more options to get into space. They must either buy a flight from foreign private companies, or depend on a government agency to approve them.

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Rogozin proposes Russia launch modules to China’s space station

9:54 am

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, yesterday proposed in an interview on China’s state-run press that Russia is eager to discuss the possibility of attaching its future space station modules to China’s Tiangong space station.

“As for the Chinese space station, we can discuss construction of some joint modules as well. In order to be friends in space, friendship must first be established back on Earth, and Russia and China are friends on Earth,” Rogozin said. He opined that Russia and China “can be together” in human spaceflights as well.

Whether China will agree is in some ways besides the point. The real question is whether Russia has the capability to do this. Though China and Russia already have a joint agreement to develop a permanent base on the Moon, China is carrying most of the load. Moreover, Russia’s new modules for ISS are decades behind schedule. Whether they will now even be launched to ISS is questionable. Adding these Russian modules to China’s space station will require some major engineering discussions, as neither Tiangong nor the modules were designed for such a thing.

I suspect the two countries will work out an agreement that they will announce with great fanfare. I also expect China will insist that at no time will it be dependent on Russian technology, so that if Russia is delayed or can’t get it done, China will not be hampered in any way. This is essentially their deal for building the lunar base.

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SLS dress rehearsal countdown scrubbed an hour before T-0

9:22 am

Yesterday’s first dress rehearsal countdown for NASA’s SLS rocket managed to get within an hour of T-0 with its oxygen tanks half full when mission control scrubbed the countdown.

During chilldown of the lines in preparation for loading the liquid hydrogen, the teams encountered an issue with a panel on the mobile launcher that controls the core stage vent valve. The purpose of the vent valve is to relieve pressure from the core stage during tanking. Given the time to resolve the issue as teams were nearing the end of their shifts, the launch director made the call to stop the test for the day. A crew will investigate the issue at the pad, and the team will review range availability and the time needed to turn systems around before making a determination on the path forward.

No word as yet when they will attempt the next full dress rehearsal. The delays with SLS have so far caused several further delays for Axiom’s private mission to ISS, since NASA has given SLS priority over the range. It has now been pushed back to April 8th.

Note that none of these problems should be a surprise. This is the first time the rocket and mobile launcher have been placed under flight conditions, so minor issues should be expected. At the same time, dealing with these issues now, just before actual launch, rather than earlier in development, illustrates the backwards way NASA’s management has run this program. You can never design anything new perfectly. You need to test and fail and fix along the way. NASA avoids testing because it can’t build anything at a reasonable cost. The result is that when it comes time to launch, lots of previously unidentified minor issues pop up that need fixing.

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Pushback: Musk — offended by Twitter censorship — becomes its biggest shareholder

1:19 pm

Twitter's censorship a target of Elon Musk
Twitter’s censorship a target of Elon Musk

Defeating the censors: On March 25th Elon Musk — opposed to the censorship of conservatives on the social media outlet Twitter — had conducted a poll on Twitter that asked:

Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?

The poll results were unequivocal: by 70.4% to 29.6% the respondents declared that the present management at Twitter is hostile to free speech.

In the next two days Musk then tweeted “Is a new platform needed?” followed by “Seize the memes of production!” The rumors all suggested that Musk would start his own competing social media platform.

Musk fooled everyone. Instead, as revealed today he proceeded to buy 9.2% of Twitter’s shares, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder.

What Musk will do with this new power is of course not yet known. » Read more

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Rogozin tweets: ISS cooperation to end

5:59 pm

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s aerospace corporation, Roscosmos, today confirmed in a series of tweets that Russia intends to end its partnership at ISS due to the sanctions imposed on Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine.

Rogozin however did not provide any details other than saying:

Specific proposals of Roscosmos on the timing of the completion of cooperation within the framework of the ISS with the space agencies of the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Japan will be reported to the leadership of our country in the near future.

I predict the following:

1. No more barter flights, exchanging Russian and international astronauts on each other’s capsules.
2. No more mutual research on the station.
3. Russia leaves as of ’24, after it adds its remaining modules.

Once those extra modules are launched and installed on the Russian half of ISS, Roscosmos will be more capable of separating its half from ISS and fly it independently. There will be engineering challenges, but this plan will give them two years to address them. It will also give everyone else the time necessary to plan for that separation.

