Tag: politics

FCC issues first deep space communications license to private asteroid mining company

9:44 am

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on October 18, 2024 issued the first deep space communications license to the private asteroid mining startup company Astroforge for its planned Odin mission to an asteroid.

Asteroid prospecting company AstroForge has been awarded the first-ever commercial license for operating and communicating with a spacecraft in deep space, ahead of its Odin mission that’s set to launch and rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid in early 2025.

The license, granted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Oct. 18, pertains specifically to setting up a communication network with radio ground stations on Earth, to enable commands to be sent up to Odin and data to be transmitted back to Earth. In this case, deep space is defined by the International Telecommunications Union as being farther than 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Earth.

Other private companies have sent missions to the Moon, but this will be the first to go beyond. Odin will orbit and map the asteroid — not yet chosen — in advance of a larger AstroForge spacecraft, dubbed Vestri, that will land on the asteroid.

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Expect fewer and less violent protests should Trump win

11:46 am

Nazi brown shirts destroying Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht
No more American Kristallnachts

Based on recent events, I am willing to predict that we shall see much less violence than expected in the days after the election should Donald Trump win. And if those protests occur, they will mostly be concentrated in Democratic Party strongholds where the protesters feel reasonably confident they can get away with it.

I base this optimistic prediction on the trends we have been seeing. As I first noted in April 2024, the strength of these leftist protests has clearly lost steam in the last four years. While in 2020 the protests and looting and violence occurred almost everywhere, destroying many inner cities, in the last year those protests have mostly been confined to college campuses, and have resulted in relatively little damage in comparison.

The reasons have been two fold. First, the authorities, while still generally treating these protesters too gently, have still responded more aggressively. Violent protesters are now arrested. Some face prison terms. Faced with real consequences, this violent leftist protest movement can no longer get the same numbers to turn out.

Second, the protests and violence has declined because of the utter failure of these protests to work. If anything, the looting and destruction has convinced vast numbers of Americans to oppose the left and to now vote with even greater energy against the politicians who support it.

Thought trends have been obvious for months, recently we have had even more evidence that the protests and violence will be less should Trump win. And that evidence is striking.
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Astronomers call for the FCC to halt all launches of satellite constellations

9:50 am

In a letter [pdf] sent to the FCC on October 24, more than one hundred astronomers demanded a complete halt of all launches of low-Earth satellite constellations until a complete environmental review can be done.

The environmental harms of launching and burning up so many satellites aren’t clear. That’s because the federal government hasn’t conducted an environmental review to understand the impacts. What we do know is that more satellites and more launches lead to more damaging gasses and metals in our atmosphere. We shouldn’t rush forward with launching satellites at this scale without making sure the benefits justify the potential consequences of these new mega-constellations being launched, and then re-entering our atmosphere to burn up and or create debris This is a new frontier, and we should save ourselves a lot of trouble by making sure we move forward in a way that doesn’t cause major problems for our future.

Under this premise, Americans would forever be forbidden from doing anything without first having detailed environmental reviews by federal government agencies. Ponder that thought for a bit.

The astronomers’ argument of course is intellectually dishonest and disingenuous, on multiple levels. It is more than evident that these launches and satellites will cause little serious harm to the atmosphere or the environment. What the astronomers really want is to block these constellations so that their ground-based telescopes will be able to continue to see the heavens unhindered.

To hell with everyone else! We need to gaze at the stars and we are more important!

What these Chicken Littles should really do is give up on ground-based astronomy entirely, and start building space-based telescopes of all kinds, and fast. They would not only bypass the satellite constellations, they would get far better data as they would also bypass the atmosphere to get sharp images of everything they look at.

Whether the FCC listens to this absurd demand depends entirely on who wins the election. A Harris administration might easily go along, shutting down not only SpaceX’s Starlink constellation (thus getting political revenge on Elon Musk for daring to campaign against Democrats) but Amazon’s Kuiper constellation as well. Such an action would likely exceed the FCC’s statutory authority, but that won’t matter to these power-hungry thugs.

Trump in turn would almost certainly shut down much of the administrative state’s mission creep into areas of regulation it has no legal business.

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Three launches last night

9:10 am

Last night three different rockets took off from three continents.

First, Russia launched two space weather satellites and 53 cubesats, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in the far east. The main payload were the two Ionosfera-M satellites, designed to study the Earth’s ionosphere in tandem.

The rocket flew north, over Russia, where its lower stages were dropped into planned drop zones. No word if they crashed near habitable ares.

