Month: September 2018

Linkage (Rosh Hashanah Edition)

No Comments

I queued this up for a post a few days ago.

If only the Australian Government were so honest:

Rule Number 1 of Telcos: They Will F%$# the Consumer Whenever They Can

No Comments
Rule number 2 is: GOTO 1

Case in point, wireless carriers got caught throttling Netflix and Youtube:

Anyone holding out hope that the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules wouldn’t affect their internet better brace for some bad news. New research from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Northeastern suggests that all of the major U.S. telecom companies have been throttling traffic to and from apps like Netflix and YouTube. That means customers are getting lower quality video, because the internet service providers say so.

The data that backs up this startling claim comes from over 500,000 tests that looked at more 2,000 ISPs worldwide. Everything was collected through an app called Wehe, developed by the researchers, that has been downloaded by over 100,000 people. This amounts to one of the largest studies of its kind. Verizon appears to be the biggest culprit with 11,100 instances of what the researchers call “differentiation,” most of which involves throttling. AT&T was spotted treating traffic differently 8,398 times, and they identified T-Mobile doing it almost 3,900 times.

Need a few more stats to get angry? The throttling observed through the Wehe app was not minor. Bloomberg gives an example of a recent test wherein “Netflix speeds were 1.77 megabits per second on T-Mobile, compared with the 6.62 megabits-per-second speed available to other traffic on the network at the same time.” That’s about one third as fast. David Choffnes, one of the researchers behind the Wehe app, says YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, and NBC Sports have been throttled in similar ways.

………

None of this means that big telecom companies will change how they’re operating. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all told Bloomberg that these instances of differentiation simply meant that they were managing internet traffic. “And people probably don’t notice because the video still streams at DVD quality levels,” Bloomberg reports. “If you want high-definition video, you can pay more, the carriers say.”

………

We don’t know what will happen next in that fight, but one thing does look very clear. Given the opportunity, it looks like big telecom companies can and will throttle internet traffic, unless their customers pay more money. Extrapolated over time, this principle could fracture the internet as we know it into fiefdoms and walled gardens, where only the rich get access to certain information and services. If this sounds like a bad idea, you can email Ajit Pait at this address.

I think that the best solution is public ownership of telecommunications services, but I tend to be fairly far along that philosophical axis, so YMMV.

The Mistake Jet Abides

No Comments

It looks like there will be another delay for the f-35:

The troubled $1.5 trillion F-35 program is not ready to begin the critical combat-testing phase, the Pentagon’s testing director said in a previously undisclosed August memo obtained by the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). That decision marks another setback in the development of the Pentagon’s largest acquisition program.

 The memo, issued on August 24, 2018, says the program has not met the necessary entry criteria to begin the crucial combat-testing phase called Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E). It comes on the heels of the revelation, reported first by POGO, that program officials have been trying to make it appear as though the program has completed the development phase, by altering paperwork to reclassify potentially life-threatening design flaws to give the appearance of progress rather than actually fixing them.

This has gotten to be a remarkably routine thing:  The aircraft experiences problems, so the program managers move the goal posts.

It’s no way to develop a successful weapon system.

Also, Not a Surprise

No Comments

The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in SeaTac are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study – and disagree about – the impact of the new policies on pay and jobs.

The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases in pay and no widespread job losses. That reinforces the conclusions that the same group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers reached in 2017 after studying the impact just in Seattle.

This time, the Berkeley researchers examined Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where minimum wages at the end of 2016 – the end of the study period – ranged from $10 to $13.

“We find that they are working just as the policymakers and voters who enacted these policies intended,” said Sylvia Allegretto, co-author of the report and co-chair of Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. “So far they are raising the earnings of low-wage workers without causing significant employment losses.”

This is the latest in a series of studies showing the same effects, but it won’t change the minds of the Freshwater (conservative) economists, because they are even more impervious to reality than the economics field as a whole.

Not a Surprise

No Comments
Since Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods, the lot of its employees has deteriorated.

There have been benefit cuts, layoffs, and the implementation of a new centralized inventory system that has led to empty shelves and crushed worker morale.

Think of it as the, “Amazon Way,” transferred from their hellhole warehouses to the local grocery store.

