Elon’s SpaceX To Rescue Stranded Astronauts After NASA Dumps Boeing
NASA said it has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring home the US astronauts who were forced to extend their stay at the International Space Station because of the latest debacle plaguing the woke DEI disaster that is Boeing, whose space capsule suffered major technical issues.
Boeing’s spacecraft will return without people on board, the US space agency said during a Saturday news conference announcing its decision, in which it said that it was too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months.
LIVE: We’re discussing NASA’s @BoeingSpace Crew Flight Test following the completion of today’s Agency Test Flight Readiness Review. Listen in for the latest #Starliner updates. https://t.co/M2ODFmLuTj
— NASA (@NASA) August 24, 2024
The contingency plan means that NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will hitch a ride home on SpaceX’s rival Crew Dragon capsule during a mission slated to launch in late September. That would put them back on US soil in February, when that capsule is slated to return and months later than originally planned. Their empty Starliner capsule will undock in a week or two and attempt to return on autopilot.
The seasoned pilots have been stuck at the International Space Station since the beginning of June. A cascade of vexing thruster failures and helium leaks in the new capsule marred their trip to the space station, and they ended up in a holding pattern as engineers conducted tests and debated what to do about the trip back.
As Starliner’s test pilots, the pair should have overseen this critical last leg of the journey, with touchdown in the U.S. desert.
It was a blow to Boeing, adding to the safety concerns plaguing the company on its airplane side. Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.
Retired Navy captains with previous long-duration spaceflight experience, Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, anticipated surprises when they accepted the shakedown cruise of a new spacecraft, although not quite to this extent.
Before their June 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, they said their families bought into the uncertainty and stress of their professional careers decades ago. During their lone orbital news conference last month, they said they had trust in the thruster testing being conducted. They had no complaints, they added, and enjoyed pitching in with space station work.
Wilmore’s wife, Deanna, was equally stoic in an interview earlier this month with WVLT-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, their home state. She was already bracing for a delay until next February: “You just sort of have to roll with it.”
There were no other options.
The SpaceX capsule currently parked at the space station is reserved for the four residents who have been there since March. They will return in late September, their stay extended a month by the Starliner dilemma. NASA said it would be unsafe to squeeze two more into the capsule, except in an emergency.
The docked Russian Soyuz capsule is even tighter, capable of flying only three — two of them Russians wrapping up a yearlong stint.
So Wilmore and Williams will wait for SpaceX’s next taxi flight. It’s due to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four for a routine six-month stay. NASA yanked two to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return flight in late February.
NASA said no serious consideration was given to asking SpaceX for a quick stand-alone rescue. Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original craft was damaged by space junk. The switch pushed their mission beyond a year, a U.S. space endurance record still held by Frank Rubio.
Starliner’s woes began long before its latest flight.
Bad software fouled the first test flight without a crew in 2019, prompting a do-over in 2022. Then parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that nixed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks sprouted following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed.
All but one of those small thrusters restarted in flight. But engineers remain perplexed as to why some thruster seals appear to swell, obstructing the propellant lines, then revert to their normal size.
These 28 thrusters are vital. Besides needed for space station rendezvous, they keep the capsule pointed in the right direction at flight’s end as bigger engines steer the craft out of orbit. Coming in crooked could result in catastrophe.
With the Columbia disaster still fresh in many minds — the shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing all seven aboard — NASA embraced open debate over Starliner’s return capability. Dissenting views were stifled during Columbia’s doomed flight, just as they were during Challenger’s in 1986.
Despite Saturday’s decision, NASA isn’t giving up on Boeing.
Hardly anyone knows that there was a massive effort to block SpaceX from providing astronaut transport for NASA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2024
NASA went into its commercial crew program a decade ago wanting two competing U.S. companies ferrying astronauts in the post-shuttle era. Boeing won the bigger contract: more than $4 billion, compared with SpaceX’s $2.6 billion.
With station supply runs already under its belt, SpaceX aced its first of now nine astronaut flights in 2020, while Boeing got bogged down in design flaws that set the company back more than $1 billion. NASA officials still hold out hope that Starliner’s problems can be corrected in time for another crew flight in another year or so.
Death of Woke: Queer Activist Video Game Funded By EU Can’t Find Players
If the new punk rock is to be politically correct, then it’s not punk rock. The woke activist invasion of popular media since 2015 continues to ignore the reality that they are not “rebels”, they are villains, and their delusions are becoming more embarrassing for them with each passing year.
