Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Space
2. NGO
3. SOTU
4. SCOTUS
5. Canada
6. Mexico
7. Ukraine
1. Space. Fairly significant week in space with the 8th test flight of Starship, landing of two commercial landers on the moon with a third enroute. There were problems with Starship, as it lost its upper stage, Ship. While the second lunar lander landed, it fell over during landing and ran out of electricity shortly afterwards.
- For the 8th time, the Starship stack successfully lifted off. The stack staged and the Superheavy Booster (Booster) was caught by the chopsticks at the tower. Two engines of 13 were out during its boostback burn. One of those engines relit during its landing burn. Having multiple engines does give a safety margin when you lose engines during operation. All engines are computer controlled. If the computer does not like what it sees during startup, it will shut the engine down, which does not preclude operation the next time the engine is asked to operate. Ship did not go so well, exploding, tumbling and finally breaking up over nine minutes into flight. Everything looked well until 8+03 after launch when the first engine went out. A series of flashes was seen on a video of a trailing edge flap 8+05. Two more engines went out at the same time. Ship immediately started to tumble. The fourth engine went out 8+09. The 5th engine went out 9+10. Telemetry and video was lost shortly afterwards. A debris cloud was observed over Florida heading east.
- What happened? So far, SpaceX has been pretty quiet. Speculation in the community has centered around the harmonic vibration problems that destroyed Ship on the previous test. The vibration arises from the massive forces involved in the engines, the cryogenic methane and oxygen pumped through them, and the plumbing to get the cryo liquids from the tanks above to the engines below. The more powerful the engines, the more vibrations you get. All rockets have this problem. The larger the rocket, the worse the problem, and Starship is the largest ever flown. Note that earlier flights with Block 1 Ship and Raptor 1 engines did not fail this way. The newer Raptor 2 engines are more powerful, and the Block 2 Ship has this as a failure mode. At worst, this is a major design failure, repeating the failure on test flight 7, which will call for a major redesign and delay in the program. At best, it can be solved by an early move to the Block 3 Ship and Raptor 3 engines, which are in the pipeline. At this point, I have no idea how it is all going to play out.
- Activity on the moon was busy with commercial landers coming fast and furious. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost successfully landed on Mare Crisium Mar 2. The lander carries a variety of experiment packages for other commercial customers and NASA. As of this writing, everything is reportedly working and it is proceeding with its various missions. One of these is an attempt to use the GPS constellation around Earth while operating on the lunar surface, something that initially seems possible.
- Second attempt was Intuitive Machine’s Athena lander Mar 6. This one had a more challenging target, a crater at the south Lunar pole, where illumination is spotty and some craters permanently in shadow. While the lander touched down and reported a landing, it appeared to have bounced and toppled over sending back a photo of a leg or two pointing into the sky. Because of its orientation and physical location, the solar arrays were not able to provide power. It was declared a loss the next day as its battery ran out of juice. This is their second successful landing and second lander to end up on its side after landing.
- The third of these is iSpace Resilience lander, launched Jan 15. This lander is taking the long way around, scheduled for landing Jun 5 or so. Resilience is iSpace’s second attempt at a commercial lunar lander, having lost its Hakuto-R lander during landing Apr 25, 2023. The Hakuto-R is described as a tech demo, which all these landers actually are.
2. NGO. Perhaps the most important thing exposed by DOGE is the NGO business model created by democrats over the last several decades. The basic money flow is tax dollars into various federal agencies, which then turns right around and funds various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) with grants and contracts. Those NGOs are all owned and operated by democrats, hiring democrats, and laundering that moneys into democrat political campaigns which in turn elect democrats who pass budgets to keep priming the free money pump. The most obvious of these is USAID, which is why DOGE went after them first. But there are others, with the EPA and Department of (No) Energy up to bat next. This is literally the business model for democrats. It means they don’t have to rely on Soros or Reid Hoffman or any of the other democrat billionaires for continued money, as they simply get if from the taxpayer. Even Stacy Abrams Power Forward Communities $2 billion grant from the EPA discussed last week ended up being a get out the vote for democrats scam. The idea was to purchase democrat votes by buying high efficiency washing machines and dryers for low income voters purchasing their votes in future elections. Musk and DOGE are upending the democrat NGO business model which is why they are hated.
