Re: Let me rephrase part of your report
I think the correct rephrasing is:
"relations with Western space agencies have broken down thanks to atrocities and war crimes committed by Russia in its WAR with the Ukraine"
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth today aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts. Vande Hei's 355-day mission is the longest single spaceflight for a NASA astronaut, comfortably eclipsing the 340 days of Scott Kelly's mission from 2015 to 2016. Kelly's interactions with Roscosmos …
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The relations between Moscow and Washington have been on the decline for years. This isn't a new thing. Economically, Moscow was already feeling like it was in trouble; and desperately did not want a Petrochemical competitor on the European continent to interrupt it's monopoly. Consider also that western europe had already persuaded itself it was a good idea to reduce demand; so I'm sure Moscow sees nothing but long term threats to it's income and therefore it's power base.
Ironically the war has pushed the west to forcibly reduce demand and try to progress alternatives more quickly.
Space exploration is another area that the Russians have now lost out on export business, what with SpaceX being able to out-price and out-capability both Soyuz and Proton - even with comically low wages for Russian personnel. Doing things the same way for 50 years did eventually come with a "price" of falling behind. And with the brain drain on Russia; I cannot see them able to innovate to even keep up let alone re-take such a lead. Angara isn't remotely competitive with other heavy lift options, and, crucially, it still isn't working. It may never.
Trump's ineffectiveness and terrible diplomatic skills are of course part of the story; and seemingly, a whole bunch of yes men in the chain of command fuelling the paranoia - some of whom have already been sacked. Ultimate responsibility lies in the Kremlin of course.
Or it could have read this way back in 2003:
"relations with Western space agencies have broken down thanks to atrocities and war crimes committed by United States in its WAR with the Iraq"
But the rest of the world obviously didn't care to protest against that 8 year "military intervention" and even if they did it fell on deaf ears of the western leaders who wanted to bring their depleted uranium and cluster bomb enhanced "democracy" to the people of Iraq.
A lot of people did protest if you remember. Biggest march on London in living memory.
Didn't do jack to change Tony B Liar's policies of course. I am sure it did affect subsequent election results.
Whataboutism is not an excuse to engage in worse behaviour. What about Syria where Russia used chemical weapons to support Assad? Iraq, which used them on its own citizens in Kurdistan?
Or ask the women in Afghanistan if their lifestyle has improved under the resumption of the Taliban? Of course Russia invaded and destabilised Afghan way before NATO got involved.
So don't you dare what about us, you Russian Stooge.
So what if you protested war in Iraq? It still happened and the country ended up destroyed and a puppet government installed while the resources were pillaged.
Let me remind you that USA doesn't even share border with Iraq and it still invaded it without UN approval.
The fact that you personally condemned the act doesn't mean shit when the USA never got punished for breaking international law and for the atrocities they committed in any of the conflicts they created.
Until that happens you don't really have the moral high ground to condemn or sanction Russia for not wanting to put up with Wesrern hypocrisy and bullshit anymore.
As for calling any comparison made with the sole intent to point out hypocrisy and double standards "whataboutism", it is really becoming an old and tiresome excuse for ignoring your own shitty behavior.
I read posts in other forums saying how Russians should get in the streets and use violence to topple their government. I don't remember those same people taking pitchforks and toppling their "democratic" governments to stop the war in Iraq despite having more personal freedoms and less risk to do so than Russians do.
So don't you dare asking us all to forget your crimes because they didn't happen today you imperialistic stooge.
Not that you are in any way a target that can be persuaded otherwise; trying to justify a wrong by looking at other wrongs and claiming "they got away with it" still makes it no less wrong. I make no claims to defend western crime and governments that issued highly questionable orders on justifications weaker than used toilet paper.
The US was condemned for it's invasion by a lot of parties. The ongoing escalation and trade war with China was one of the outcomes - one that China cannot afford to prosecute to the same extent that the entire western world can prosecute Russia.
If you look beyond the end of RT's propaganda, the role of the nation state is diminishing; and, as much as I hate the guy, Jacob Rees-Mogg is onto something with the rise of the sovereign individual. Defending being shit to other humans because other humans were shit to other humans is a pretty pointless exercise for all concerned. I'd ask why can't we all get along; but then naked self interests will flare up once again.
Tech may have improved but the species hasn't evolved beyond the primitive monkeys we are. Waking up and accepting that might improve life for everyone.
His Russian pals placed a NASA cap on his head when he landed.
Scientists and engineers are just better than other people, more rational, and the further we get from earth the better we get.
I rated the ISS as the best present I've ever been given. I get an alert on my phone when it passes overhead, with video of the clouds above Scotland from above. The air that we breathe was exhaled by our so-called 'enemies', which is more apparent in a wee tin can.
NASA engineers had to work fast to avoid another leak affecting the latest Artemis dry run, just hours after an attempt to reboost the International Space Station (ISS) via the Cygnus freighter was aborted following a few short seconds.
