Satellites are revolutionizing Mayan archaeology

I'm starting to tread on The Silicon Graybeard's turf, but this is really cool:

Satellites are helping scientists spot more ancient Mayan ruins than ever before, which is no small feat considering how thick the forest is in the indigenous group's ancestral lands.

"Archeologists have mapped more Mayan sites, buildings and features in the past 10 years than we had in the past — preceding — 150 years," Brett Houk, an archaeology professor at Texas Tech University, told attendees at a NASA-led space archaeology conference Sept. 18 to which Space.com received an exclusive invite.

Archaeologists are finding these ruins faster due to better satellite technology. Using a pulsed laser technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging, satellites can peer through the dense canopy surrounding typical Mayan sites, Houk explained at the two-day livestreamed NASA and Archaeology From Space symposium.

I found the arguments in Charles Mann's 1491 to be pretty convincing that American populations were much larger than previously thought prior to Columbus' voyage.  This seems to be evidence in favor of that thesis.

Other places this technique should be easily applicable are the Amazon basin (which Mann claims hosted a very large population) and likely Cambodia/Angkor Wat.

 

Secret or no secret?

If this were such a big deal, would the Chinese be talking about it?

According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.

...

The research details how the academics were able to recognize the rough location of a commercial drone by observing disturbances in electromagnetic signals from Starlink satellites caused by aircraft passing through them. The system could "provide significant advantages in detecting small and stealth targets," the team claimed.

The academics, led by professor Yi Jianxin from Wuhan University's School of Electronic Information, launched [paywall] a commercial DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and sent it over the coast near the Chinese city of Guangdong. The researchers chose the drone as they estimated it has the same radar signature as a modern F-22 fighter.

They reported being able to detect up the drone – not by hammering it with easily identifiable radar pulses (which would invite a counterattack in a war situation) but by identifying where the drone reflected the signals from a Starlink satellite orbiting overhead. The test was overseen by the Chinese government's State Radio Monitoring Centre.

This looks to be pretty similar to a system of passive radar that the Germans used in World War II.

You would think that if this were effective (or if the Chinese thought it could be made to be effective), they wouldn't say anything about it.

Dad Joke CCCXL

How do you stop an astronaut's baby from crying? 

You rocket.

Starlink grossing $3B a year

Starlink is the satellite Internet service from SpaceX.  You get high speed (200 Mbps) pretty much anywhere on Mother Earth.

Starlink costs $100/month.  They claim that they have 2.4 million subscribers.  The process of Higher Math tells us that they are taking in a quarter Billion dollars a month.

And they're only getting started.

Bavid Bowe - Space Oddity

(See what I did there?)

 

It's a little out of place to tag something Modern Monday when it was recorded over half a century ago, but this still sounds like nothing on the radio today*.

* Unless you listen to "Classic Rock" ...

Jimmy Buffett - Stars Fell On Alabama

It was 1833, and the "Night that the stars fell".  The Leonid meteor shower is an annual event each August.  The 1833 shower in Alabama was no wind and no clouds and so the show was exceptional.  Guy Lombardo recorded the first version of the 1934 jazz classic.  Jimmy did a version (as did literally a hundred others).  I do like Jimmy's version, from an Alabama native.

The Stars Fell On Alabama (music: Frank Perkins; Lyrics: Mitchell Parish):

We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night
I can't forget the glamour
Your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Alabama last night

I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
And in the center just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer
My arms wound around you tight
And stars fell on Alabama last night

I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
In the center just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer
My arms wound around you tight
And stars fell on Alabama last night

What a great song. I remember when the Stars fell on Maine in 1979 or so.  But August nights there are frequently cloud free and windless too.  As are February nights when you can see the Northern Lights.

But not a lot of great songs from Maine if you discount Rudy Vallee.  On a very not-Rudy-Vallee vein, here's the great English singer Vera Lynn ("The White Cliffs Of Dover) sounding like, well, she's not from Alabama but might be from Michigan or somewhere like that.  Her biography is worth reading, if you're a regular here.

Dad Joke CCLXXXIII

When is the Moon the heaviest?

When it's full.

An animal that survives in space

This is a Tardigrade, an animal that is about half a milimeter long.  What's interesting is that is can survive in very extreme environments.

They have been found in hot springs.  They've been found in the deep ocean.  They've been found living under ice sheets.  They can go without food or water for 30 years, during which they enter a sort of suspended animation state where their metabolism drops by 99.99%.