Now there is an aggressive effort to unionize, which is not a suprise

From the moment that Whole Foods sold out to Amazon, it was clear that the lip service that the grocer had paid to treating its employees well was, to quote Ron Zeigler, “Inoperative”:

A group of workers at Whole Foods Market is leading an effort to establish a union for the Amazon-owned company’s 85,000+ workforce.

 In a letter addressed to Whole Foods employees, the group — members of Whole Foods’ cross-regional committee — wrote that they are “concerned about the direction” of Whole Foods in an Amazon era. The letter outlines several demands, including a $15 minimum wage for all employees, 401k matching, paid maternity leave, lower health insurance deductibles and more.

 “We cannot let Amazon remake the entire North American retail landscape without embracing the full value of its team members. The success of Amazon and [Whole Foods] should not come at the cost of exploiting our dedication and threatening our economic stability,” they wrote.

 ………

 The letter, which calls out both Jeff Bezos and Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey directly, says there will “continue to be layoffs in 2019 and beyond as Amazon aims to aggressively trim our labor force before it expands with new technology and labor models.”

 Since the Amazon acquisition, several hundred Whole Foods workers have been laid-off as Amazon infuses “Whole Foods with its efficient, data-driven ethos,” per The Wall Street Journal. Shoppers, however, have saved millions as a result of the shake-up.

………

 Here’s the full letter, obtained by New Food Economy.

Well, Now We Know What it Takes for Alex Jones Banned from Twitter

No Comments

Because he just got banned from Twitter.

Twitter is not being particularly forthcoming about the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s proverbial back, but I think that what got Dorsey to stop protecting him was that, he finally had to meat Jones in meat space:


A peanut gallery of three white supremacists and conspiracy theorists are watching Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify before Congress Wednesday.

All three have been banned from major social media platforms for violating their rules — and they’re using today’s hearings to confront them, and to try to force members of Congress to stand by them.

Alex Jones, a well-known internet conspiracy theorist, sat in the audience at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to “face his accusers,” referring to Sandberg and Dorsey. Also in the front row at the hearing was internet troll Charles Johnson; Twitter banned him from the site permanently after he threatened to “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist. Present on the Hill as well was Laura Loomer, an alt-right activist who alleged that the shootings at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, were staged; she has been suspended from Facebook and Twitter in the past.

That’s Jones on the right, and Dorsey on the left, and, rather inexplicably, a glass-hole* wearing a congressional staffer (see the name tag) and a really tall guy in between them.

So the reason that Alex Jones is gone from Twitter, is not for doxxing the families of victims of mass shootings and forcing them to move, and not for calling for violence against people, it is for coming within about 2 meters of Jack Dorsey, and as a very rich man, Dorsey wants to remain apart from such unpleasantness.

Jack Dorsey is an asshole ……… standing next to a glass-hole.

*Someone out there is still wearing Google Glasses, and they are known as glass-holes.

OK, this is Evil, Even by the Standards of ICE

No Comments

Among other things, this might have the effect of revealing actual votes in early voting and absentee ballots:

Immigration authorities want North Carolina elections officials to turn over nearly a decade’s worth of voting records by the end of the month.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina subpoenaed records Friday from the state board of elections and 44 county elections boards in the eastern part of the state. A meeting notice from the board says the subpoena came at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Among the state records from Jan. 1, 2010 through Aug. 30, 2018 that were requested: all voter registration applications, federal write-in absentee ballots, federal post card applications, early-voting application forms, provisional voting forms, absentee ballot request forms, all “admission or denial of non-citizen return forms,” and all voter registration cancellation or revocation forms.

………

Wake County, one of the 44 counties in the Eastern District’s jurisdiction, received its subpoena Friday via fax. Documents requested from the county are: “Any and all poll books, e-poll books, voting records, and/or voter authorization documents, and executed official ballots (including absentee official ballots), that were submitted to, filed by, received by, and/or maintained by the Wake County Board of Elections from August 30, 2013 through August 30, 2018.”

The state board said the request for “executed official ballots” for the 44 counties includes more than 2.2 million ballots that are traceable to the voters who cast them. These are ballots that were cast by mail or at early voting, according to the board. Those ballots have an identifying number on them. The request includes more than 3.3 million ballots that cannot be traced to individuals who voted on Election Day.

………

Gary Sims, the director of Wake County’s board of elections, said his staff has not begun to gather the data requested nor has it responded to the subpoena. The state and counties must appear in court with the documents in Wilmington on Sept. 25 at 8 a.m.