The US space agency on Monday rolled the huge Artemis I stack back to its Florida launchpad having worked through the leaks and problems that had beset its previous attempt at fueling the beast in April for an earlier dress rehearsal of the final countdown.
As propellant was loaded into the rocket, controllers noted a hydrogen leak in the quick-disconnect that attaches an umbilical from the tail service mast on the mobile launcher to the core stage of the rocket.
NASA is finally ready to launch its unmanned Orion spacecraft and put it in the orbit of the Moon. Lift-off from Earth is now expected in late August using a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
This launch, a mission dubbed Artemis I, will be a vital stage in the Artemis series, which has the long-term goal of ferrying humans to the lunar surface using Orion capsules and SLS technology.
Earlier this week NASA held a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the SLS vehicle – fueling it and getting within 10 seconds of launch. The test uncovered 13 problems, including a hydrogen fuel leak in the main booster, though NASA has declared that everything's fine for a launch next month.
Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.
The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.
Sadly for NASA's mission to take samples from the asteroid Psyche, software problems mean the spacecraft is going to miss its 2022 launch window.
The US space agency made the announcement on Friday: "Due to the late delivery of the spacecraft's flight software and testing equipment, NASA does not have sufficient time to complete the testing needed ahead of its remaining launch period this year, which ends on October 11."
While it appears the software and testbeds are now working, there just isn't enough time to get everything done before a SpaceX Falcon Heavy sends the spacecraft to study a metallic-rich asteroid of the same name.
An asteroid predicted to hit Earth in 2052 has, for now, been removed from the European Space Agency's list of rocks to be worried about.
Asteroid 2021 QM1 was described by ESA as "the riskiest asteroid known to humankind," at least among asteroids discovered in the past year. QM1 was spotted in August 2021 by Arizona-based Mount Lemmon observatory, and additional observations only made its path appear more threatening.
"We could see its future paths around the Sun, and in 2052 it could come dangerously close to Earth. The more the asteroid was observed, the greater that risk became," said ESA Head of Planetary Defense Richard Moissl.
The SOFIA aircraft has returned to New Zealand for a final time ahead of the mission's conclusion later this year.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft, designed to carry a 2.7-meter reflecting telescope into the stratosphere, above much of Earth's infrared-blocking atmosphere.
A collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), development began on the project in 1996. SOFIA saw first light in 2010 and achieved full operational capability in 2014. Its prime mission was completed in 2019 and earlier this year, it was decided that SOFIA would be grounded for budgetary reasons. Operations end "no later than" September 30, 2022, followed by an "orderly shutdown."
Scientists at top universities in China propose sending a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission to orbit Neptune – the outermost planet in our solar system – in 2030.
Astronomers have not yet been able to look at Uranus and Neptune in much detail. The best data collected so far comes from NASA's Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have flown by the big blue orbs way back in 1986 and 1989.
Now, Chinese academics believe it may be possible to launch a spacecraft to orbit Neptune.
NASA has chosen the three companies it will fund to develop a nuclear fission reactor ready to test on the Moon by the end of the decade.
This power plant is set to be a vital component of Artemis, the American space agency's most ambitious human spaceflight mission to date. This is a large-scale project to put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, and establish a long-term presence on Earth's natural satellite.
NASA envisions [PDF] astronauts living in a lunar base camp, bombing around in rovers, and using it as a launchpad to explore further out into the Solar System. In order for this to happen, it'll need to figure out how to generate a decent amount of power somehow.
Pic When space junk crashed into the Moon earlier this year, it made not one but two craters on the lunar surface, judging from images revealed by NASA on Friday.
Astronomers predicted a mysterious object would hit the Moon on March 4 after tracking the debris for months. The object was large, and believed to be a spent rocket booster from the Chinese National Space Administration's Long March 3C vehicle that launched the Chang'e 5-T1 spacecraft in 2014.
The details are fuzzy. Space agencies tend to monitor junk closer to home, and don't really keep an eye on what might be littering other planetary objects. It was difficult to confirm the nature of the crash; experts reckoned it would probably leave behind a crater. Now, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has spied telltale signs of an impact at the surface. Pictures taken by the probe reveal an odd hole shaped like a peanut shell on the surface of the Moon, presumably caused by the Chinese junk.
NanoAvionics has unveiled a 4K satellite selfie taken by a GoPro Hero 7 as the company's MP42 microsatellite flew 550km above the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef.
Space selfies are hardly new. Buzz Aldrin snapped an image of himself during 1966's Gemini 12 mission, and being able to get a picture of spacecraft can be invaluable when diagnosing issues.
The MP42 microsatellite was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this year and the camera (mounted on a space-grade selfie stick) sprung out to snap shots to demonstrate techniques to check for payload deployment, micrometeoroid impacts, and general fault detection.
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