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SLS dress rehearsal begins, with press coverage limited by NASA

5:56 pm

NASA today began the two-day-long “wet dress rehearsal” countdown of its first SLS rocket, with T-0 expected to occur at 2:40 pm (Eastern) on April 3rd.

The article at the link provides all the information you could want about this rocket, which is now about seven years behind schedule and having a cost so far about $25 billion. This quote however tells us much about the mentality at NASA:

But much of the test will happen without independent press coverage. NASA plans to provide sanctioned updates on the two-day dress rehearsal via the agency’s website and social media accounts, but news media representatives are not being permitted to listen to the countdown activities.

NASA has cited security and export control restrictions for the move. Numerous media representatives requested access to the SLS countdown audio for the wet dress rehearsal. Launch countdown audio feeds for other U.S. rockets, including those developed by private companies and hauling sensitive U.S. military satellites into orbit, are widely available to the news media and the public.

…NASA plans to release only text updates through the weekend. NASA TV will not be airing any live commentary for the final hours of the practice countdown. The agency’s television channel has previously provided live coverage of similar events, such as space shuttle tanking tests. [emphasis mine]

NASA reasons for not allowing anyone to listen to its audio feed — “security and export control restrictions” — is an utter lie. The real reason is that NASA fears the public’s reaction should anything not go exactly as planned. By blocking access to the audio feed, they can hide any faux pas.

NASA’s fear of course is misplaced. This is a test. No one will be surprised or outraged if it doesn’t go perfectly. Better to be open and up front than try to hide problems, because eventually those problems will be revealed and the cover-up will do far more harm to NASA’s reputation than the problems themselves.

The many new private rocket companies, SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Astra, Virgin Orbit, understand this, which is why they all make their primary countdown audio feeds available, though of course they almost certainly have secondary private feeds where engineers can speak more freely. Similarly, NASA did the same in the 1960s, and then during the entire shuttle program.

Now however “export control restrictions” and “security” requires them to be secretive? It is to laugh.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Biden’s Labor Board attempts to silence conservative news outlet for making bad Twitter joke

11:50 am

Ben Domenech and The Federalist, blacklisted
Ben Domenech and The Federalist, censored by the federal government’s
National Labor Relations Board

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is attempting to silence the conservative news site The Federalist for “unfair labor practice” because its publisher Ben Domenech sent out a bad Twitter joke in 2019 about unions, and two lawyers who had nothing to do with the company complained to the NLRB.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ordered Ben Domenech—publisher of the conservative website The Federalist…—to take down a June 2019 tweet in which he joked about sending employees who wanted to unionize to work in “the salt mines.” Domenech has refused, and the case is now making its way through the courts.

Domenech’s tweet came in response to news that employees of Vox Media Inc. walked off the job in support of unionization. No one at The Federalist had publicly expressed any interest in unionizing, and two of the website’s six employees filed affidavits attesting that they viewed the tweet as a joke. As far as I know, Domenech doesn’t own any salt mines.

The complainants, leftist lawyers Matt Bruenig (a former NLRB attorney) and Joel Fleming, have never worked for or been personally harmed by the Federalist and were clearly acting to silence their political opponents by taking advantage of NLRB’s overly broad regulations, which allow total strangers to file complaints against businesses they don’t like. The NLRB then moves to harass those businesses.
» Read more

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Will XCOR’s Lynx’s spaceplane be reborn as smallsat launcher taking off from California airport?

9:26 am

Capitalism in space: Wagner Star Industries, a startup that now owns the unfinished Lynx spaceplane that bankrupt XCOR had intended for suborbital tourists flights, has signed a agreement with Paso Robles Municipal Airport in California to launch from there.

Wagner’s plan is to reconfigure Lynx as an unmanned first stage that would launch smallsats into orbit. It would launch and land on a runway from Paso Robles.

Wagner Star is in the process of converting the first Lynx vehicle into a drone so it can begin tests, according to the company’s website. The work involves removing life-support systems that had been installed to support the pilot and passenger and installing equipment for remote controlled operation.

Quetzalcóatl would take off from a runway, release its payload in suborbital space, and then glide back to where it took off. The company said it would be able to launch satellites from any commercial airport runway for $5 million per flight. A suborbital flight without a satellite launch would cost $3 million.

