Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Space
2. Fires
3. ERA
4. Christians
5. Cabinet
1. Space. A pretty big week in space last week with four notable events: First launch of the Bezos Blue Origin big rocket, the New Glenn, 7th test flight of SpaceX Starship, launch of a pair of commercial lunar landers, and India demonstrating the ability to rendezvous and dock in space. The two big rockets both were partial successes. Both got off the ground but had failures well into flight. And it is only going to get busier and more interesting as the operational cadence increases, so hang on for the ride some of us have been looking forward to since the end of Apollo.
- New Glenn. Blue Origin finally got its entry to the commercial orbital rocket off the pad and into orbit last Wednesday. The New Glenn is midway in size between the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Starship, with nearly double the payload capacity to low earth orbit of Falcon 9 at 45 tons. It also has a larger payload faring, meaning it can carry larger diameter payloads. Like Starship, its first stage is powered by liquid methane – liquid oxygen (LOX) engines. Like Starship, the first stage is designed to be reusable. Development has been delayed due to the extended time necessary to get their methane – LOX engine sufficiently reliable to power a reusable rocket. The night launch successfully staged with the upper stage putting a test article for Bezos satellite internet constellation into orbit. The booster did not complete the landing on a barge in the Atlantic. Depending on which story you believe, something happened during its boostback burn to landing on their midocean barge. Blue Origin is notoriously closed mouthed about any difficulties. They also lean more toward current aerospace development which has slowed them down significantly. While I worry that they haven’t broken enough stuff or blown up enough rockets to figure this out, their New Shephard suborbital rocket has flown 28 times so far, with 26 successful landings since 2015. They have carried astronauts on multiple suborbital hops. Congratulations to the team and good luck with future flights.
- Starship completed its 7th test flight Weds afternoon. Like Blue Origin, this one was a partial success, as launch and recovery of the stack was successful, staging and startup of the Starship upper stage was successful, as was recovery (catch) of the booster. Starship suffered a massive methane leak, lost 5 of 6 engines and self-destructed some 8+24 after launch. Booster lost one of 13 engines during its boostback burn. That engine successfully relit for the landing burn. Booster was caught by the tower in much better shape than the catch on flight 5. As for Starship. It started losing engines 7+38 after launch, perhaps 5 minutes after staging. This was a Block 2 Starship with hundreds of improvements and the next generation of Merlin engines for the first time. The leak showed up as an excessive use of methane toward the end of powered flight. As the failure progressed, three engines were out on the same side of Starship 8+02, at which time thrust became asymmetric and the vehicle likely started to tumble. Video from Starship stopped about this time. 5 engines were out 8+24 at which time all telemetry stopped. Video of an explosion and shower of debris reentering over Turks and Caicos Islands surfaced sometime in the next few hours. According to Elon Musk, the leak was above a firewall above the engine compartment. Venting and fire suppression was not sufficient to control it, leading to an eventual rupture of the spacecraft and its destruction. He suggested a couple improvements including better venting and fire suppression, and does not at this time see any delay in the next test early Feb. Note that this public analysis took place less than six hours after the vehicle loss.
- With the successful flight of New Glenn, the commercial sector has at least 8 commercial companies capable of putting payloads into orbit, some large, some not so much. These include United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, Orbital Sciences, Northrop Grumman, Firefly Aerospace, and Relativity Space. Some of these specialize in larger payloads. Some in smaller. Some are suborbital only. There are more, but you get the idea. The commercial sector will lead this nation into space, something that is long past due.
- SpaceX launched a pair of private lunar landers from Cape Canaveral Weds. These are both on their way to the moon. Both carry small rovers. Firefly Aerospace built Blue Ghost. Japanese company iSpace built Resilience. Blue Ghost will spend the next 25 days in Earth orbit before heading to the moon. Resilience will take 45 days to get to the moon on a low energy flightpath. To date there has been only one commercial lander successfully land on the moon, Odysseus by Intuitive Machines in Feb 2024. There will be more.
- Final bit of space news comes from India which performed their first successful rendezvous and docking of two orbiting spacecraft. India joins the US, Russia and China in demonstrating technology and skills to do more complex manned missions in space. Congratulations to India and their entire team.
2. Fires. While the fires continue to burn in LA and we continue to be in the Fog of War over the event, more interesting stories are trickling out. Some are true. Most Are BS. Still, worth passing along …..
- The empty reservoir supposed to feed the Pacific Palisades has been empty for at least nine years. Quite the upkeep system they have there.
- This wasn’t the first fire that hydrants have been empty / inoperable. The previously mentioned reservoir was part of the solution following a series of fires half a century ago.
