Friday, August 05, 2022

ROCKET REPORT...Look who's putting love in the lift

Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. Limitations of space - of another kind....just some random choices in an abundance from a great reliable source

Putting the love into lift —

Rocket Report: SpaceX launches Korea to the Moon, Georgia’s litigious spaceport

"Union Carbide most certainly has a contract with Camden."

Eric Berger - 8/5/2022, 4:30 AM

Enlarge / An Atlas V rocket launches a Space Based Infrared System satellite on Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base.
Trevor Mahlmann

Welcome to Edition 5.05 of the Rocket Report! Don't look now, but we could be fewer than four weeks away from the launch of NASA's Space Launch System rocket. I have covered this booster for a dozen years and I'm so ready for this to finally happen. I've got plenty of coverage planned in the weeks ahead.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Georgia spaceport sues to force land sale. First Camden County citizens voted overwhelmingly against a proposed spaceport in southeastern Georgia. Then, the owner of 4,000 acres sought by the spaceport proponents said it would end an agreement to sell the land to backers of the Spaceport Camden project. Even so, Camden County commissioners refuse to give up the dream of building a spaceport that local residents don't want, and for which the land owner doesn't want to sell. So they've taken the land owner, Union Carbide Corporation, to court, News4Jax reports.

Ignoring the voters ... Last month, in a statement, Union Carbide said, "As a result (of the election), there is no longer an Option Agreement in existence between the County and UCC, and UCC does not intend to convey the property to the County pursuant to the prior Option Agreement." In filing the lawsuit, Steve Howard, Camden County's government administrator, wrote, "Union Carbide most certainly has a contract with Camden. The County has indicated that it is ready, willing, and able to close. We expect Union Carbide to honor its contractual commitments." At some point you have to wonder why local officials are so hellbent on building this spaceport. (submitted by zapman987 and Ken the Bin)

Solid rocket debut a success. Chinese launch services provider CAS Space successfully placed six small satellites in orbit early Wednesday with the first launch of the Lijian-1 solid rocket, Space News reports. Lijian-1 is now the largest operational Chinese solid launcher, and CAS Space is also developing larger rockets. The 30-meter-tall Lijian-1 rocket can carry 1,500 kilograms of payload into a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit.

Derivative designs ... CAS Space is a quasi-commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The parent, CAS, develops a range of spacecraft, including Beidou satellites, and has previously launched sounding rockets. Although Wednesday's orbital launch marks a big step forward, solid rockets appear to be only the start of CAS Space's ambitions. The company is also working on reusable liquid engines with the goal of developing recoverable launchers. A new website unveiled by the company recently shows launch vehicle renders similar to Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and New Shepard launchers. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

US companies complete August 4 launch-a-palooza. Thursday was quite a day for US launch providers. Starting at 05:00 UTC, Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle launched the NROL-199 mission into low Earth orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office. Then, at 10:29 UTC on Thursday, United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket sent a Space Based Infrared System satellite into orbit for the US Space Force. Finally, at 1337 UTC, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket launched the NS-22 suborbital space tourism mission.

Next up, SpaceX ... Thursday evening the focus turned toward SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, which was due to launch the Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to the Moon. The rocket launched at 23:09 UTC from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and was successful. I cannot recall a time when four different US rockets launched during the same calendar day, but this probably won't be the last time, given all the development of new US boosters, large and small. We truly are entering an era of launch abundance. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Russia launches satellite to spysat. A Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Monday around midnight local time. The military mission's payload was classified but has been designated Kosmos 2558 for tracking purposes. The Russian satellite has since been placed in a nearly circular, 435 km×452 km orbit, with an inclination of 97.25 degrees. This is notable, Ars reports, because it will allow the Kosmos 2558 satellite to come very close to a recently launched US spy satellite, which was designated NROL-87.

