Russia, China to sign agreement on international lunar research station

Russia opts for lunar project with China over continued cooperation with ISS partners beyond LEO

HELSINKI — Russia is preparing to sign a memorandum of understanding with China to cooperate on a vision for an international lunar research station.

“Roscosmos has completed domestic proceedings to harmonize the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of People’s Republic of China on cooperation to create the International Lunar Research Station,” Roscosmos Press Office told SpaceNews in an email.

“The date to sign the above mentioned MoU has not been determined yet and is currently discussed with the Chinese partners,” Roscosmos said. An Order of the Government of the Russian Federation relating to the move was published online Feb. 11.

Roscosmos press office said the official announcement of the plans to create the International Lunar Research Station is planned to coincide with one of the upcoming international events. St. Petersburg is due to host the Global Space Exploration Conference 2021 in June.

Roscosmos did not provide requested further details on the makeup of, nor contributions to the International Lunar Research Station.

The ILRS is understood to be a Chinese-developed vision for a robotic base at the lunar south pole. The first steps will be the upcoming Chang’e-,6, -7 and -8 missions and international missions such as Russia’s Luna 27. In the early 2030s an expanded ILRS will involve long-term robotic and potentially short-term crewed missions. A long-term human presence at the lunar south pole is the goal for 2036-2045. 

The project, at this early stage, would appear to consist of Chinese, Russian and potentially other nations contributing their own, discrete spacecraft. This would be in contrast to a more complex, integrated program such as the International Space Station.

ILRS objectives include “construction and operation of human[ity]’s first sharing platform in the lunar south pole, supporting long-term, large-scale scientific exploration, technical experiments and development and utilization of lunar resources’, according to a 2020 presentation to the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) by the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center under the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

From Gateway to China-Russia lunar station

The development follows Russia opting not to join eight nations, including the U.S., in signing on to the Artemis Accords last October. The Accords are a set of principles and norms for those who want to participate in the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration program.

Bleddyn Bowen, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, told SpaceNews that the development is not such a surprise, given that Russia has always been lukewarm to the Lunar Gateway, part of the Artemis program, and this will have been factored in. However the project will still suffer from the loss of Russian expertise.

Bowen sees the move from Russia as an ISS partner to working more closely with China in lunar exploration rather than ISS partners is part of wider space-related and geopolitical shifts, particularly since the outbreak of the Ukranian conflict.

“This MoU fits the larger trend, which is Russia moving into a closer orbit with China,” says Bowen, adding that this more formal agreement builds on existing cooperation in material science, data sharing, purchase agreements and lunar exploration.

Bowen cautions however that this is “just a memorandum of understanding, so we’ll have to wait and what, if anything, comes from this”. 

Zhang Ming, a researcher on international security and space issues at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told SpaceNews both China and Russia, who have long cooperated in space, have difficulties in working with the U.S. for different reasons. Zhang notes that Russia had expressed concerns that Artemis was too “U.S.-centric” and she would expect “more and more space and lunar cooperation between Russia and China” if the “United State continues its space policies and practices without any change.”

“The U.S. advances its space agenda aggressively and sometimes unilaterally in recent years despite the concerns of the rest [of the] world, which made China and Russia very worried. The mistrust and skepticism towards U.S. motives will promote China and Russia to further their space cooperation,” Zhang said.

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin last year told Russian media China and Russia had agreed they will “probably” build a moon research base together, following talks with Director of the China National Space Administration Zhang Kejian.

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation also believes the split has been coming for sometime, citing the Ukraine invasion and 2016 election interference. “I think we’re at a much different US-Russia space relationship than we had for the past few decades.”

“I don’t think it’s going to have a serious impact on Artemis. Russia indeed has some experience in robotic lunar landers but no human spaceflight experience and their space sector has been declining for some time,” says Weeden. “The space partnership with Russia in the ISS was driven more by national security and foreign policy reasons than a need to have Russian expertise. It’s useful, but not critical.”