They are asking for 5 years of voting records, including ballots that can be tied to individual voters.

This is wrong on so many levels, it boggles the mind.

While there has been no public comment from the US Attorney, the nature of this court order clearly implies this is being driven by electoral, and not immigration, considerations.

This stinks to high heaven.

Kisses and Squeezy Hugs

No Comments

Natalie is giving a speech in class, and she wanted to use one of the poems that my dad had written.

She read a couple and one was about shopping, and all I could think of was, “Kisses and squeezy hugs.”

Cue the wavy flashback camera thing:

Many, many years ago, my mom sent my dad to the grocery store with a shopping list.

At the bottom were two items, “Kisses and Squeezy Hugs.”  (I bet you can see where this is going)

About an hour and a half later, he frantically called my mom from the store.

He could not find the squeezy hugs. (He thought that it was one of the new brands of cereal out there)

According to family lore, it took at least 15 minutes for my mom to stop laughing, and explain to my clueless dad that, “Kisses and Squeezy Hugs,” were not items on the shopping list, but a romantic note that spouses sometimes leave for each other.

I guess that every family has stories like this, and I’ve been thinking about ours a lot lately.

She’ll be Back

No Comments
The fraudulent blood test company Theranos is liquidating:

Theranos has told its investors that the company will wrap up, paying “unsecured creditors its remaining cash,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company’s dissolution comes months after its top two executives, ex-CEO Elizabeth Holmes and former President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were federally prosecuted for criminal wire fraud.

Theranos, with Holmes at the helm, had claimed that it could run a slew of physiological tests with a simple pin-prick of blood. That assertion turned out to be false.

As Ars reported previously, in March 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Holmes, Balwani, and Theranos, alleging that they had committed “massive fraud.” The SEC accused them of obtaining $700 million in investments by orchestrating an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

This is not a surprise.

I recalled that she came from money, she does, the  Fleischmann’s yeast fortune, as I confirmed on Wikipedia, but I found something else that was surprising:

Holmes was born in Washington, D.C. Holmes’ father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron

That’s right, Enron.

Maybe that should have been a hint to the people who were so fascinated by her story.

I need to make it clear that her father was not involved in any of the accounting irregularities that brought down Enron, but one would have thought that it would have rung a bell among the clueless investors who showered her with millions billions.

Still, I do not expect her to see any jail time, she’s from money, and she’s white, so I expect a slap on the wrist, and maybe some probation and community service.

Dump Nancy

3 Comments

Nancy Pelosi has decided that she will do her damnedest to re-institute pay-go, which will once again make advancing any meaningful Democratic Party agenda nearly impossible.

In addition to the fact that this is horrible policy, this sort of pandering to rich beltway pundits bullsh%$ that led to the Democratic Party losing the House, the Senate, the White House, and something like 2/3 of the state houses in the nation:

In the first outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats would pursue if they take the majority in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made the public a big promise, vowing to handcuff her party’s progressive ambitions, including in the event that a Democratic president succeeds Donald Trump, by resurrecting the “pay-go” rule that mandates all new spending is offset with budget cuts or tax increases.

………

Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code.

According to Axios, Pelosi “is committed to reviving” pay-go, which she instituted as a standing rule upon taking over the House in 2007. Though she waived the rule to pass the economic stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession, most of the other major legislative initiatives of the early Obama era — including the Affordable Care Act — were paid for. In 2010, Obama took this even further by signing the Statutory Pay As You Go Act. It enables presidents to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates the rule.

A note here:  Given that the Supreme Court ruled that the line-item veto bill was an unconstitutional violation of the separation power in 1998s, the Pay as You Go Act is also likely unconstitutional.

Pelosi’s planned legislative package for the beginning of a potential House takeover would include establishing ethics and lobbying reforms, lowering the costs of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs, and spending $1 trillion for infrastructure investment. The latter two would cost money, and under pay-go it would all have to be offset.

That’s not necessarily a problem — liberals have plenty of ideas for how to raise revenue. But it puts them in a box, having to propose tax increases that Republicans gleefully broadcast. Meanwhile, Republicans, unconcerned with deficits, get to play Santa Claus, without having to match tax cuts with anything unappealing.