Close encounter of the satellite kind ... This US national security payload was designed and built for the National Reconnaissance Agency and launched on February 2 into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Russian satellite launched into the same orbital plane as NROL-87, and this set up a close encounter between the two satellites on Thursday, August 4, when they will pass within just 75 km of one another.

Falcon 9 fairing recovery going well. SpaceX continues to tinker with how it recovers Falcon 9 payload fairing halves, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Most notably, the company appears to be testing a new system of a crane and rigs, with inflatables, to pluck fairing halves from the ocean after they fall to Earth. The new rig appears to have been designed with inflatables to avoid damaging the fairing if the two were ever to make contact. This video of a recent test is quite interesting.

Seven time's the charm? ... More than a year ago SpaceX abandoned its plan of attempting to "catch" the falling fairing halves with boats equipped with large nets, determining that it was less work to refurbish fairing halves that briefly touch the sea compared to the effort of trying to catch them. It now appears that the company has flown some of these fairing halves as many as seven times, and due to the success of its recovery effort has a factory full of them ready to fly again. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

OneWeb needs five more launches to complete network. OneWeb and Eutelsat announced plans in late July to merge, bringing together OneWeb's network of Internet satellites in low Earth orbit with Eutelsat's fleet of larger video, data relay, and broadband platforms in geostationary orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. OneWeb's chairman also said the company is on track to resume deploying its remaining Internet satellites as soon as September, with three SpaceX flights and two Indian launches on tap to replace Russian Soyuz rockets no longer available after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Awarding contracts for second-gen constellation ... While OneWeb still has about 220 satellites to launch before completing its first-generation network, the company is already planning an even larger constellation called Gen 2. OneWeb announced an agreement with Relativity Space last month for multiple Gen 2 satellite launches beginning as soon as 2025 on the launch company's next-generation reusable Terran R rocket.

Book your Russian launch online. Roskosmos' commercial arm to sell Russian launch services abroad, Glavkosmos, has opened a booking page for its launch vehicles, Anatoly Zak reports. The webpage invites users to order a "target launch" on one of four launch vehicles: Angara-1.2, Angara-A5, Soyuz-2.1, and a Proton-M. While the webpage includes basic information about each vehicle, the Russian website does not list prices.

Customers must be OK with genocidal war ... Zak probably said it best about the new booking website: "If you have a 4-24-ton satellite built without any Western components and you are OK with Russian genocidal war in Ukraine, you are welcome to book your ride here." I have to agree. Tangentially, if you're wondering what Glavkosmos CEO Dmitry Loskutov thinks of the Rocket Report, it's safe to say he does not have a flattering opinion of my efforts. Udachi with your sales, Dmitry

SLS launch remains on track for late this month. It hardly seems real, but we very well could be within just a few weeks of the debut launch of the Space Launch System rocket. SLS managers and agency leaders said this week that the work to prepare the SLS and the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center was "on plan" to support a rollout to the pad August 18 and a launch 11 days later, Space News reports. "We are in the final stretch," Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis 1 launch director at KSC, said at a briefing to preview the mission.

Need to complete flight termination system work ... A rollout on August 18 would allow a launch on August 29. Since NASA announced the targeted launch date last month, crews have been working on SLS and Orion, ranging from completing repairs to the rocket to installing payloads inside the Orion capsule. Technicians also powered on Orion for the final time before launch last weekend. One remaining item to complete is testing the rocket's flight termination system in the "intertank" portion of the core stage. That testing will begin next week, Blackwell-Thompson said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Sex Robots

10 years to transform the future of humanity -- or destabilize the plane...

WE LIVE IN NOTIFICATION HELL...Yes, we do! [The apps never shut up]

No denying that...OK Let's get right to it. Ready?

We live in notification hell

12 comments

You can check in, but you can’t check out

By Allison Johnson@allisonjo1 Aug 5, 2022, 3:29pm EDT

12 comments

*Clearing notifications is like playing red dot whack-a-mole.*

It starts innocently enough. You download an app, and the app asks for your permission to send you push notifications. Sure, you think. What harm could come of it? I’d like to know when my package arrives or my burrito is ready. But then you download more apps, and they all need your permission to send you notifications, and before you know it your lock screen is awash with apps clamoring for your attention.