Next, SpaceX launched an unmanned cargo Dragon to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing safefly back at Cape Canaveral. The capsule is on its fifth flight, and successfully docked with ISS this morning.

Finally, Rocket Lab launched a “confidential commercial” payload under a contract designed to launch very fast after contract signing, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its launchpads in New Zealand.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

108 SpaceX
49 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 126 to 75, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 108 to 93. Note too that with these launches the world has exceeded 200 launches in 2024, the second time this has ever been done, with the record of 213 launches set last year. This record will almost certainly be broken sometime this month.

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Farewell to America

12:57 pm

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Despite my headline, this essay is not intended to be entirely pessimistic. Instead it is my effort to accept a reality that I think few people, including myself, have generally been able to process: The country we shall see after tomorrow’s election will not be the America as founded in 1776 and continued to prosper for the next quarter millennium.

The country can certainly be made great again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX proves it, time after time. The talent and creativity of free Americans is truly endless, and if Donald Trump wins it is very likely that energy will be unleashed again, in ways that no one can predict.

The country can certainly become free again. There is no law that prevents the elimination of bureaucracy and regulation, no matter how immortal government agencies appear to be. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 proves this. Though Russia has sadly retreated back to its top-down government-ruling ways, the country did wipe out almost all its bureaucracy in 1991, resulting in an exuberant restart that even today is nowhere near as oppressive as Soviet rule.

Should Donald Trump win, we should have every expectation that he will do the largest house-cleaning of the federal government ever. The benefits will be immeasurable, and magnificent.

What however will not change, even if Donald Trump wins resoundingly tomorrow, is the modern culture and political ethics that now exist. That modern culture is fundamentally different than the America that existed during the country’ s first 200 years, and it guarantees that America can never be the country it once was.
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Three Chinese astronauts return to Earth

9:32 am

Three Chinese astronauts safely landed in Mongolia today after completing a six month mission on China’s Tiangong-3 space station.

Ye Guangfu, on his second flight, and two rookies, Li Cong and Li Guansu, lifted off on April 25, 2024 at 8:59 am EDT and docked about six-and-a-half hours later. They’ve been aboard the past six months conducting scientific experiments and performing maintenance activities including a space walk.

They landed today, November 3, at 12:24 pm EST at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. China is 13 hours ahead of EST, so it was a nighttime landing there at 1:34 am November 4. China’s CGTN television network provided live coverage. Descent and touchdown were captured by infrared cameras.

A new crew has taken over occupancy of Tiangong-3, and has now started its own six month mission.

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Australia issues licenses for two spaceports

9:27 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

The Australian government has now issued permits for two different spaceports, making possibly orbital launches at both in the near future.

First the planning minister for the province of South Australia has issued final approval allowing launches at the Southern Launch facility on Australia’s southern coast, though that approval included serious restrictions, such as no rocket launched could be taller than 30 meters. He also placed limitations on the number of launches per year, 36, the amount of noise a launch could make, and added other rules “regarding cultural heritage and native vegetation management.”

The spaceport hopes to complete its first orbital launch by the end of next year. Not surprisingly, the leftists in Green Party opposed the spaceport.

Second, the Australian Space Agency issued a launch license to Gilmour Space at its Bowen spaceport on the eastern coast of Australia, seven months late. This quote from the company’s founder is instructive:

But Mr Gilmour said when he and his brother, James Gilmour, set out to be the first to build a rocket of its kind in Australia almost a decade ago, he never imagined that getting a [launch] permit would be the most difficult part. “In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think it’d take this long,” he said. “I honestly thought the environmental approval [to launch a rocket over the Great Barrier Reef] would take the longest, and we got that well over a year ago.”

The company had originally hoped to launch early this year. It still hopes to do so before the end of 2024.

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Japan launches military communications satellite

9:12 am

Japan today successfully launched a military communications satellite on the fourth launch of Mitsubishi’s new H3 rocket.

Liftoff occurred at Japan’s Tanegashima spaceport on the southern end of Japan’s island chain.

This was Japan’s fifth launch in 2024, the most launches it has accomplished in a single year since it completed six in 2018. As such the leader board in the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:

107 SpaceX
49 China
12 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 74, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 91.

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Boeing finally shuts down its DEI division

12:33 pm

Boeing's racist hiring goals in 2024
Boeing’s racist hiring goals in 2024

According to a report from Bloomberg news today, Boeing has now dismantled its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) division, with its head leaving the company.