- A 2019 video of the lesbian Chief of LAFD surfaced, where she opines that if she has to carry a man out of a burning building, he was in the wrong place. Given that ALL accidents take place when someone is at the wrong place at the wrong time, this comment was a lot smarmier than it should have been. It does show her level of concern for her fellow citizens based on their sex (zip, zero, nada) while completely undermining the need for a formally constituted and funded city fire department, something she does not appear to comprehend.
- As usual, the greens had their filthy (and deadly) little fingers on the leadup to the fires. This time, they managed to get a judge to halt brush clearing on the hills above LA due to the presence of an endangered shrub, the Braunton’s milkvetch. A 2019 attempt by LA Department of Water and Power to replace 100-year-old power poles was halted after greens complained that the plants were being trampled. I guess the work can now proceed as the plants are no longer a problem. Note that downed powerline are a great source of sparks to start fires like they did on Maui during the 2023 Lahaina wildfires. Other vectors for fire starters include the homeless population. Apparently, meth-heads like to play with fire. Final vector would be the presence of 15-25 million unvetted illegals and possible terrorist acts.
- Cali Governor Newsom pointed residents to a website intended to assist with donations and combat disinformation. The website funnels donations to democrats via their fundraising machine Act Blue. Nice to see democrats continuing to act like democrats.
3. ERA. Dementia Hitler trotted out his inner constitutional scholar, opining that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had actually been passed. He ordered the National Archives to publish it as the legally ratified 28th Amendment to the Constitution. His mini-me, Kamal Harris chirped right up in agreement. The National Archives ignored the order, noting that it was never ratified. This opens a window into the O’Bama-oid governance via phone and pen model, for presidents have nothing to do with the amendment process. They simply aren’t players, as the festivities are completely owned by congress and the states. A short review of the ERA’s flow is in order. The idea is over a century old, first coming up in 1921. Legislation finally made it out of congress Mar 1972. The problem was that the enabling legislation had a 7-year limit on time for passage. Congress has done this before, with the 18th and 20th Amendments. In this case, 35 of the 38 states needed ratified the ERA before the deadline. Three additional states ratified relatively recently, generally as the first act of newly installed democrat legislative majorities. The last of these was VA, Jan 2020. Over that same period, 6 states rescinded ratification, 5 of them before the 1979 deadline, one afterwards. Another 4 states passed some sort of contingent ratification. 3 states reversed ratification based on a date. MN passed a resolution in 2023 assuming the ERA was now part of the US Constitution. One of the writers at the left of center legal blog Volokh Conspiracy is working on a piece calling Biden’s action constitutional vandalism. Worth your time to read.
4. Christians. One of the biggest stories over the last few decades has been the rise of people who reject religion entirely. This has been gleefully trumpeted by the media as the end of the hated and despised evangelicals. The dropouts are often referred to as the “nones.” An equally large though never reported story has been Christians rejecting worship in various organized Christian denominations, many of which have been swinging hard liberal in recent years. These are referred to as the “nons.” This leads directly to the question about how many of the nones are actually nons? This falls out of how the various populations are measured. It is very easy to simply count those who attend regular services on Friday, Saturday or Sunday and graph those changes as either growth or contraction of religious belief. It is something else entirely to figure out where these people have gone and why. This has been going on for a while, at least half a century. With the nons growing 2 – 15% over the period. Note that about 22% claim to be Catholics as of 2022. The linked article draws a parallel between the growth of the nons and the growth of the political outsiders over the last decade. That may be a bit of a reach but is worth considering. The only comment for the nones is that no such thing exists, as we all have a spiritual part of us that must be fed, nourished, and tended to. Refuse to fill that part with the right stuff (whatever your religious orientation may be), and it will be filled with anything else. Not something else. Anything else. This explains much of the religious experience on the political left these days, where government becomes their Holy Church and elections their Holy Sacrament. Environmentalism fills most, if not all of the same squares.
5. Cabinet. Lincoln’s cabinet has long been referred to as a Team of Rivals, a disparate grouping of people in conflict with one another. It worked for Lincoln, eventually. Trump’s run for his second term has been described by many as a pirate ship, which may or may not be worse than a Team of Rivals, though it might not be all that different in construction or operation. Everyone who signed onto the pirate ship has something they agree with Trump about and aren’t a bit uncomfortable with putting differences aside at least for a few years. Abigail Shrier a week ago described Trump’s appointees Trump’s Cabinet of the Cancelled, those on the receiving end of government coercion. Trump and his supporters are tired of being bullied by government. This includes his newfound billionaire backers, all of whom at some level have gotten tired of being told to sit down, shut up and color. It is a pretty good piece and once again worth your time. Apologies for the additional homework assignment.
More later –
- AG