They can survive temperatures approaching absolute zero, and in 2007 they were sent into orbit and once returned to Earth were reanimated.  There's currently talk that they could live on Mars if there were anything for them to eat.

Pretty wild.
 

Pigs Hackers In Space!

This isn't quite the 21st Century I was promised, but this sounds like a very interesting idea:

Assuming the weather and engineering gods cooperate, a US government-funded satellite dubbed Moonlighter will launch at 1212 EDT (1612 UTC) on Sunday, hitching a ride on a SpaceX rocket before being releasing into Earth's orbit.

And in roughly two months, five teams of DEF CON hackers will do their best to successfully remotely infiltrate and hijack the satellite while it's in space. The idea being to try out offensive and defensive techniques and methods on actual in-orbit hardware and software, which we imagine could help improve our space systems.

Each year there is a security conference held in Las Vegas.  The Black Hat Briefings are pretty corporate and button-down, but it's pretty much the high point of the security year.  Black Hat's red headed stepchild is held immediately afterwards: DEFCON is where security folks let down their hair and let their freak flag fly.  In may ways, it's more interesting than Black Hat.

For example, they set up a network where people play "capture the flag", computer security style.  The attendees are also notoriously skeptical of the government, and have a "Spot The Fed" contest each year.

This is a very interesting approach taken by the Fed.Gov in that the visibility and coolness factor of hacking a satellite in orbit will totally overwhelm the natural tendency of the attendees to avoid all things Fed.

Interestingly, Dwight (your go-to guy for obituaries and which coaches have been fired) is also your go-to guy on DEFCON reporting.

Huh. It seems that the Moon needs a time zone

There are plans to build a GPS and data network, and it no workee (very well) without a reference time.  The Moon doesn't have that.  Yet.

Time being one of the fundamental parts of determining position using satellites, interoperability standards had to be agreed upon after the launches of the various GNSS constellations. 

That has meant making up for slight timing differences between GPS, Galileo and other GNSS systems by introducing fixed offsets – something that everyone involved would prefer to avoid in building out LunaNet and similar systems. 

ESA navigation system engineer Pietro Giordano said a joint international effort to create some form of Lunar standard time began after a November meeting of ESA's Space Research and Technology Centre. 

 I must say, this is very much the 21st Century that I was promised.

SpaceX successfully static fires Booster 7

1 engine was shut down by Mission Control and one shut itself down after ignition, so this was 31 engines burning for 6 seconds.  Looks like it's being considered a success.

Hopefully we'll see Starship launch next month.

Artemis/Orion: Pow! Zoom! To the Moon!

Congratulations to NASA for this week's successful SLS launch.  It is (for now at least) the most powerful rocket in history.  The Orion capsule is now on its way to the Moon which is pretty cool.

But you have to think that SpaceX is the future.  Casey Handmer describes just what a game changer the Starship rocket is:

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

SLS has a different motivation.  The return to the Moon is a Prestige Project (not to mention a way to funnel Federal money to favored suppliers).  That road is a dead end.  I posted this years back, before SpaceX was really on the radar.  Looking at what they are doing, they look very much like Columbus.

(Originally posted Monday, July 20, 2009)

Jack Kennedy's Treasure Fleet

I was 11 years old, and it was late. We simply weren't allowed to stay up that late - after 11:00. But this was no normal day. We all huddled around that old Black-and-White television set, watching a terrible picture that showed the first man on the moon. Dad was in Paris finishing his PhD research, and watched it projected on a huge screen at the Place de la Concorde. This was maybe the last time that an American's money was no good in Paris.

We haven't been back, since Gene Cernan climbed back aboard the LEM in December, 1972. Some folks think this is a crying shame. I used to be one of them. Now I recognize that there could not have been any other outcome. We've seen this before.

Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese Ming dynasty sent a series of exploration voyages to southeast Asia, India, and even Africa. While the Portuguese under Prince Henry struggled down the western coast of Africa in their tiny caravels, huge Chinese treasure ships sailed to Calicut and Mogadishu.

And then they were gone, as if they had never existed. Why?