Staff from Boeing’s DEI office will be combined with another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to people familiar with the matter. Sara Liang Bowen, a Boeing vice president who led the now-defunct department, left the company on Thursday. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase above tells us all we need to know. The focus under Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg will be “talent and employee experience,” not skin color or gender.

Bowen wrote the following in announcing her dismissal:

It has been the privilege of my lifetime to lead Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Boeing company these past 5+ years. Our team strived every day to support the evolving brilliance and creativity of our workforce. The team achieved so much – sometimes imperfectly, never easily – and dreamed of doing much more still. [emphasis mine]

As far as I can tell, all that Bowen accomplished was to destroy the reputation of Boeing as a quality manufacturer of aerospace products. Instead, it became a place which hired people based on their race, and didn’t care if they knew the difference between a screwdriver and a forklift. The screen capture to the right comes from the company’s 2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report [pdf], which is still online, as is the webpage of Boeing’s DEI division. Both still tout the racist quota goals of this DEI department that forced the company to consider race and gender above talent and experience in its hiring. Hopefully that ugliness will vanish soon as well.

Meanwhile, Boeing union employees on the west coast are about to vote on a third contract proposal, having rejected the previous two and going on strike since mid-September. I suspect the decision above to get rid of this poisonous DEI department will sit well with those union employees, and likely help to encourage them to approve the plan.

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European Commission finally awards contract to build its government Starlink-type constellation

9:38 am

The European Commission yesterday finally awarded a gigantic contract to a consortium of European satellite companises to build its government-conceived and government-designed communications constellation designed to duplicate constellations already in orbit and built by Starlink and OneWeb.

The full constellation, dubbed IRIS2 and first proposed in 2022, is expected to have 290 satellites. The consortium, dubbed SpaceRISE, is led by satellite companies SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, and also includes Thales Alenia Space, OHB, Airbus Defence and Space, Telespazio, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Hisdesat, and Thales SIX.

In other words, practically every major European aerospace company gets a piece of the pie.

According to a 31 October press release, the European Commission aims to have the IRIS2 service up and running by 2030. The project was initially expected to cost approximately €6 billion, of which the European Commission would provide 60%, with the rest being covered by private industry. However, recent reports have indicated that the project’s budget will likely reach as much as €10 billion.

Based on these numbers, it is going to take more than six years to launch, with each satellite costing about 3.5 million euros.

This is a very typical European government project, conceived not to fill a real need but to make sure there is a European version of something for Europe to use. It is also conceived as a way to transfer cash to as many European aerospace contractors as possible. Considering the number of companies involved and the fact that the whole constellation is government designed, expect the budget to well exceed ten billion euros before completion, and take far longer to become operational than presently planned. For example, the project was first proposed more than two years ago and only now has the contract been issued. In that time SpaceX conceived and has practically launched its entire direct-to-cell Starlink constellation of about the same number of satellites.

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Has there been a wave of fraudulent election ballots swamping PA? Let’s find out!

2:08 pm

What does the newly discovered election fraud in PA tell us?
What does the newly discovered election
fraud in PA tell us?

In the past week there have been a bunch of stories in the conservative press from three different counties in Pennsylvania, suggesting that each county has been swamped with thousands of fraudulent ballots, produced in bulk and then delivered in large numbers so as to make it difficult to trace or investigate them.

I decided to take a closer look, because this story could either be telling us how corrupt the upcoming election will be, or it might actually be telling us that it is going to be much more reliable than we have anticipated.

The three counties involved are Lancaster, York, and Monroe. All told, less than six thousand voter registration applications, all submitted apparently in bulk by a Arizona-based company called Field+Media Corps, were under review, the number from each county being 2,500, 3,087, and 30 respectively. Note that these do not appear to be actual ballots, but registration forms that would once approved would allow the individual to vote, either by mail or in person.

Of these applications, the reviews have already produced results. For example, York County has found that of the 3,087 submitted, 47% were verified and approved, 29% needed more information, and 24% were declined and are under further review. In Monroe County the investigation has apparently only flagged these 30 forms, with one coming from a deceased person and others flagged for different reasons that in the end might be legitimate.

In Lancaster County officials have not yet issued a report. Initially it announced:
» Read more

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Russia launches military satellite

9:38 am

Russia today (October 31st in Russia) successfully launched a classified military satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia.

The flight path took the satellite over the Arctic, where the rocket’s lower stages crashed harmlessly.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

107 SpaceX
49 China
12 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 73, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 90.

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