………

Progressives have grown incensed by Pelosi’s insistence on budget neutrality. “The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now, given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said to The Hill in June. He argues that, unlike Republicans who are happy to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion without offsets, Democrats would try to solve nagging problems with unnecessary shackles. Grijalva called it “irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs.”

A new vanguard of economists in Washington, including former Bernie Sanders staffer Stephanie Kelton, has argued that under modern monetary theory, public spending is only constrained when the economy is running at full capacity and inflation starts to rise — which is not remotely the case today. Public deficits, she points out, are just another way of talking about private surpluses. She has warned of the dangers of balanced budgets that take money from the hands of ordinary people, and has made some headway inside Washington. Kelton has been involved in strategy sessions with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and remains close to Sanders, who would chair the Budget Committee if Democrats take the Senate. But Pelosi has been unmoved.

In a statement, Kelton said that “pay-go is a self-imposed, economically illiterate approach to budgeting.” Republicans, she said, know this, which is why “they have unabashedly used their power to expand deficits and, hence, deliver windfall gains for big corporations and the already well-to-do.”

She continued, “Instead of vowing budget chastity, Democrats should be articulating an agenda that excites voters so that they can unleash the full power of the public purse on their behalf.”

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 was in spite of Pelosi’s complete lack of ideology as leader of the House Democrats, not because of it.

Seriously, to paraphrase someone who was not Tallyrand, he appropriated the quote, “She has forgotten nothing, and she has learned nothing.”

Another Democratic Primary Upset Blowout

No Comments

Ayanna Pressley  destroyed 20+ year Congressman Michael Capuano in the Massachusetts primary yesterday:

Ayanna Pressley didn’t just beat Rep. Michael Capuano, she buried the incumbent Democrat by double digits in the district he has represented for more than 20 years.

With more than 100,000 primary ballots counted in the state’s deep-blue 7th District, the 44-year-old Boston city councilor received 58.6 percent of the vote. Capuano, meanwhile, took home 41.4 percent of the vote. The 66-year-old congressman barely even carried his hometown of Somerville, which had propelled him into Congress two decades earlier.

“If you’re serious about running a grassroots campaign, you don’t just pick and choose where you think you can run a strong race or where you think you have a base of support,” Alex Goldstein, a senior adviser to the Pressley campaign, said Wednesday. “You try to change the map everywhere.”

………

Before the election, Pressley spoke of the need to expand the electorate. As NBC News reported, the 102,067 total votes cast in Tuesday’s election dwarfed — and sometimes more than doubled — the turnout in Capuano’s previous uncontested primaries. Even in 2006, when Gov. Deval Patrick, a Milton resident, was on the primary ballot, the turnout reached only 85,051. 

It is said that Democrats hate their base, and Republicans fear their base.

If the pressure is kept up, and progressives are not convinced to keep their powder dry, we’re going to see some well deserved fear in the party establishment.

About that NY Times OP/ED

No Comments

I’ve generally found Chris Hays to be a bit glib and shallow, but his analysis of this now viral New York Times opinion piece by a senior official inside the White House is spot on:

The op-ed is an attempt to take out an insurance policy for the GOP and conservatism if and when things get much much worse. It’s a very public hedge meant to preserve the reputation of the GOP’s entire political and governing class.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 5, 2018

This editorial is an effort at ass-covering.

What a Pathetic Punk

No Comments

If you ever want to see a portrait of cowardice, just watch Brett Kavanaugh slink away from the parent of a Parkland shooting victim:

When the father of a school shooting victim held out his hand to Donald Trump’s nominee for the supreme court on Tuesday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh looked at him, then turned without saying a word and walked out.

“I put out my hand and I said: ‘My name is Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg, who was murdered in Parkland,’ and he walked away,” Guttenberg said in an interview with the Guardian.

The moment was captured in dramatic photographs, as well as on video from several different angles. In a statement after the incident, a White House spokesman said that “an unidentified individual” had approached Kavanaugh as he was preparing to leave for the confirmation hearing’s lunch break and that “before the Judge was able to shake his hand, security had intervened”.

 “If you watch the video, you see that’s not the case, ” Guttenberg said. “What the White House said was not true.”

Kavanaugh made eye contact with him “long enough for me to say who I was”, Guttenberg said. “He could have absolutely shook my hand and said: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ I mean – if nothing else.”

He’s a miserably excuse for a human being completely lacking in decency.