The European Space Agency has also been involved in discussions, while recently having signed an MoU with NASA on the Gateway. “At ESA we are following the Chinese lunar exploration plans very closely in order to see where our respective programmatic interest could meet, primarily the CE-6, -7 and -8 missions but also the ILRS initiative”, Karl Bergquist, ESA’s international relations administrator, told SpaceNews last year.

From Chang’e to ILRS

The ILRS is an evolutionary, expanded stage of Chinese lunar exploration following the approval of a first set of missions in the early 2000s. China has since launched two lunar orbiters, a pair of lander and rover missions and, in late 2020, the complex Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission.

Chang’e-6, a polar sample return mission, and the multi-spacecraft Chang’e-7 are scheduled for around 2023-2024. The later Chang’e-8 mission will be designed for in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology tests, as well as life science related to potential long-term stays on the moon. These missions will form the robotic basis of the ILRS before expansion into more long term base.

China is also developing capabilities for deep space human spaceflight. In May 2020 China tested a new generation spacecraft and is also developing a super-heavy-lift launcher for space infrastructure and lunar missions. A new, three-core launcher for potential crewed lunar missions is also in development.

NASA Mars rover landing seeks cosmic life

The organic cosmos...

…begotten by the Big Seed.

UPDATE (Feb. 18, 2021, 4:00 p.m. ET): On Thursday, Perseverance successfully touched down on Mars, kicking off a two-year mission to roam its surface and search for signs of ancient microbial life.

NASA is reprising an old quest: a search for life on Mars.

The hunt for red planet residents began close to four decades ago, when the agency sent two spacecraft — the Viking landers — to Mars. Their task was to prove that the planet, while red, is not dead.

The landers initially sent back data that seemed consistent with bacteria-like organisms in the soil. But with further analysis, early optimism soured. Was there life on Mars? NASA concluded: Probably not.

This wishy-washy answer was frustratingly ambiguous, especially for a $1 billion experiment. So, NASA is now taking a different approach in its hunt for microbes. Unlike the Viking landers, the new Perseverance rover isn’t looking for chemical signs of metabolism. Instead, Perseverance will trundle around Mars’ gaunt landscapes searching for sediments. These could contain clues to organisms that pitched and swirled in long-vanished seas.

The rationale is simple: If Mars ever had life, the dead will surely outnumber the living, and are therefore more likely to be found. The proposed landing site for Perseverance, Jezero Crater, looks like a former lake basin fed by a dried-out river, a happy hunting ground for a rover prowling for the desiccated remains of early inhabitants.

The samples cached by Perseverance will hopefully be collected and returned to Earth by a future mission, to be analyzed in terrestrial laboratories. There will be no “Eureka” moment for Perseverance; if Martians are found, they will be found on Earth.

But if it that happens, it will be more than an interesting science story. Just as the past is now divided into “before” and “after” the Copernican revolution, so too will discovering long-expired Martian bacteria permanently change humanity’s view of its own importance.

There is, however, one thing that could dampen the impact of finding (dead) life on Mars. If it turns out that Martian organisms were related to Earthly life — if both sport the same DNA biology — then the discovery may point to the way life can accidentally spread between worlds, hitchhiking on dirt clods kicked into space by meteor impacts. That would be interesting, yes. But far more portentous would be to discover that our solar system has had a “second genesis”; that life on Earth and Mars had different origins. That would imply that life is as commonplace in the cosmos.

If so, it would be a near-certainty that in other places among the trillion planets of the Milky Way, life has evolved to a state of self-aware intelligence. Simply getting life started doesn’t guarantee this; there would surely be manifold worlds where life stalls out as pond scum. But that cannot be the case for every planet or moon that spawns biology. Intelligence has survival value.

So, finding Martian life should compel us to abandon the notion that we are privileged, that humans are the sole sentient inhabitants of the universe. Indeed, we would not only have a strong indicator of cosmic company but could infer that it is widespread. It would include beings that are far beyond our own technical level, given that the Sun and its planets are relative newcomers to the universe, billions of years younger than the average solar system.