A clever plan. I have doubts about the satellite launches, but using this plane to place drones into high altitude where they could then continue to fly for great distances will almost certainly appeal to the military.

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The Ukraine War: Increasing Ukrainian gains in the past week

4:42 pm

The Ukraine War as of March 24, 2022
The Ukraine War as of March 24, 2022. Click for full map.

The Ukraine War as of March 31, 2022
The Ukraine War as of March 31, 2022. Click for full map.

Another week has passed in the Ukraine war, and with it we begin to see increasing evidence that not only has the Russian invasion stalled, but that the Ukraine is beginning to push back with more and more effectiveness.

The two maps to the right are from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and have been simplified, annotated, and reduced to post here. The top was from ISW’s March 24, 2022 report, the bottom from its report today. The dark red areas are regions either controlled by Russia or areas of confirmed Russian advance. The light red indicates areas the Russians claim to control without confirmation. The blue areas mark areas retaken by the Ukraine in battle. The circles indicate areas of recent heavy fighting.

The green arrows I have added to both maps indicate areas where there have been changes since the week prior. Like last week, the arrows point almost entirely to areas where Russian control has ebbed, either because the Russians have chosen to retreat, or because Ukrainian forces have pushed them out. The summary from ISW is succinct:
» Read more

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Pushback: University’s blacklisting of a student quickly ends when confronted by lawyers

1:08 pm


Boris Badenov: The school administrators at
Southern Illinois University

Today’s blacklist story came and went so quickly that no one in the press really ever had a chance to cover it. I however want to highlight it today because it tells us a great deal about today’s bankrupt academic culture, and its paper tiger nature if challenged.

On February 10, 2022, Jamie Ball, the director for Equal Opportunity, Access and Title IX Coordination at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, sent notices to Maggie DeJong, a student in the school’s Art Therapy Counseling Program, telling DeJong that she was forthwith forbidden to interact in any way with three other students.

Because DeJong attended classes and also worked at the same facility as these three students, the orders essentially blacklisted her from school through the end of the ’22 semester.

Ball provided no facts or reasons for the “no-contact” orders, other than saying that any contact between DeJong and these three students “would not be welcome or appropriate at this time.” Ball’s order also admitted that no harassment or violation of school policy had occurred. Her order was simply “to prevent interactions that could be perceived by either party as unwelcome, retaliatory, intimidating, or harassing.”

In other words, Ball was punishing DeJong for something that might happen, likely based on secret accusations made by those three students.

On February 23rd, less than two weeks later, lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sent the school’s Chancellor, Randy Penbrook, a letter [pdf] outlining the illegality of this action, and demanding the no-contact orders be immediately rescinded.
» Read more

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Another update on the lie that was COVID

12:16 pm

How governments determined policy against COVID
How our governments continue to determine policy against COVID

One week ago I published a short essay listing a number of news stories that, as I wrote then, “illustrate starkly the foolishness and the over-reaction to COVID.”

It appears I might have to make this a weekly feature. In the last seven days I’ve collected a whole bunch of new articles, all of which provide further evidence of the lie that was COVID. Not only did our political and health leadership in government routinely lie to us, they often exhibited a remarkable ignorance about some basic science. Until there is reckoning that cleans house in these government agencies, Americans should never believe anything they say.

Most of the stories this past week document the overall failure of the COVID shots to do what these government officials promised: to prevent infection. To understand the significance of this fact, one must go back and review the claims made by government health officials when these shots were first developed. From the beginning these officials repeatedly claimed that the shots would prevent transmission of the virus, and protect people from any Wuhan flu infection if they got the jab. Just watch some of the videos here. Over and over again so-called experts claimed back in the spring of 2021 that the shots would “prevent transmission.”

NOT. » Read more

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Europe’s deep space communications network to support India’s next two missions beyond Earth orbit

8:52 am

The new colonial movement: Based upon a 2021 agreement, the European Space Agency (ESA) today outlined how its deep space communications network of antennas will support India’s next two missions beyond Earth orbit.

ESA’s global deep-space communication antennas will provide essential support to both missions every step of the way, tracking the spacecraft, pinpointing their locations at crucial stages, transmitting commands and receiving ‘telemetry’ and valuable science data.

In June 2021, ESA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) signed an agreement to provide technical support to each other, including tracking and communication services to upcoming Indian space missions via ESA’s ground stations.

