Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. IFT 10
2. Cook
3. Bolton
4. Letitia
5. Flag
6. Students
7. Automation
1. IFT 10. Quite the week for SpaceX, with the first successful Starship flight of the full Block 2 stack. This stack first flew in Jan on IFT 7 with a catch of the Booster and an inflight explosion of the Starship upper stage over the Caribbean. Subsequent tests blew up the next Starship at about the same point in flight (IFT 8), successfully got through the engine burn but lost control due to a massive methane leak into the payload bay (IFT 9). To top it off, in preparation for IFT 10, they also destroyed another Starship on a test stand before flight. There is a final Block 2 Starship being prepared for IFT 11 sometime around the end of Sept. After that, they will move on to their Block 3 stack with an increased launch cadence.
- The testing program this year has been rough, not dissimilar to a patch SpaceX went through starting Sept 1, 2016, when they blew up a Falcon 9 upper stage on the pad. Some observers worried that the Block 2 Starship was haunted.
- After two scrubs due to an oxygen leak in the fueling infrastructure (first) and thunderstorms in the area (second), the third attempt went off nicely. Launch was normal and Booster performed well, though did lose a single engine about 1+30 into flight. Staging, separation, and flight back to a simulated landing flight offshore went normally. The engine out during launch never relit. A final engine out test for landing was done, with one of the three center engines intentionally failed which Booster recognized and relit an engine next to the failure to compensate.
- Starship continued on its suborbital trajectory, conducting the first deployment of 10 Starlink simulators (Dumblinks) from its ‘pez dispenser’ in the payload bay. Starship can carry 48 – 60 of the actual Starlink Block 3 satellites which will greatly increase the capability of the existing constellation. One of the dumblinks bumped the wall of the open door during deployment. If the next flight is successful, expect SpaceX to quickly start moving to operational Starlink flights using Starship.
- The next bit of excitement was a relight of a single engine while in space. This has been done successfully on a previous test flight and it is necessary to return Starship from orbit so it can be caught and reused. There was a bit of excitement afterwards as failure of an oxygen vent nozzle on the skirt surrounding the engine bay ignited oxygen and methane with an explosion that shredded part of the skirt.
- Reentry went well, with improvements in flap locations protecting the flaps on the nose section from melting during reentry. The rear flaps did not do as well, with some melting at the lower root next to the body. Melting was not enough to keep the flaps from working during flight to final landing, which was seen by a camera on a SpaceX buoy in the Indian Ocean W of Oz. They did a number of tests of heat shield tiles during this flight. Results will take a while to be announced.
- I usually post links to video of the entire flight. The following video by Scott Manley is a pretty good summary of the flight with appropriate video clips.
- Starship was not the only SpaceX action last week, as they were busy with their normal manifest of launches. There were launches from both coasts the day before and after IFT 10, using all three launch complexes they fly out of. A launch later in the week used a Falcon 9 booster for the 30th time. There is some speculation that they think they can get 40 flights out of a booster. Given their success in reusing it, I would not bet against them. This is the sort of reusability that they have in mind for the Starship stack.
2. Cook. Lisa Cook is a Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She is, as you might expect, the prototypical DEI hire, privileged, minority, and most importantly, incompetent. Turns out that she is also corrupt, committing mortgage fraud, calling at least three properties in three separate states her primary residences. Trump demanded her resignation a week or so ago after the first criminal referral for mortgage fraud was sent to DoJ. Cook refused to resign. A week later, Trump fired her for cause, something the president can do under the Federal Reserve Act, though it has never been done. Cook refused to acknowledge the firing and responded with a lawsuit against the president. Her lawyer is one Abbie Lowell, who is also defending Letitia James from her own mortgage fraud difficulties. Lowell was also Hunter Biden’s lawyer. The boy gets around. Looks like the case will be heard by yet another Biden federal judge who has been front and center in judicial lawfare against Trump. Expect the case to make it to SCOTUS before everything is settled. Two final pieces. First is that one of the properties Cook purchased was a condo she turned into a rental in Atlanta. She apparently never paid income tax on the rental income. Final piece comes courtesy of Jeff Childers’ Coffee & COVID. Childers reports that Lowell’s lawsuit against being removed as a Fed Director claims that the mortgage fraud took place before she was nominated for the Fed and therefore cannot be a cause for removal. This little tidbit puts Cook in a bit of a spot, as she did not bother to tell the US Senate about the fraud during the confirmation process, something they would have most certainly have wanted to talk about. If she admits to the fraud, then she admits to a federal felony, a bigger slam dunk in an already slam dunk case. Should be a fun ride. Once again, good luck playing by your new rules.
