Tab Clearing...

• Awaiting the Apocalypse With Elon Musk


• Space debris lands on Canadian farm.


• U.S. and Japan strengthening military ties.

.

55 years ago today...

This was The Onion's finest hour.

Summer Summer Summer

The solstice is today, the longest day of the year. It's the official start of summer and, thanks to the vagaries of celestial mechanics, it's occurring earlier in the year than it has since 1796.

The last time the summer solstice was this early, there were only sixteen states, George Washington was president, and Napoleon was running roughshod over Italy.

.

The Airport Cultural Index

As a longtime orbital peeper using the GoogleSat, I've found something interesting about airports. In some parts of the world, they're a mess.

Check out this disorganized corner of ramp in El Alto Airport in La Paz...

...or the back forty of Quatro de Fevereiro airport in Luanda, Angola...

You don't see that kind of disorganization at Narita, or Schipol, or Heathrow. Airports in the developed world tend to be pretty organized places. The mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan, Kingman Field, or Pinal Airpark tend to be parked in orderly rows. Even the Libyan C-130's quietly decaying in a clearing in the woods on the grounds of the Lockeed plant in Marietta are tucked in neatly among the pines.

So the state of Russian airports often surprises me. The Apathy of Kleptocracy: It's visible from space!

U.S. Aerospace Industry: A Crown Jewel Sullied

The state of our aerospace industry is worrisome.

"In recent years, however, the dangers of resting on our collective laurels and ambling ahead with no real vision have become apparent. Boeing’s ongoing 737 MAX debacle and the chronic manufacturing issues with its 787 Dreamliner show just how far the once-proud commercial aviation giant has fallen—and transformed one of America’s leading aerospace companies into what one journalist took as the exemplar for the current “Dark Age of American Manufacturing.”

The industry’s problems aren’t confined to Boeing and its commercial aviation business, either. Lockheed’s challenges with the F-35 stealth fighter are well-known and ongoing, with software problems delaying the delivery of new jets to the U.S. Air Force as well as NATO allies like Denmark and Belgium. Nor has the company announced plans to expand production to meet increased demand, even after the war in Ukraine revealed production capacity shortfalls across the entire American defense industry and as orders for the older F-16 fighter remain backlogged.

In space, the United States has quickly become far too reliant on just one firm—SpaceX—for its launch and space exploration needs; problems with SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft have already delayed NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon with its Artemis III mission. Worse, NASA’s own famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the brains behind many of the agency’s robotic exploration programs, faces “broader institutional issues” that have delayed missions and forced them over budget. The cost of NASA’s ambitious Mars Sample Return mission has also skyrocketed, leading to significant changes to the planned mission."

Go and RTWT.

.

Solar Storm Disables... Tractors?!?

What happens when your farm machinery is GPS-guided and there's a solar storm? Weird stuff, apparently.

"The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.

One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years.

“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”"

Big solar flares do more than give you cool aurora photos to post on social media.

.

We Live in a World of Miracles & Wonders

This is a headline that describes an actual thing that really happened:

Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found

H/T to Kevin D. Williamson

Real Men of Genius

So the guy who owns the 5th busiest website by traffic, one that relies on advertising and is constantly trying to panhandle you for eight bucks a month because it's hemorrhaging money, wonders why the 7th busiest website by traffic, which doesn't sell ads and is entirely supported by donations...is asking for donations.

"Hey, Elmo! Why do you need all that money to operate Twitter? You can literally fit its source code on your phone!"

Smartest guy in the room, you betcha.

Turns out that he knows roughly as much about website infrastructure as he does about launch pads.

.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...

One of the most interesting findings from the Webb telescope has been the existence of very large, well organized galaxies at unimaginably vast distances from Earth.

Now, thanks to the laws of relativity, remember that the farther away from Earth you look, the farther back in time you're looking. The light from those galaxies left them a long long time ago...so long ago that, uh, according to the current cosmological models of the universe, it was farther back in time than large, well-organized galaxies should theoretically even exist.

"Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations."

This feels like one of those scientific moments where they're either going to have to add ever more epicycles, or decide that maybe the Earth really does move.

.

Space Race News

On the heels of the Russian probe making like a Baikonur lawn dart in the lunar surface, the Indian space program has successfully landed its probe and is ready to go lunar roving.

Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.

.

If the earth is flat and space is fake...

...then this guy's got some weird looking dust flecks in his lens.

Oops, I did it again! This time from Netherlands, during Steve Bowen & Woody Hoburg spacewalk. The full solar transit lasted 0.75 second 😎

Each frame is a single shot at 1/32000s with the OM-1 on the CFF200 apo: I never make ISS transits from stackings or assemblies! pic.twitter.com/94y644q4bI

— Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) June 10, 2023

Orbitville, Pop.17

China sent another three astronauts into space — including the first civilian — on Tuesday morning, a day after announcing plans to land astronauts on the moon before 2030 and setting up a new sphere of rivalry with the United States.