Woke tropes have become poison for any brand seeking a wider audience or greater profits, to the point that activist media projects must now be funded by governments and NGOs through DEI initiatives just to pay developer salaries. The goal? To saturate the market with multicultural ideology and LGBT propaganda until the public was forced to accept it and consume it as “normal.” The agenda has failed.
Every new woke product seems to bomb harder than the last these days and that’s a good sign for the future. Video game players, a market which now dwarfs movies and TV streaming, are rejecting woke material en masse. Case in point: Dustborn.
The aggressively advertised game features a cast of queer activist “punk rock” characters that set out on a road trip across an America controlled by “conservative oppressors” that are really uncool. Set in North America in 2030, The American Republic is under the iron fist of “Justice” and The Puritans, a fascist police force presided over by President Samuel Ward. California has gained independence and is now Pacifica, a corporatocracy ruled by the wealthy few. Texas has seceded, rebranding itself as the libertarian Columbia.
Hilariously, players fight the fascist government by using the “power of words” to gain allies and divide their enemies. Characters can also build up their “trigger meter” to really punch the patriarchy.
Impossible to parody pic.twitter.com/IBQtfomNdM
— LA/ENDER (@LavenderGhast) August 22, 2024
As the developer, Red Thread Games, notes:
“Dustborn’s story is a story about being different, about being an outcast and outsider, about having to hide who and what you are from the authorities, from society — even from your family…
Last but certainly not least, it’s a story about the power of disinformation, propaganda, and language, and about how powerful words can alter our perception of reality, hack minds, and change the world…”
Dustborn embraces the the leftist ideological fallacy that words are magical weapons that need to be controlled and policed at all times by the woke devout; the only people apparently enlightened enough to dictate language. The game was released this week to the deafening sound of crickets. On gaming service Steam, the project garnered a maximum of 83 players on launch day. A total flop of epic proportions.
One might find it ironic that a game about rebel queers fighting the government was actually co-funded by government through the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union (at least $168,000). ESG strikes again.
The notion that popular games dealing with America need to be adjusted for “modern audiences” and the cast needs forced diversity to be “authentic” is based on a popular leftist fallacy that all of America is the same as or should be the same as New York and LA.
The collapse of Dustborn comes not long after the uproar over the impending release of Ubisoft’s ‘Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’, another highly marketed woke game set in feudal Japan. Leftist developers claim that the game is based on “true historical figures”, yet the primary protagonist is a gay black samurai (there was never a black samurai in feudal Japan, let alone a gay black samurai. The idea is based on faulty evidence provided by a fraudulent historian who worked with Ubisoft and who is now under investigation by the Japanese government). The game is expected to suffer dismal sales upon its launch in November.
Public support for woke media is dead.
‘Darkness Descending’ – Tucker Carlson Reacts to Reports of Telegram CEO’s Arrest
The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France is a warning to online platforms that stand up to censorship, American journalist and political commentator Tucker Carlson has said.
The Russian tech entrepreneur was detained at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday and will appear in court on Sunday evening. French authorities had reportedly issued an arrest warrant against him, arguing that insufficient moderation allows for Telegram to be widely used by criminals.
The news of Durov’s apparent prosecution has raised concerns online, including suggestions that it could be politically motivated.
“Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech,” Carlson wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. “It was a Western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away.”
Durov’s arrest is “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies,” Carlson argued. “Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.”
Carlson recorded a rare interview with Durov in April, in which the Telegram owner spoke about his disagreements with the Russian government, as well as the pressure he faced in the US. He said that the American government had wanted him to set up a surveillance “backdoor” on his messaging service, and he refused.
X owner Elon Musk also condemned the reported arrest. “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” he wrote in a comment to the news story.
Telegram was launched in 2013 and currently has more than 950 million active monthly users. Durov is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, but has been mostly been living in the UAE since the mid-2010s. He became a French and an Emirati citizen in 2021.
Top Republican Asks How Biden Admin ‘Lost Track’ Of 300,000 Illegal Migrant Children
Sen. Josh Hawley is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on how it lost track of nearly 300,000 unaccomapnied migrant children within the US. Untold numbers of these missing children are at […]
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French Police Arrest Telegram Founder for Refusing To Censor ‘Non-Mainstream’ Content
The Macron regime in France has arrested the founder of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, due to his refusal to censor ‘non-mainstream’ content on the platform. Durov, who obtained a French passport in 2021, was […]
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BBC Hired Convicted Pedophiles To Chauffeur Children and Elite VIPs
The BBC hired convicted pedophiles to chauffeur children and elite VIPs for over 30 years, according to a new report. A chauffeur service headed by a convicted child rapist was used by the BBC from […]
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