In other words, the very modern model of the modern Republican judicial nominee.

Adios Mother F%$#er

No Comments

In a stunning decision, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Tuesday morning that he will no longer seek a third term in office, signaling the end to what has been a tumultuous – and at times transformative – eight years in office.

With First Lady Amy Rule by his side, an emotional Emanuel said the time simply had come to write a new chapter in their lives together.

“I’ve decided not to seek re-election,” Emanuel said. “This has been the job of a lifetime, but it is not a job for a lifetime.”

Emanuel’s decision marks a dramatic political reversal, as for the better part of the last year he had said he would run for a third term. The mayor, long a prolific fundraiser, had already reeled in more than $10 million toward a bid for a third term.

Either he has realized that his political future in Chicago is done, because he tried to cover up a murder by police to help with his reelection bid:

Emanuel weighed the decision as the murder trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke is scheduled to begin this week, a high-profile case that is sure to bring about fresh scrutiny of his handling of the Laquan McDonald police shooting, in which Van Dyke shot the teen 16 times in October 2014 as he walked down a Southwest Side street holding a small folding knife.

For most of 2015, Emanuel fought in court not to release police video of the shooting, arguing the matter was still under investigation. When a judge ordered Emanuel to release the video in November 2015, then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez filed murder charges against Van Dyke on the same day Emanuel made the video public.

The controversy led to a federal civil rights investigation of the police department, accusations of a City Hall cover-up and weeks of street protests that called for Emanuel’s resignation. It also left Emanuel saddled with deep unpopularity among African-American voters, a demographic that he performed strongly with in his previous campaigns for mayor.

Or he is facing an indictment.

Given his fundraising prowess, and his overweening ego, I do not think that he would not believe that he could not turn his political fortunes around in the next 6 months, the election is in February.

The trial should be long over by then.

I’m hoping to see him being frog marched out of his posh Ravenswood home in handcuffs.

You have Got to be F%$#ing Kidding

No Comments
There is a company out there that is marketing a cryptocurrency miner as a home heater.

Reality has completely outdone the human capacity for satire:

French startup Qarnot unveiled a new computing heater specifically made for cryptocurrency mining. You’ve read that right, the QC1 is a heater for your home that features a passive computer inside. And this computer is optimized for mining.

While most people use laptops, back in the golden days of computer towers, you could heat a room with a couple of desktop computers. And heat is still one of the biggest challenges when you’re building a data center. You have to cool thousands of computers that run 24/7.

Qarnot started thinking about edge computing for data centers back in 2010. The company has built three generations of computing heaters with multiple CPUs and sold them to construction companies looking for heaters for their new buildings.

………

And now, the company is selling its first devices to end users directly. The company thinks it’s the perfect use case for cryptocurrency mining. The QC1 features two AMD GPUs (Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM) and is designed to mine Ethers by default.

You can set it up in a few minutes by plugging an Ethernet cable and putting your Ethereum wallet address in the mobile app. You’ll then gradually receive ethers on this address — Qarnot doesn’t receive any coin, you keep 100 percent of your cryptocurrencies.

………

But that’s where the Qarnot QC1 stands out and could be the crypto miner we’ve all been waiting for. Mining has become increasingly harder if you have to pay the electricity bill. But you still need to heat your home during those cold days of winter. So why not mine at the same time. 

Seriously?  This is the most insane consumer heating technology since Ford Motor Company marketed the Pinto as a 4 passenger portable stove.

Oh My God, Think of the Children!

1 Comment

The New Yorker holds a festival every year.

It’s you standard exercise in pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, so all the deep thinkers, people like, “John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey.”  (In case you are wondering, this is me mocking the whole enterprise.)

Well, the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, decided that it would be a good idea to invite white supremacist Steve Bannon, and the cancellations rained down like cluster bombs in Yemen:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, will no longer appear as a headliner at this year’s New Yorker Festival, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, announced in an email to the magazine’s staff on Monday evening.

The announcement followed several scathing rebukes and high-profile dropouts after the festival’s lineup, with Mr. Bannon featured, was announced. Within 30 minutes of one another, John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey said on social media that they would be pulling out of scheduled events at the festival. Right around the time when Mr. Remnick announced the cancellation of Mr. Bannon’s participation, Patton Oswalt did the same.