3. SOTU. President Trump gave his State of the Union (SOTU) speech last week. The 90-minute speech was well received by everyone except democrats and their media cheerleaders. As an aside, I am so happy that there is now the occasional presidential speech that is fun to watch. Used to despise O’Bama and Biden’s STFU (Shut the F#$% Up) speeches. Still do. Trump emphasized popular policies. Democrats did their focus grouped protests, with Congress Critter Al Green getting kicked out for running his mouth and waving his cane. Green was censured by the House a couple days later. Most notable was democrat refusal to clap for any story or example of perseverance, success against daunting obstacles, or overcoming deadly diseases. They even managed to ignore a 13-year-old fighting cancer and a death sentence from it. Gonna be difficult to survive as a political party after your grifting money goes away and you smartly come down on the 20% side of 80 – 20% splits in every political issue out there. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.
4. SCOTUS. One of the expected reactions from the left was to take their political opposition to all things Trump to the federal courts and fight via lawfare and judge shopping for friendly Biden, O’Bama and Clinton judges. Last week’s story was a newly ensconced Biden federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order (TRO) ordering near immediate payment of $2 billion in USAID funds. The administration appealed quickly to SCOTUS because of the short timeline inflicted by the trial judge. By a 5-4 majority, SCOTUS sent the case back to the trial judge. This was widely reported as a Great Victory for Democrats and Our Democracy. The opinion led to widespread gnashing of teeth aimed at Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett for voting with the liberals. Turns out that criticism was premature, as SCOTUS just set the trial judge up. This was a temporary strategic defeat teeing up a win. SCOTUS removed the short deadline. The trial judge must issue a new one, and he is under a Mar 10 (today) date to do so. He must grant a full hearing. He needs to clarify what obligations the government fulfils. In short, SCOTUS put the trial judge in a minefield, one in which an angry minority of 4 Justices are ready to act upon. Finally, the trial judge must consider the feasibility of compliance deadlines, meaning no more pay now orders. The dissent was harsh and called out the trial judge. It only takes 4 Justices to take an appeal, meaning the majority is inviting an appeal of any other foolishness from the trial judge. This is only getting started. Looks like the Roberts Court is about to clean up lawfare aided and abetted by democrat judges in the old mule training tradition of a 2×4 between the eyes to get their attention.
5. Canada. The verbal war between Canada politicians and President Trump increased nicely last week with Canadians reacting loudly to Trump 25% tariffs levied against Canada over their failure to control their border and fentanyl flowing across it. Canadians announced retaliatory tariffs and shook their fists at the sky in defiance. How much of this was real is up for debate, as it is election season in Canada and Trudeau’s liberal party is desperate, fighting for their political lives. At one level, I am concerned that turning Trump into a political issue will harm Canadian conservatives, though they were smart enough to bash Trump too. Canada’s problem is that they have a large number of tariffs levied against American goods, most notably dairy and timber that we do not levy against their goods. Late last week, Trump backed off tariffs announced for Canadian goods covered by the USMCA. While I don’t particularly like tariffs, I do like them as negotiating tools. And if this starts negotiations and normalizes (equal tariffs on both sides of the transactions), I think it will work out well. Trump is loud. His negotiations are noisy, especially with people who have never been called out on anything like Canada’s liberals. Should be interesting to watch.
6. Mexico. Mexico extradited 29 cartel higher ups from Mexico to the US last week. This was blamed on their impending release by corrupt Mexican judges. Given that much of the Mexican national government and cartel leadership are two sides of the same coin, corrupt to the core, the question arises: what else can be going on? Several things, I think. First is that this will be thought to appease the new Trump administration a bit and remove some increasing US military pressure on Mexico to control the cartels. Second, would be the stronger, more politically dominant / connected cartels are using the extradition to remove their enemies from the battlefield, weakening their rivals. Both are possible. Both are likely. Mexico is acting in their own best interest on this. If the government can survive a bit longer by picking sides and tossing some cartel members over the side to the US, they are ready, willing and able to do so.
7. Ukraine. Much was made of the Zelensky negotiating visit to the WH a week ago and his demand for the US to win the war against Russia for him. The willingness to say no in any negotiation is among the most important parts of that negotiation. Zelensky immediately decamped and made the rounds of his new BFFs in Europe asking for their help. He was greeted with sympathy and much glad-handing, but few promises of actual money or military aid. As such, he was back a week later with a suitably groveling letter to Trump announcing he was ready to negotiate a cease fire and end of the war, sign the rare earths agreement (apparently Great Britain already signed one of those with Ukraine), and end the war. For his part, Putin took the opportunity to crank up the military pressure on Ukraine, though he has taken no more territory that I know of (fog of war). While I can see Ukraine denied entry into NATO as a solution, I can also see NATO membership for both Ukraine and Russia as a possible outcome. My view is that NATO should have dissolved at the same time the Warsaw Pact did, both outdated Cold War agreements. Today, NATO has morphed into an international agreement to force purchase of US military equipment (all in the Holy name of standardization), hardly a reason to continue ad-infinitum.
More later –
- AG