The apps never shut up. They’re hungry for engagement. They want you to know that your favorite items are on sale, that you haven’t practiced your Spanish today, that your delivery driver is five stops away, that your child at daycare just had a blowout – all day, all at once. Welcome to a place we all live, a place called Notification Hell.

We haven’t always lived here. For a while, companies like Apple wouldn’t let app developers run all willy nilly with the power to request our attention at any moment of the day. They insisted that the power should be used for good, not evil. That didn’t last long. App developers are now permitted to send us marketing notifications as long as we’ve opted into them. And guess what: if you’ve opted to have any notifications at all, you’ve opted into a lot of them. The call is even coming from inside the house now – Apple is promoting its services in settings menus and Samsung is trying to sell you a new phone… while you’re using your Samsung phone. There is truly nowhere to hide.

It’s not just ads that are the problem. Our phones’ digital assistants are trying hard to learn our behavior and predict our every move. Probably because they’re robots, they don’t really understand what’s helpful and what’s not. Like when Siri sees that I have a flight on my calendar, so it suggests a shortcut to put my phone in airplane mode. Immediately after that, it asks if I want to dial into the meeting on my calendar: my flight. The road to Notification Hell is paved with digital assistants with good intentions.

It’s not an assistant, but Google Photos frequently commits notification crimes. It’s always learning new tricks, like how to identify a beer or a latte in a photo, and then pestering you to look at how it can identify all the photos you took of beer and lattes. It also really wants me to know when it finds a bunch of similar shots of my cat sleeping on different pieces of furniture, bringing them to attention unbidden, like a dog that found a stick. My brother in Christ, I took the photos. I know they’re similar.

Our operating system developers aren’t totally indifferent to our suffering; they cast us a couple of lifelines. On iOS, you can have non-time-sensitive notifications gathered in a daily digest and delivered once a day. You can also set up focus modes – the UI for which is its own kind of hell – or have some apps deliver notifications quietly unless they’re time-sensitive. But if you do that, you have to kind of solve a riddle first.

I tried this once with Amazon. I thought I’d configured it so that I’d only get notifications when a package arrives. I did this wrong, apparently, because a grocery order sat outside my house for five hours the night of the Fourth of July. I now let Amazon send me as many notifications as it wants.

That sums up our situation: we are trapped in notification hell, and there will be no rescue. We have a couple of meager tools at our hands, but the onus is on us to find our way out. Until I figure out my notification settings, I know I’m here for the long haul. For now, it’s just a comfort to know that there are others with me too, because misery loves company.

Life Interrupted

AWarning about all those warnings and emergency alerts

“Huge flaw” threatens US emergency alert system, DHS researcher warns

Hackers can disrupt legit warnings or issue fake ones of their own.

Dan Goodin - 8/4/2022, 5:32 PM

“Huge flaw” threatens US emergency alert system, DHS researcher warns — Enlarge

The US Department of Homeland Security is warning of vulnerabilities in the nation’s emergency broadcast network that makes it possible for hackers to issue bogus warnings over radio and TV stations.

“We recently became aware of certain vulnerabilities in EAS encoder/decoder devices that, if not updated to the most recent software versions, could allow an actor to issue EAS alerts over the host infrastructure (TV, radio, cable network),” the DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned. “This exploit was successfully demonstrated by Ken Pyle, a security researcher at CYBIR.com, and may be presented as a proof of concept at the upcoming DEFCON 2022 conference in Las Vegas, August 11-14.”

Pyle told reporters at CNN and Bleeping Computer that the vulnerabilities reside in the Monroe Electronics R189 One-Net DASDEC EAS, an emergency alert system encoder and decoder. TV and radio stations use the equipment to transmit emergency alerts. The researcher told Bleeping Computer that “multiple vulnerabilities and issues (confirmed by other researchers) haven't been patched for several years and snowballed into a huge flaw.”