The first missions to benefit from this new support agreement will enable India look to the Sun and the Moon with the Aditya-L1 solar observatory and Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and rover, both due to launch in 2022 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota Range (SDSC SHAR), India.

Though scheduled for launch this year, ISRO (India’s space agency) has not yet announced firm launch dates for either.

This arrangement signals an effort by India and Europe to remain independent of the American Artemis program, which is NASA’s central program for manned missions beyond Earth orbit. To partner with NASA for such missions the Trump administration had demanded nations sign the Artemis Accords, though that requirement might have been eased by the Biden administration for deep space communications.

Regardless, this agreement gives both India and ESA flexibility for remaining outside the accords, at least for now. Neither India nor most of the partners in the ESA have signed, with France and Germany the most notable European nations remaining outside the accords.

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Soyuz capsule returns three astronauts safely, completing Mark Vande Hei’s 355 day mission

8:28 am

A Russian Soyuz capsule successfully returned three astronauts back to Earth today, thus completing Mark Vande Hei’s 355 day mission, the longest so far achieved by an American astronaut.

Vande Hei’s record is the fifth longest overall, behind four other Russians on Mir. Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov were the first to complete a year-long flight in 1987-1988. Sergei Avdeyev’s flight of 381 days on Mir in 1998-1999 is the second longest. Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest flight, 437 days in 1994-1995.

Now that Vande Hei is safely back on Earth, expect Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, to make some announcement in the next day or so further limiting cooperation at ISS. It is my expectation he will end the discussions between Roscosmos and NASA to exchange one-for-one flights on each other’s capsules. While the partnership to maintain and occupy ISS will continue, Rogozin will likely end any cooperation otherwise.

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China’s Long March 11 rocket launches three satellites

8:20 am

China today successfully launched what appear to be three technology test satellites using its Long March 11 rocket.

The three satellites Tianping-2A, Tianping-2B and Tianping-2C will provide services such as atmospheric space environment survey and orbital prediction model correction.

This is all we know about these satellites.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
8 China
4 Russia
2 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 17 to 8 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Vassar’s college newspaper retracts story because it quoted “too many whites”

1:30 pm

Vassar College: now run by clowns

The new dark age of silencing: The Miscellany News, the college newspaper at Vassar College, recently retracted an article not because it contained any errors of fact (which it did not) but because the article had simply interviewed too many white students in its reporting.

The article had been written to describe the controversy surrounding the school’s decision to have Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, speak at the school, and his decision to withdraw because of the uproar from students demanding he be blacklisted. From the newspaper’s retraction announcement:

We would like to use this statement to both emphasize our values of diversity and inclusion, and delve deeply into our editorial process and the resulting article in question, especially since we understand that many people in the Vassar community are unaware of the article’s removal. … In this article, we attempted to include a variety of quotes from students describing why there was protest to the announcement of him as speaker in the first place, and the students’ reaction to his withdrawal.

In prioritizing urgency over thoroughness, we made misguided and insensitive oversights with whom we were representing in the article and failed to provide in-depth reporting of the issue at large. The majority of our quotations came from white students and therefore we reduced the positions of students of color to a singular, tokenized perspective. After this was brought to our attention, the paper decided to remove the article online in an attempt to prevent further harm among the communities we misrepresented. [emphasis mine]

» Read more

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Surprise! NASA’s ’23 budget request asks for more money!

11:13 am

In releasing its budget request this week to Congress for the 2023 fiscal year, NASA did what it routinely does each year, ask for more money, this time asking for an 8% increase from what Congress appropriated last year.

NASA’s FY2023 budget request is $25.974 billion versus the FY2022 appropriation of $24.041 billion. NASA had requested $24.802 billion in large part to pay for the Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but Congress wasn’t willing to allocate that much. While supportive of Artemis and NASA’s many other science, aeronautics and technology programs, there is a limit as to how much Congress is willing to invest.

NASA is requesting not just another boost in FY2023, but in the “out years” thereafter, rising to $28 billion in FY2027, though much of that purchasing power likely will be lost to inflation.

…In essence, the agency wants more money for everything it is doing.

The budget request also asks again for Congress to terminate the SOFIA airborne telescope, which NASA contends is not producing enough science to justify its $80 million annual cost. Congress has repeatedly refused to do so in past years. As should be expected, Congress will likely not cancel SOFIA again, as it likes to spend money we don’t have.