Such a realization would be as consequential to our self-image as when we learned that we are not separate from the fauna of our world, but simply a part of it.

Suddenly, we would confront the likelihood that everything we accomplish has parallels in the actions of unseen others, and that what we find beautiful and worthwhile must have a billion other definitions elsewhere. Scientists, who find joy in being the first to know something, would realize that countless other beings have learned it too. We could be certain that there are vast libraries of knowledge that we cannot enter.

And what of religion? Theology has famously railed against earlier scientific discoveries that seemingly diminished our central position in the cosmos, from Galileo to Darwin. How would it react to learning that not only is our planet not unique, but neither are its most celebrated inhabitants?

A Survata poll from 2013 suggests the response might be more positive than we think. According to the poll’s respondents, up to one-third of the members of major western religions may already believe in extraterrestrial life. Even the Catholic Church, notorious for censuring Galileo, is accepting of at least the possible existence of sentient beings elsewhere in the universe. (Pope Francis has specifically expressed his willingness to baptize Martians.)

Perseverance could put us back on a road long traveled. In the 18th century, telescopes became powerful enough to discern the polar ice caps and surface markings on Mars. The red planet was the only world we knew where conditions might be similar to those on Earth. This likeness launched a durable belief in Martian life, and the Perseverance rover is the latest gambit by science to hunt it down, dead or alive.

But what may seem like a straightforward pursuit of a long-standing hypothesis would — if successful — have implications of great philosophical consequence. Protagoras wrote that man is the measure of all things. But thanks to some high-tech hardware lumbering across the dusty sands of a nearby world, that might soon cease to be true.

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The cosmic Brotherhood of Sentience: intelligence / abstract contemplation = highest end / final cause - regardless of particular species or point of cosmic origin.

Female Judge Strikes Blow Against Orthodox Jewish Male Privilege: Empowers Black and Brown Parents on East Ramapo School Board

"Hoisted by your own petard":

"Hoist with his own petard" is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is literally that a bomb-maker is blown up by his own bomb, and indicates an ironic reversal, or poetic justice.

For more than a decade, most of the school board members have been strictly Orthodox Jewish men. They steered more money to school buses, textbooks and special education services for private yeshivas. All the while, the board made drastic cuts to public schools - from laying off teachers and social workers to reducing kindergarten hours and gutting school supplies. “It got so bad, at one point, children were coming home—little girls were coming home, saying ‘I don't go to the bathroom because there's no toilet paper,’" said Willie Trotman, president of the NAACP’s Spring Valley chapter.

“It’s not because we don’t like these people,” said Luis Nivelo, a public school parent, referring to the Orthodox communityJews. But he said it’s people on the board “who destroy our schools.”  And he said extra state funds that were allocated in recent years weren’t sufficient. “They give us a piece of cookies,” he said, adding “we deserve equality in education, because we are human beings.”

Full article available: here.

Portrait of young galaxy throws theory of galaxy formation on its head

Speedy galaxy evolution:

Summary

The processes that transformed small, turbulent, relatively unstructured protogalaxies into rotating spiral or giant elliptical galaxies are not well understood. Most galaxies are expected to go through a spiral-like phase, maturing into an elliptical structure. Many local spiral galaxies have a classic rotating disk of young stars as well as a “bulge” of older red stars at their centers; these two features are considered to be signatures of galaxies that have evolved from their original primordial forms. Unfortunately, these features are challenging to directly detect, particularly in the very distant (i.e., early) Universe. On page 713 of this issue, Lelli et al. (1) report a galaxy that had evolved features (both a disk and a bulge) when only 1.2 billion years had elapsed since the Big Seed (∼12.5 billion years ago) (see the figure). This finding suggests that the processes that generate the key features of a mature galaxy arose more rapidly than has been thought.

http://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse

This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.