3. Bolton. The feds raided John Bolton’s home in Bethesda, MD on Aug 22. Bolton was a National Security advisor from Trump during his first term. Trump and Bolton played the bad cop, worse cop game, with Trump trotting out Bolton to do his fire and brimstone act during negotiations. Bolton lasted about a year and a half, leaving Sept 2019. He quickly joined the Beltway Republican never-Trump community of vocal opposition to all things Trump, up to and including vocal support for the awful FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Aug 2022. Media immediately claimed the raid was simple political payback, a typical anti-Trump media lie. Turns out that the raid was based on intel from a less than friendly foreign nation that turned over intercepted e-mail traffic demonstrating Bolton had been sending classified materials on unsecured servers and unclassified e-mails. He was apparently working on his book, published quickly following his departure from the Trump administration, getting family members to review its contents before publication. The raid was intended to verify whether or not he still has classified in his possession. Bolton’s book was published relatively quickly following his departure, leading to some speculation that he was receiving favorable treatment during the review process. Who needs favorable treatment when you can simply walk out the door with all the classified you need to write it with still in your possession?
4. Letita. A NY Appeals Court tosses NY AG Letitia James’ and her seeing eye state judge Arthur Engoron’s civil fraud fine against him as unconstitutional under the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The $355 million fine has grown to at least $574 million due to daily interest accruing. The opinion was 323 pages long, mostly concentrating on what an awful human being Donald Trump was with the unconstitutional finding buried at the end of the polemic. The single judge who will no longer face election was the single judge who wrote that the entire case be thrown out completely. This case will be appealed by James’ office and Trump to get the rest of the charges likewise tossed and/or the fine reinstated. The former may happen while the latter never will. The appeal was heard shortly after the fine was levied summer 2024. The appeals court managed to sit on their opinion for almost an entire year, apparently writing it in longhand. The case, the fine, Engoron and James are all a giant embarrassment to the legal system in NY at the state and local levels. It should also be an embarrassment to the state and local Bar Associations who stood by and let these political hacks make fools out of them and their precious legal system.
5. Flag. President Trump signed an Executive Order entitled Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag, Aug 25. Burning the American Flag was declared constitutional by SCOTUS in 1989. Since then, while you can burn American Flags with impunity, burning other flags and mucking up or otherwise defacing other political symbols are far less accepted. People who torch Korans, BLM, Palestinian or LGBTQWTF flags, BLM and LGBTQWTF murals are regularly prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Trump’s EO works this disparity, by noting that burning an American Flag in a manner “… likely to incite imminent lawless action or that it an action amounting to ‘fighting words’” is not constitutionally protected. The EO charges federal law enforcement with policing the fighting words incitement. This is yet another example of Trump picking off an 80-20% issue with democrats, counting on the media and democrats to misrepresent (lie about) what he is trying to do. The EO is essentially an attractant, in fly fishing, a fly tossed on the political waters that all but demands an unreasonable attack its target, the political left. Trump is a master at doing this, and it doesn’t look like he is slowing down anytime soon.
6. Students. The other bit of breathless misreporting last week was Trump’s so-called approval of 600,000 Chinese students in American colleges and universities over the next couple years. Turns out that while the total number may be close, the breakdown is not. 2023 – 2024, US allowed almost 280,000 Chinese and 332,000 Indian students to enroll in colleges. The admissions also allowed the students to get work permits via the H-1B program. There is a lot to unpack with this. First is the absolute knowledge that every single Chinese student is spying for China. We know it. They know it. They know that we know it. Why let them in? First as a bargaining chip. Anything we allow can be instantly turned off and every single one of the students deported at the drop of a hat. Second, is to see who they are talking to here, who they are reporting to back home, and what they are saying. I am skeptical we have the sort of manpower to do this, but who knows? Finally, and most nefarious, what better way to take down the CCP than to infest their best and brightest with the leftist sewage that passes for higher education here in the US these days? From the Trump administration standpoint, Commerce Secretary Lutnick notes that without that many foreign students, up to 15% of all colleges would have to close. Given the sorry state of higher education these days, is that necessarily a Bad Thing? Perhaps. Perhaps not, though I do trust the Trump team to have looked into it a lot closer that I have writing this paragraph. The Trump team is doing a couple other things. First is limiting those here in the US on educational visas to 4 years. This will make it harder for white collar migrants to sneak into white collar jobs. The changes have been denounced by pro-migration groups as the most brutal seen in the last 40 years. Finally, US State Department revoked over 6,000 international student visas for violation of US law and overstaying the visa. Progress.
7. Automation. Things are changing due to both AI and the shutdown of immigration. AI seems to be starting to cut into low-end, entry level programming and IT jobs. AI has the ability to assist writing code to the extent that entry level jobs are starting to dry up. The more people learn how to use AI to assist their idiot level coding, the fewer entry level jobs will exist. Second is a growing boom in automation for farming. This is a movement long expected, but never economically viable due to the flood of uneducated immigrants across the border for the last half century. When there is sufficient automation so that the spare bodies are no longer necessary, the only reason they will be needed is for population replacement (important) and to vote for democrats (only important to democrats, but otherwise a negative).
More later –
- AG