The goal of the increased funding for Artemis is also to continue the SLS program for many years to come. Expect Congress to also fund this in the coming few years, though the long term future of SLS remains in doubt, especially if SpaceX’s Starship begins flying. Artemis won’t be cancelled by our spendthrift Congress, but Congress will likely decide to shift that spending to Starship and other private rockets rather than SLS as those private rockets come on line.

All in all, expect Congress to give NASA more cash, but not as much as the agency requests.

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Japanese satellite startup Synspective raises $100 million

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: The Japanese satellite startup Synspective announced today that it has successfully raised $100 million in private investment capital.

The latest funding was led by Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), Nomura SPARX Investment, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), and Pavilion Capital Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) among others, as well as bank loans, and it is supposed to be ranked within the top ten largest startups in Japan. This puts our total funding value at US $200M (22.8 billion yen) since our founding.

The company plans to launch a constellation of 30 radar satellites by 2026, designed to do Earth resource observations.

Synspective had hoped to launch its first demonstration satellite in ’23 on a Soyuz rocket. That launch is presently threatened by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, though it is not clear if it has been cancelled.

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China successfully launches Long March 6A for the first time

9:55 am

China today successfully completed the first launched of its Long March 6A rocket, upgraded significantly from earlier versions of the Long March 6.

The launch also debuted a new launchpad at China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the country’s interior. The two payloads deployed appear to be technology tests, though China provided little information.

The launch of the Long March 6A also sported four solid rocket strap-on boosters. With these and the core first stage all crashing on land in China, there was no word whether any had any technology for controlling their landings.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
7 China
4 Russia
2 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 17 to 7 in the national rankings.

4 comments

Singapore signs Artemis Accords

9:46 am

Singapore announced yesterday that it has become the eighteenth nation to sign the Artemis Accords with the United States.

The full list of signatories: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Though the press announcement claims the accords are “grounded in the Outer Space Treaty,” this is only superficially correct. The real goal of the accords is to build a coalition of governments that wish to overcome the treaty’s restrictions on property rights in space.

Russia and China oppose the accords. Of the other big space-faring nations, France, Germany, and India remain uncommitted one way or the other. The Ukraine War could very well push all three to sign the accords, as their partnerships with Russia have largely vanished, and with them any incentive to stay out. Moreover, the U.S. has made it clear that for a nation to participate in its Artemis program it must sign the accords.

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Today’s blacklisted American: TV reporter fired for covering protest objectively

12:16 pm

Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter
Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter

The new dark age of silencing: A television reporter for the ABC affiliate in Seattle, KOMO, Jonathan Choe, was fired after he had covered, as accurately as possible, a peaceful Proud Boys demonstration in Seattle, including a photo montage of the event.

Choe, a reporter of 20 years, created a photo montage with sound from the march to end his day. In the clips, he included music from the rally that included a song called “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” Although Choe was unfamiliar with the tune, it is allegedly played frequently at Proud Boys rallies and similar gatherings.

“I wanted to simply capture a moment in time, with authentic visuals and sounds. It was clearly misinterpreted by some on-line,” Choe wrote.

Because of the uproar, Choe said his news director told him to take down all his social media related to the Proud Boys rally. He did so, but was fired the following day, he said.

By his own response to his firing Choe reveals that he himself buys into the racist, anti-American propaganda of today’s left, focusing much of his commentary on his race (he is Asian-American) and noting that though he has been a successfully journalist “for more than 20 years,” he has somehow “faced years of discrimination for my race and ethnicity.” The willful blindness of these statements is astonishing. How could Choe get a great job for a major television affiliate reporting the news if he was living in such a terrible bigoted nation (which by the way has recently twice elected a black man as president)?

No matter. He tried to do his job well and fairly, and a Twitter mob immediately descended upon him. His boss then cowered in fear, forcing Choe to first censor his work, and then firing him because the only thing that will satisfy a lynch mob is a lynching.

Of course, the lynching is not enough. » Read more

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The seeds of today’s madness were planted decades ago

9:58 am

Political journalist Doug Ross yesterday re-posted an essay he had written a decade ago, which had successfully predicted the crime wave we are undergoing today.