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Portrait of young galaxy throws theory of galaxy formation on its head:

Scientists have challenged our current understanding of how galaxies form by unveiling pictures of a young galaxy in the early life of the Universe which appears surprisingly mature.

The galaxy, dubbed ALESS 073.1, appears to have all of the features expected of a much more mature galaxy and has led the team of scientists to question how it grew so fast.

The new research has been published today in Science.

Galaxies come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours, and are made up of different components such as rotating disks, spiral arms, and "bulges".

A major goal of present-day astronomy is understanding why different galaxies look the way they are today and when their different components formed.

The team, led by scientists at Cardiff University, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope as a 'time machine' to peer into the remote past, revealing how ALESS 073.1 looked just 1.2 billion years after the Big Seed.

Because the light emitted from the galaxy took billions of years to reach our telescopes on Earth, the team were able to explore how the galaxy looked during its infancy and determine how it was initially formed.

The result was one of the sharpest, direct images of a primordial galaxy ever produced which allowed the team to undertake a detailed study of its internal structure.

"We discovered that a massive bulge, a regular rotating disk, and possibly spiral arms were already in place in this galaxy when the Universe was just 10% of its current age," said lead author of the study Dr. Federico Lelli, who undertook the work at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

"In other words, this galaxy looks like a grown adult, but it should be just a little child."

Co-author of the study Dr. Timothy Davis, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "This spectacular discovery challenges our current understanding of how galaxies form because we believed these features only arose in "mature" galaxies, not in young ones."

One key feature of a galaxy is the presence of a so-called bulge—a tightly packed group of stars usually situated within the centre of the galaxy.

It was believed that massive bulges formed slowly by the merger of smaller galaxies or by specific processes that occurred within the galaxy itself; however, the kinematic properties of ALESS 073.1 have revealed that the formation of massive bulges can occur extremely fast—around half of the stars in the galaxy were shown to be in a bulge.

Similarly, some mature galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have been known to have spiral arms extending from their central parts, giving them a distinctive spiral shape.

Similar features were also unexpectedly spotted in ALESS 073.1, much to the team's amazement, as early galaxies are generally thought to be chaotic and turbulent rather than having regular, well-organized structures like spiral arms.

"A galaxy like ALESS 073.1 just defies our understanding of galaxy formation," concluded Dr. Lelli.

The global Judeo-plutocracy lies - literally - from the Beginning...

Simply make the following three touchstone translations, and Judah's Gordian knot of satanic lies is forevermore cut:

1. "Big Bang" = Big Seed;
2. "violently exploded" = teleologically sprouted;
3. "this explosion, this bang" = this sproutling, this seed:

Origins of the Universe: Advanced Seminar.

Occupation regime rag New York Times calls for 'reality czar' to fight 'disinformation'

 

As someone once said, "truth is whatever the best liar says it is."

The money-power elite have literally imposed upon our minds their own self-serving reality-paradigm, and ordinary people do not - or rather, did not - even get it. But now, there can be no mistake: If ever there were, there are no longer any differences between the Government and organized crime.

Meanwhile...

The postmodern enclosure movement moves us yet another step closer to a return to feudalism:

Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments:

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.

The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.

The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.

Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed.

The draft proposal said the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone” to provide the resources to make Nevada a leader in attracting and retaining businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and industries.

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development would oversee applications for the zones, which would be limited to companies working in specific business areas including blockchain, autonomous technology, the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless, biometrics and renewable resource technology.

Zone requirements would include applicants owning at least 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) of undeveloped, uninhabited land within a single county but separate from any city, town or tax increment area. Companies would have at least $250 million and plans to invest an additional $1 billion in their zones over 10 years.

The zones would initially operate with the oversight of their location counties, but would eventually take over county duties and become independent governmental bodies.

The zones would have three-member supervisor boards with the same powers as county commissioners. The businesses would maintain significant control over board membership.

The governor’s economic development office did not respond to questions about the zones Wednesday.

Usurper Joe & His Wrecking Crew

Serfdom Redux