The historian David Landes spends considerable time on this question in his indispensable The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations. The Chinese voyages differed in one critical way from those of Diaz and Columbus: the Chinese voyages were motivated by a desire to glorify the Middle Kingdom, while the European ones were motivated by the desire for filthy lucre:

In the 1430s a new emperor reigned in Peking, one who "knew not Joseph." A new, Confucian crowd completed for influence, mandarins who scorned and distrusted commerce (for them, the only true source of wealth was agriculture) and detested the eunuchs who had planned and carried out the great voyages. For some decades, the two groups vied for influence, the balance shifting now one way, not the other. But fiscality and the higher Chinese morality were on the Confucian side. The maritime campaign had strained the empire's finances and weakened its authority over a population bled white by taxes and corvee levies.

[snip]

So, after some decades of tugging and hauling, of alternating celebration and commemoration on the one hand, of contumely and repudiation on the other, the decision was taken not only to cease from maritime exploration but to erase the very memory of what had gone before lest later generations be tempted to renew the folly.

[snip]

At the same time, [the Chinese] desire to overawe meant that costs far exceeded returns. These voyages reeked of extravagance. Whereas the first profits (the first whiff of pepper) and the promise of even greater ones to come were a powerful incentive to Western venturers, in China the pecuniary calculus said no.

[snip]

The vulnerability of the program - here today, gone tomorrow - was reinforced by its official character. In Europe, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. Nothing like that in China, where the Confucian state abhorred merchantile success.

So why did we leave the Moon, never to return? Why is NASA wandering in the wilderness? Let's update Landes, shall we? In Europe America, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal Government projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies low-cost way to orbit was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. OK, then.

The heroism of the Astronaut corps doesn't change the fact that NASA will not - and can not - ever do what Columbus did. If they want to make a difference, to make it possible for people to live in Space, they should declare that they will purchase X kilograms of orbital launch delivery at $Y per kilo, and get out of the way. Unlike the X-Prize and Spaceship-One, NASA's pecuniary calculus will always be a football game, played between the Johnson Center Eunuchs and the HHS Mandarins.

But hey, this is all crazy talk, right? I mean, NASA would never skew things because of politics, right? Right?

 

R.I.P. James McDivitt

Gemini and Apollo astronaut (and USAF General) James McDivitt dead at 93.

As usual, Dwight is your go-to guy for obits. 

Dad Joke CCXX - Special Space edition

The Queen Of The World says I need to get back to posting Dad jokes.  OK, to make up for the hiatus, here are two.

When we have a Moon Base someday there will be a restaurant there.  I don't think I will go, however.  Even if it has great food, there will be no atmosphere.

When we have a Mars Base someday there might be a riot.  The Government would have to declare Martian Law. 

Dad joke CCXVIII - Special Astronomy edition

Orion's Belt is just a big waist of space.

And while it's not Orion's Belt, here is one of the first images from the Webb Space Telescope.  It's the Ring Nebula, in our own Galactic neighborhood at only 2000 light years away.

 You can see more cool pix from space here.

A step even farther out

Longtime readers will no doubt be shocked to find out that I am a nerd, and have been for a long time.  Back in the 1970s I subscribed to Galaxy science fiction magazine in no small measure because of Jerry Pournelle's monthly column "A Step Farther Out" about space and space technology.

I've just run across a blog that is basically this for the modern age: Casey Handmer is a former JPL techie who seems to be in one of the many space exploration companies that are popping up everywhere these days*.  I think I ran across his blog via a link at The Silicon Graybeard, but Handmer doesn't focus on "what's the space news from this week" - rather, it's in-depth discussion of fascinating topics that I either didn't know, or topics that I thought I did know but actually knew wrong.  Here is a smattering of some of the most interesting ones:

OMG space is full of radiation, and why I’m not worried
Domes are over-rated
Modular space stations don’t save time or money
The Moon’s water is less exciting than you might think
There are no known commodity resources in space that could be sold on Earth

And the most important of his posts (IMHO) is this one: The SpaceX Starship is a very big deal.  Here's the key bit:

Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing. It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger.

He then goes on to think bigger.  There's all sorts of things wrong in this world, but what's happening in space is not on that list.  We are witnessing the birth of The industry of the 21st Century, just like aviation was the industry of the 20th.

Pournelle wrote a column when the Space Shuttle Enterprise first flew, comparing it to the DC-3 "Gooney Bird".  I think that Starship is the actual space DC-3.  It will make space travel routine, in ways that we can't imagine any better than someone looking at the first DC-3 in 1935 could.  They would never have figured on Freddy Laker's People's Express; we can't imagine what a Moon Shuttle will be.

* Now this is the 21st Century I was promised.