In it, he outlined how the growth in 2011 in government anti-poverty and welfare programs — which acted to further tear apart families — was going to lead to what he called “a true Obama Crime Wave” sometime in the early 2020s.

  • Fact: There are a record number of Americans dependent upon government anti-poverty programs thanks to the Obama Democrats
  • Fact: Expanded access to welfare and food stamps greatly increases the number of children born to unwed mothers
  • Fact: Single-parent families correlate to higher crime rates
  • Conclusion: with the unprecedented increase in welfare, food stamps and unemployment, we will also see an unparalleled increase in violent crime within the next dozen or so years.

Obama and his Democrat sycophants in Congress will have created hundreds of thousands of single-parent families. These kids, born out-of-wedlock, will find themselves trapped in lives of criminality at far higher rates than kids from two-parent families.

Fast forward a dozen years, give or take a couple, and we will see a true Obama Crime Wave. I predict that we will see an unprecedented increase in crime. In fact, you could call it historic.

And the question is not whether it will happen. The question is just how bad it will be.

Ross’s prediction in 2011 was of course guaranteed to be right, as good social science research since the early and mid-twentieth century had shown that if you raise children in broken homes, chaos ensues when they reach adulthood.

I think however that Ross and most previous researchers have missed half the equation. Broken homes certainly produce adults who don’t know right from wrong, and thus become hardened and violent criminals.
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ISRO pinpoints cause of August ’21 failure of India’s GSLV

9:59 am

India’s space agency ISRO has completed its investigation of the failure of the third stage of its GSLV rocket during an August ’21 launch, identifying a leaky valve as the cause.

The leakage in the Vent and Relief Valve is being attributed to the damage in the soft seal that could have occurred during the valve operations or due to contamination and valve mounting stresses induced under cryogenic temperature conditions.

“The committee has submitted comprehensive recommendations to enhance the robustness of the Cryogenic Upper Stage for future GSLV missions, which includes an active LH2 tank pressurization system to be incorporated to ensure sufficient pressure in the LH2 tank at the appropriate time before engine start command, strengthening of Vent & Relief Valve and associated fluid circuits to avoid the possibility of leakage along with the automatic monitoring of additional cryogenic stage parameters for giving lift-off clearance,” Isro said.

India entire space industry almost completely shut down for two years due to its panic over the Wuhan flu. This launch was part of its effort to resume launches, and the failure only added to that shutdown.

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FAA again delays decision on environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility

1:32 pm

Surprise, surprise! According to an FAA email sent out today, the agency has once again, for the fifth time, delayed its decision on the environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica Starship launch site.

From the email:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is updating the release date for the SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) on the Federal Infrastructure Permitting Dashboard (Permitting Dashboard) and project website. The FAA plans to issue the Final PEA on April 29th. The planned April 29, 2022 release date will allow the FAA to review the Final PEA, including responses to comments, and complete consultation and coordination with agencies at the local, State, and Federal level. All consultations must be complete before the FAA can issue the Final PEA.

This date is now listed on the FAA’s SpaceX-Starship webpage. Nor is the decision a surprise. Expect the FAA to continue this charade month-to-month until after the November election, when the Biden administration will then feel free to block SpaceX’s effort in Boca Chica completely.

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Pushback: Lawsuit by teacher fired for his opinions to be heard by VA Supreme Court

11:49 am

Peter Vlaming, fired for his opinions
Peter Vlaming

Peter Vlaming was a successful French teacher in the West Point School District in Virgina in 2018, until he was fired for refusing to use male pronouns demanded by a female student.

In 2018, one of Peter’s female students decided to identify as male.

Peter went out of his way to accommodate this student. He said he would use the student’s preferred male-sounding name and avoid using pronouns.

But Peter simply could not use male pronouns for a female student because it would contradict his core beliefs. This was about more than just pronouns; it was about what pronouns mean. In speech, after all, pronouns identify us as either male or female.

Peter couldn’t in good conscience use male pronouns to identify a female student. At the same time, he made it clear that he wanted to work with the student by avoiding pronouns that may cause offense.

But that wasn’t good enough for the school district. It didn’t care about how Peter treated the student. It was on a crusade for conformity. It wanted to force Peter to speak words he disagreed with by using pronouns for the student—even when that student was not present. [emphasis in original]

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