“When asked what can be done after successful exploitation, Pyle said: ‘I can easily obtain access to the credentials, certs, devices, exploit the web server, send fake alerts via crafts message, have them valid / pre-empting signals at will. I can also lock legitimate users out when I do, neutralizing or disabling a response,’” Bleeping Computer added.

Promoted Comments

gavron Ars Scholae Palatinae

jump to post

Everyone I know has all alerts turned off -- even weather alerts. Those that don't have them disabled... you see this out in public... the alert hits everyone about the same time and they all roll their eyes and rush to silence the damn phone.

The EBS sucked. The EAS sucks. Nobody gives a rat's ass. DHS should just turn it off.

- NO you can't have 330 million people searching for Amber, taken in an SUV. All cars are SUVs now.
Amber alerts are 17% effective, 5% hoaxes, and 78% annoyance.

- NO you can't have 330 million people searching for Mr. Silver, driving an SUV. He's got dementia. They left him keep his driver's license, car, car insurance, etc.
Silver alerts account for a 94% success rate. That's because most of the time the guy is asleep in his own car in his own driveway (or locked the keys outside...)

- NO flash floods in Houston don't matter to those of us NOT IN Houston (or downstream from it).
Weather alerts have been called 20,000 times in twenty years starting 1996. There are no numbers for how effective this is at all.

There's no "good way" to "alert EVERYBODY" in a way that will lead to positive results. Duck and cover? Get under your schooldesk? Tuck your head between your knees and kiss your sweet ass goodbye?

Time to ditch EAS and do what we do in real life business solution management:
1. Define the problem.
2. Propose a solution.
3. Ensure the solution solves the problem.
4. Ensure the solution doesn't make things worse overall, has no side effects, and doesn't empower black-hats to overrun the system.
5. Collect data to verify #3 and #4
6. Itterate.

E

994 posts | registered 4/8/2008

GLOBAL ECONOMIC OUTLOOK IS MUDDY

As good as we can get even from all the economists

Elon Musk predicts the US will have a 'mild recession' for 18 months

Tim Levin

Thu, August 4, 2022 at 4:42 PM·2 min read

In this article:

Elon Musk co-founded PayPal after his startup X.com merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity. — Elon Musk said he expects the US will enter a mild recession for 18 months.Alexi Rosenfeld / Contributor / getty

Elon Musk thinks the US will experience a mild recession that will last around 18 months.
Fears of a recession have been bubbling up for months amid record inflation.
The US government is trying to cool down the economy by raising interest rates.

Elon Musk thinks the US is headed into a recession.

The world's richest man laid out his assessment of the US economy at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.

"Making macroeconomic prognostications is a recipe for disaster, but my guess is that we are past peak inflation and that we will have a recession," the businessman said. "I'm just guessing here, this is total speculation. But I would guess it's a mild recession for, I don't know, 18 months or something like that."

He said that since Tesla needs to order commodities several months in advance, it has some insight into where prices are heading over time. One bit of good news for consumers: Musk said that the prices Tesla is seeing are trending downward, which "suggests that we are past peak inflation."

He said he expects inflation to "drop rapidly," though he acknowledged the situation could change.

For months now, economists have sounded the alarm that the US could be headed toward a recession. Record inflation has pushed the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in an effort to cool down the economy and slow spending. Stocks have tumbled this year after a long bull market, and large companies from Coinbase to Tesla have announced large-scale layoffs to cut costs.

Musk said earlier this year that Tesla would look to cut 10% of its white-collar staff. Rival carmaker Ford is preparing to cut roughly 8,000 positions, Bloomberg reported.

Still, not all economists are in agreement and there are signs that the economy is relatively healthy. The organization that declares when the US enters a recession — the National Bureau of Economic Research — hasn't made the call yet.

Read the original article on Business Insider