Tag: Russia

U.S. universities have pocketed $6 billion from hostile enemy countries

8:57 pm

Our new fifth column: An investigation by the Department of Education has found that U.S. universities have taken $6 billion in unreported donations from hostile coutnries, all of which could be in violation of the law.

A probe by the Department of Education into colleges that accept foreign investments and donations has uncovered $6 billion in previously unreported foreign donations from US adversaries including China and Russia, a report said Friday.

House Republicans were monitoring the investigation into the schools to determine if they were violating Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which prohibits an “Institution of Higher Learning” from failing to properly report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more, Town Hall reported.

It also appears that some of those universities are now uncooperative, apparently placing their loyalties more with their foreign backers than with their own country.

This evidence is not surprising, and is reinforced by the numerous arrests in recent months of many university professors taking money secretly and illegally from China. The culture in the American university community has been downright hostile to the United States for decades. In the past it was dressed up as their effort to not be jingoistic. That was a long time ago. For at least two decades the academic community has been an anti-American fifth column, working as much as it can with foreign powers to both indoctrinate its students against their own country, while providing aid and comfort to authoritarian countries like Russia and China.

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NASA signs deal with Russians for one Soyuz seat to ISS

9:17 am

Citing a need to provide some back-up in case there are more delays getting the American manned capsules being built by SpaceX and Boeing into operation, NASA yesterday announced that it has signed a deal with Roscosmos to buy one seat on the October Soyuz launch to ISS.

The statement did not disclose the value of the deal, but NASA spokesman Josh Finch told SpaceNews the agreement is valued at $90.25 million. That includes the seat on the Soyuz spacecraft and various training, pre-launch and post-landing services. In addition, Finch said that NASA will compensate Roscosmos for bumping a Russian cosmonaut off that Soyuz mission by flying an unspecified amount of Russian cargo to the station on NASA commercial cargo spacecraft.

I wonder if there are other political reasons behind this deal, besides insuring American access to ISS. $90 million is a lot of money to the Russians, and considering their impending loss of income from NASA (with us no longer buying Soyuz seats in the future) as well as their loss of most of their commercial launch business, it could be that NASA managers wanted to shore up Roscosmos’s financial situation. Remember, at NASA there are many who swear a greater loyalty to space operations from all countries, even at the expense of the United States.

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Sea Launch project crushed by Putin government

5:10 pm

Nice launch platform you got there. Be a shame is something happened to it: S7, the Russian company that had purchased and moved the Sea Launch platform from California to Russian, now says it is suspending operations because of the high costs imposed upon it by the Russian government.

The sale of Sea Launch to S7 Group closed in April 2018, but only in recent months had the company taken steps to move the ships from Long Beach to Russia. In February, the launch platform, Odyssey, was loaded onto a cargo ship that transported it to Russia, while the command ship sailed on its own.

In the interview, Filev appeared to regret moving the ships to Russia. He said he had been told that the costs of basing the ships in Russia would be no higher than what they had been in California. Instead, he said the cost was “twice as worse” in Russia.

S7 had claimed it hoped to do as many as 70 launches over the next 15 years, but it has no launch vehicle other than ones that the Russian government controls and allows it to use. It thus appears that the Putin government is moving to push S7 out of the deal so the government can take over.

Very typical for the corrupt, mob-inspired government in Putin’s Russia. There, you do not start your own company that might compete with the powers-that-be. Instead, anything you accomplish will taken by them for their own benefit.

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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

9:18 pm

Russia tonight successfully launched a new Progress freighter to ISS using its Soyuz-2 rocket.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

6 China
6 SpaceX
6 Russia

The U.S. now leads both China and Russia 10 to 6 in the national rankings. This is the first time that Russia has been able to keep up with China in launches in several years. Since China had expected to launch more times than Russia in 2020, this suggests that China’s launch rate has been reduced because of the Wuhan flu. It at least appears that many of their smaller launch rockets have suspended launches.

We have also heard nothing recently about China’s planned mid- to late-April first launch of its Long March 5B. With only six days left in the month, one wonders if this launch too has been delayed.

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Russians slash their launch prices by 39%

9:08 am

Capitalism in space: Having lost their entire commercial market share because of SpaceX’s lower prices, the Russians have finally decided to slash their launch prices by 39%.

As the article notes, the cost for a Proton rocket launch was once $100 million. Then SpaceX came along with a $60 million pricetag. At first the Russians poo-pooed this, and did nothing. When their customers started to vanish however they decided to finally compete, so a year ago they cut the Proton price to match SpaceX’s.

Because of SpaceX’s ability to reuse its first stages, however, that $60 million price no longer worked. SpaceX had a year earlier lowered its prices even more, to $50 million, for launches with used first stages.

This new price slash by Roscosmos probably brings their price down to about $36 million, and thus beats SpaceX.

We shall see whether it will attract new customers. It definitely is now cheaper, but it is also less reliable. Russia continues to have serious quality control problems at its manufacturing level.

That SpaceX’s arrival forced a drop in the price of a launch from $100 million to less than $40 million illustrates the beautiful value of freedom and competition. The change is even more spectacular when you consider that ULA, the dominant American launch company before SpaceX, had been charging between $200 to $400 million per launch. For decades the Russians, ULA, and Arianespace refused to compete, working instead as a cartel to keep costs high.

SpaceX has ended this corrupt practice. We now have a competitive launch industry, and the result is that the exploration of the solar system is finally becoming a real possibility.

Correction: I originally called ULA “the only American launch company before SpaceX.” This was not correct, as Orbital Sciences, now part of Northrop Grumman, was also launching satellites. It just was a very minor player, with little impact. It was also excluded from the military’s EELV program, and thus could not launch payloads for them after around 2005.