China lofted another capsule to its Tiangong space station yesterday, which had three crew aboard already.

At the time, the four Axiom Space Ax-2 astronauts were still aboard the ISS, along with the seven crew of ISS Expedition 69.

That's enough humans in space at one time that you'd need to pull off both socks to count them. There are only two fewer people in orbit right now than there are permanent residents of Mentone, Texas.

With China having moved their planned lunar landing ahead to 2030 and NASA still aiming for 2025, the new space race is heating up pretty good.

.

Muh Research

Fortunately most of my epidemiology and virology credits were transferrable to my rocket science Internet PhD program. https://t.co/FJQH8LLivN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 22, 2023

Nerding Out

O SHI...

Google satellite view has added most of the planets and larger moons in the solar system as well as a "Street View" interior of the ISS.

R.I.P. my productivity.

Turn, Turn, Turn...

Here's a neat animation showing the relative rotational velocities of the planets, as well as their axial tilts relative to the plane of their orbits.

This is how planets of the solar system rotate pic.twitter.com/vVNoyOxg2e

— How Things Actually Work (@tech9icaIs) September 18, 2022

The thought of Jupiter turning that fast is wild, especially when you consider that it's so huge that its famous (and shrinking!) "Great Red Spot" would easily swallow the Earth, nothing but net.

.

Fun With Physics

Visualising the effects of gravity on different planets in the solar system.pic.twitter.com/sTt90SYTSa

— Space Explorer Mike 🇺🇦 (@MichaelGalanin) September 4, 2022

I love the way the car is floating on its springs in some of the lower grav environments, and practically bouncing on its tires even at rest on Pluto, whose surface gravity is only about .06g. 

(Don't worry, the car's not going to bounce right off Pluto. Escape velocity there is still something like 2,700mph. It'd take a pretty small asteroid for the Duke boys to be able to yeehaw themselves clean out of orbit, aside from the fact that there'd be no atmosphere for the General Lee's 383 to breathe.)

.

Space Fail

Artemis will not be going to space today.

The launch of #Artemis I is no longer happening today as teams work through an issue with an engine bleed. Teams will continue to gather data, and we will keep you posted on the timing of the next launch attempt. https://t.co/tQ0lp6Ruhv pic.twitter.com/u6Uiim2mom

— NASA (@NASA) August 29, 2022

I'm stuck in a kookocracy.

There are people who think the James Webb Space Telescope is a secret Illuminati orbital mind control laser or some crap like that because of course there are.

If it makes a splash in the headlines, you can bet someone will be there to say that it’s actually a Freemason plot or that it's a false flag or aliens or whatever else.

The worst thing about social media is that it allowed idiots and assholes to heterodyne in ways not previously possible. 

Instead of these wacky loners having to physically find each other to exchange mimeographed newsletters of kookery, face-to-face and hand-to-sweaty-hand, they can gather in throngs in virtual auditoriums and try and outdo each other by concocting dumber and more outlandish crap and expounding it more sincerely than the kooks around them.

.

Links...

• Amazon posts a $4B loss for Q1 of '22, causing its share price to go on a "10% off!" sale, in case you wanted to get mom a few shares of AMZN for Mothers Day. (It's still nearly three grand a share, so you'd have to really like mom to do that.)


• What is it about tsars and kooky prophets?


• Private spaceflight is still pretty cool. Here's video of the first rental capsule returning. I hope Axiom gets their deposit on Crew Dragon Endeavor back.

Book reports...

Having finished re-reading The Number of the Beast and concluding that it is, indeed, Heinlein's second weakest effort, I went on and re-read The Rolling Stones. I'd only read it once before, probably twenty years ago at least, and it held up well as a story.

Sociologically in some respects it was very much a Fifties Y.A. novel, in that the protagonist twins have a bratty savant of a younger brother and a boy-crazy sister hoping to snag a beau from among the spacemen they encounter, but they also have an iron-willed MD for a mom and a grandma who's an ex revolutionary from the Luna rebellion.

The book was published five years before Sputnik and nearly a decade before Gagarin's flight, so Heinlein's imagining a future Earth with only three radio satellites and a space station is forgivable, as are scenes of people calculating trajectories with slide rules; almost nobody predicted the ubiquity of computers and Arthur C. Clarke had only floated the idea of radio relay satellites a handful of years earlier. 

On the other hand, its descriptions of life in lunar or micro gravity are way ahead of their time, and his description of anarchic Belter society predated even Niven's Known Space stories, to say nothing of The Expanse. It wouldn't be out of line to credit this novel as being the origin point for the entire trope of Belter society as a polyglot anarcholibertarian mining frontier one.

Definitely a keeper.

Oh, yeah...The Rolling Stones inspired tribbles, too.

.