WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

^{Shepard Fairey}

That’s the main notebook – insert 1 is the daily book, the two behind it are what I run LTD and Orbital Operations off.

It may be meteorological spring, but it’s grey and misty out there, so I’m today using the midwinter beard oil I was gifted by Fires of Freyja.

Low energy slobby day: black Wrangler jeans that are now four inches too big for me, black Wrangler workshirt, surplus Russian submariners base layer which I like for its boat neck, an old grey Calvin Klein jacket, and a grey cashmere scarf because I have reached the age where I must take the scarf.

Two months ago, a key staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz said in a public meeting that she was “begging” NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition among private companies to develop replacements for the International Space Station.

There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this “request for proposals.” So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.

Regarding NASA’s support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:

• Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
• Within 90 days, release the final “request for proposals” to solicit industry responses
• Within 180 days, enter into contracts with “two or more” commercial providers for such stations

Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies—including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager—are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as “requirements” in NASA parlance.

When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the revamped approach to the Artemis moon program, it was unclear whether the new mobile launcher that has been constructed over the last two years at Kennedy Space Center would ever get used.

A NASA rundown of the reconfigured Artemis launch plans released Tuesday, though, answers that question for the foreseeable future: No.

“The agency is no longer planning to use the Exploration Upper Stage or Mobile Launcher 2, as development of both has faced delays,” according to the agency update.

The universe is overrun with dark matter, outweighing the ordinary stuff that stars and planets are made of five-to-one. But some corners of the cosmos are more dominated by the invisible substance than others.

Using the stalwart Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have found a galaxy 300 million light away that appears to be made of at least 99.9 percent dark matter — so much that the galaxy is barely visible at all, they report in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The tenebrous realm, dubbed CDG-2, could be one of the most dark matter heavy galaxies ever found, and a compelling candidate for elusive and yet hypothetical “dark galaxies” that astronomers have been searching for for decades, which are thought to contain vanishingly few, if any, stars.