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Space Force hypes unspecified Russian anti-satellite test

8:52 am

Yesterday Space Force officials released a scathing press release condemning a so-called Russian anti-satellite test, calling it “a threat” while providing zero details about what the Russians actually did.

I saw the press release and realized it was nothing more than an effort by the new Space Force to justify its existence and to possibly encourage more funding from Congress. Until they release some details about the test itself, the story simply doesn’t merit coverage.

Our compliant and brainless media today however immediately jumped on the Washington swamp bandwagon with numerous stories reinforcing and supporting the Space Force lobbying effort. Here are a few examples:

All of these articles buy into the Space Force agenda, with practically no skepticism. All provide lots of quotes from a variety of Washington “experts” backing the Space Force position, insisting that the Russians are evil and have now demonstrated a new capability that requires a big U.S. response. None provide any further detail about the test itself, meaning that no further information on it was available, and that their stories were nothing more than a xerox of that empty Space Force press release.

Only this story from C4ISRNET described the press release properly, giving no play to these so-called “experts” because any quotes they would provide were merely a transparent lobbying effort for the Space Force. Instead, the article provided this much needed background:

Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation, said the test is likely of the Nudol, a ballistic-missile system capable of taking out satellites in low earth orbit. He warned not to overreact, as the system has been tested several times in recent years. According to the CSIS Aerospace Security Project’s Space Threat Assessment 2020, Russia conducted its seventh test of Nudol in December 2018.

As to why military leaders issued the statement, Weeden said it is “part of the DoD being more public about what’s going on in space, which is good. But it also seems the only thing they’re doing about it is using it to justify more U.S. spending on our own counterspace capabilities.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, this test is nothing unusual, and was being hyped by the Space Force in order to garner a bigger budget for the new agency.

Sadly, this is par for the course. Our entire society is presently shut down because medical “experts” in Washington and the mainstream leftist press did the same thing with COVID-19, hyping what was clearly nothing more than a new disease variation of the annual flu season so much that they convinced American public it was another Black Plague. The result: a new Great Depression, millions out of work, and the end of American freedom, all for the benefit of those Washington “experts” and that leftist press.

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Russians find serious problems with three Proton rockets

8:49 am

As a result of a new quality control inspection system, the Russians have discovered that three Proton rockets delivered for launch had serious issues, and have sent them back to the manufacturer.

Three Proton-M heavy-lift launch vehicles designated for launching satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome will be returned to the Khrunichev rocket manufacturer in Moscow so that low-quality parts can be replaced, a source in the space and rocket industry has told Sputnik.

The defective parts, believed to have been manufactured between 2015 and 2016, were said to have been discovered last month due to checks under a new quality control system introduced by Roscosmos. “Having analyzed the situation, experts came to the conclusion that the replacement of the [faulty] components on the three Proton-M rockets located at Baikonur could only be done at the factory,” the source said.

Two of the rockets have already been loaded up onto a train and sent back, with the remaining rocket to be sent back at a later date.

This is a follow-up on the March 11th story where they had discovered “mismatched” parts on a Proton. They have also had to replace an entire stage on a Soyuz due a malfunction detected prior to launch.

While it is excellent news that the Russians are now catching these issues before launch, that they continue to have such problems at the manufacturing level is not good.

Their problem is that in Russia they do not permit competition. The government works hand-in-glove with the established players to lock out new companies. Thus, no natural mechanism exists to weed out bad operations. They are trying to do it with tighter inspections, but in the end, that just adds cost and slows operations.

Meanwhile, in a related story, the manufacturer of Soyuz rockets has suspended operations because of fear of the Wuhan virus. The suspension probably makes some sense, as they have a lot of rockets (52) already built.

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Soyuz successfully launches three astronauts to ISS

1:18 am

The Russians early today successfully launched three astronauts into orbit, using their Soyuz-2 rocket and Soyuz capsule.

The crew, heading to ISS, is two Russians and one American, with the American the last purchased seat bought by NASA on a Soyuz. Unless they sign a new deal with Russia, the next Americans to go to ISS must fly on American capsules.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

6 China
5 SpaceX
5 Russia
2 Europe
2 ULA

The U.S. continues to lead China 9 to 6 in the national rankings.

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Russia hostile to Trump declaration to promote private enterprise in space

9:33 am

Russia today issued the first international response to the Trump executive order yesterday calling for private enterprise and property in space, and that response was decidedly negative.

Attempts to seize the territories of other planets are harmful to international cooperation, Deputy Director General of Roscosmos for International Cooperation Sergey Saveliev said on Tuesday. “Attempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of other planets hardly set the countries for fruitful cooperation,” Saveliev said.

He recalled that there were examples in history when one country decided to start seizing territories in its interests. “Everyone remembers what came of it,” Saveliev added.

Part of the goal of Trump’s order was to try to garner international support for the idea of allowing private property in space. The Russian response today suggests that they will not go along, and instead will use the words of the Outer Space Treaty to block such rights.

As I have been saying for years, the real solution is to pull out of the treaty. It forbids us from establishing our laws anywhere in space, which means future space-farers will be second class citizens, with their only rights determined by the UN, not the Bill of Rights.

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Russia confirms launch delay to 2021 of Nauka module to ISS

9:04 am

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency Roscomos, confirmed yesterday that the launch of its Nauka module for ISS will not occur in 2020.

In January they had hinted that the mission would be delayed to early 2021.

Construction of Nauka had begun in 1995, twenty-five years ago, which in a sense puts it in the lead for the most dismal government space project, beating out the James Webb Space Telescope (about 21 years since first proposed) and the Space Launch System (16 years since Bush proposed it). All three now say they will launch in 2021 but no one should be criticized if they doubt this.

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