………

In Mr. Remnick’s email to his staff, he said that even New Yorker staff members had expressed discomfort at the decision to invite Mr. Bannon to be interviewed at the festival.

Gee, you think?

How does someone who is too stupid to cut his own meat end up editing the New Yorker anyway?

Tweet of the Day

No Comments
Woodward is sometimes an unreliable narrator and his sources are always self-serving. But in this case, his sources are also not well in the head, casting more than usual doubt on accuracy.

— Dan Froomkin (@froomkin) September 4, 2018

This is pretty much my take on Woodward’s book about Trump as well

Woodward has always practiced a sort of journalism that has worked on the private agendas of his sources, and pretty much every one of his sources is from the Trump administration, which means that, by definition, they are a morass of bigotry, psychoses, idiocy, and malice.

Under such circumstances, a sense of perspective, and the ability not to miss the forest for the trees, is important, and Woodward is lacking here.

What frightens me is that his latest freak show may be soft pedaling reality as a result.

Today in Weird

No Comments

Source if the leak

The leak in the space station was some screw-up with a drill who tried to hide his mistake:

Last week, a pressure leak occurred on the International Space Station. It was slow and posed no immediate threat to the crew, with the atmosphere leaving the station at a rate such that depressurization of the station would have taken 14 days.

Eventually, US and Russian crew members traced the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle that had flown to the space station in June. The module had carried Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA’s Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor.

The crew on the station was in no danger, and, over the course of several hours, Russian engineers devised a fix that involved epoxy. A preliminary analysis concluded that the vehicle is safe for return to Earth (the orbital module detaches from the small Soyuz capsule before entry into Earth’s atmosphere).

The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris. However, recent Russian news reports have shown that the problem was, in fact, a manufacturing defect. It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional. There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test.

“We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull,” Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. (A translation of the Russian articles in this story was provided to Ars by Robinson Mitchell). “We want to find out the full name of who is at fault—and we will.”

………

In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.

The Soyuz manufacturing issue represents another significant problem for the Russian space agency’s suppliers and its quality control processes. Already, the manufacturer of Proton rockets, Khrunichev, has had several serious problems that have led to launch failures. Rogozin was recently installed as the leader of Roscosmos to try to clean up corruption and address these kinds of issues.

Seriously, this sh%$ is rocket science, and everyone screws up.  You own it, and the Russians know how to use a TiG welder just as well as anyone else, and the fix along with post weld inspections, should not have taken more than a couple of hours.

Bondo is not an option in space.

One Way to Deal With Limited Launcher Capacity

No Comments

Israel is working to sharpen its eyes in space, enlisting Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to improve the optical and radar payloads of the spy satellites serving the nation’s intelligence community.

The company is developing a new generation of satellites for even more complex missions, using nanosatellite production and electric propulsion concepts.

………

In addition to the imagery, Doron says the low weight and a unique set of reaction wheels in IAI’s satellites enable them to capture more usable images of an area of interest in every pass. Special reaction wheels also enable Israeli satellites to carry a smaller amount of hydrazine gas, usually used to enable the satellite’s maneuvers in space and to keep it at the designed altitude.

An ion thruster or drive is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft. It creates thrust by accelerating positive ions with electricity for satellites with optical and synthetic aperture payloads. The resolution will be improved, and the way the images are processed on the ground also will be enhanced with very advanced ground stations.

Reaction wheels are basically gyroscopes, and it means that there is no propellant expired to change orientation.

They are also looking at adding electric propulsion for orbital maneuverability:

To further prolong the life of full-size Israeli satellites, the division is evaluating the use of electric propulsion to replace the use of hydrazine. The system will use xenon gas to operate on thrusters, he says. According to Doron, the use of xenon will enable the satellite to orbit the Earth at a lower altitude but give it enough power to correct any loss of altitude that will be caused by greater friction with the atmosphere.

An ion thruster or drive is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft. It creates thrust by accelerating positive ions with electricity for satellites with optical and synthetic aperture payloads. The resolution will be improved, and the way the images are processed on the ground also will be enhanced with very advanced ground stations.

An ion drive provides much less thrust than a rocket or a thruster, but it’s ISP (basically fuel economy) is far greater, with about 250 seconds for a thruster, and 3000 seconds for an ion thruster, which means a lot more delta-V with a lot less propellant, which means greater maneuverability and greater time on station.