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The Airbus-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft has been closed up inside the payload fairing of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in preparation for liftoff from Cape Canaveral in February on a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA.

Technicians inside the Astrotech payload processing facility encapsulated the Solar Orbiter spacecraft — designed with thermal shielding to protect against the heat of the sun — inside the Atlas 5’s payload fairing Jan. 20. The spacecraft inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s 4-meter-diameter (13.1-foot) aerodynamic nose shroud will soon travel to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility, where crane will hoist the payload package atop the launcher.

Valued at nearly $1.7 billion, the Solar Orbiter mission will travel closer to the sun than Mercury, where it will join NASA’s Parker Solar Probe for tandem observations of the solar wind and giant solar eruptions that can affect communications and electrical grids on Earth, plus satellite operations.

WASHINGTON — DirecTV is racing to move its Spaceway-1 satellite out of the geostationary arc after the 15-year-old satellite suffered a crippling battery malfunction that the company fears could cause it to explode.

DirecTV told the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that it does not have time to deplete the remaining fuel on Spaceway-1 before disposing of it by boosting it 300 kilometers above the geostationary arc, a region home to most of the world’s large communications satellites.

Spaceway-1 is a Boeing-built High Power 702 model satellite that was designed to last 12 years. Launched in 2005 on a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket, the 6,080-kilogram satellite originally provided high-definition television direct broadcasting services from its orbital slot at 102.8 degrees west longitude. More recently, Spaceway-1 was being used to backup Ka-band capacity over Alaska.

Quantum physics now states that matter is merely an illusion and that everything is energy at a different frequency in vibratory motion. This is something that science has only started to take seriously since the turn of the last century. However, this was something Hermes Trismegistus (the founder of the hermetic teachings) taught as one of the 7 principles of existence and recorded history of his teachings have dated back as far as the 1st century AD.

These teachings go further than modern science has the ability to quantify, but science is slowly catching up with many of the ideas shared. Here is a section on vibration which has been taken from the book The Kybalion is an introduction into the teachings of occult hermeticism and was derived from the ancient teachings of Hermes Trismegistus.

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything.

Circa 2018


In 1963, L. Herwig proposed the nuclear pumped laser, based on the idea that the ions produced from nuclear reactions can be used as a driver for the laser medium. Since high power and high efficiency lasers with short wavelengths require high pumping power densities, nuclear pumping is an extremely appealing method. Nuclear pumped lasers could therefore direct significant amounts of energy emitted in a nuclear explosion into a very narrowly collimated beam. This beam would not only be able to destroy or damage targets from very long ranges, but also preclude subsequent use due to its own self-damaging mechanism to the initial weapon. [1] This system would ultimately constitute “a ‘third generation’ of nuclear weapons, the first two generations being the atomic (fission) and the hydrogen (fusion) bombs,” according to Edward Teller, also known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”. [2] In this sense, it would be able to target energy toward specific targets instead of spreading energy into all directions.

Strategic Defense Initiative

On March 23, 1983, President Reagan announced plans to build a defensive Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) system to protect against a potential intercontinental ballistic missile attack on the United States (Fig. 1). The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program outlines a multilayered defense system. The first line of this defense aimed to destroy missiles in their boost phase just after launch, with a candidate for this first line being the nuclear-explosion-pumped X-ray laser. [2].

But a new figure blows all of these out of the water. Last week, British renewable energy developer SSE announced construction of Dogger Bank Wind Farm off the eastern coast of England in the North Sea.

With a capacity of 3.6 gigawatts (GW), Dogger Bank will be three times bigger than the world’s biggest existing wind farm, the nearby 1.2 GW Hornsea One.

Located near a seaside town called Ulrome, which is 195 miles north of London, Dogger Bank will have three separate sites—Creyke Beck A, Creyke Beck B, and Teesside A—each with a 1.2 GW capacity, and construction is slated to take two years.

If humans are going to have a long-term presence on the Moon, they’re going to need breathable air and rocket fuel — and the ESA might just have a way to create both using the Moon itself. The agency is running a prototype plant that converts moondust (currently simulated, of course) into oxygen that could be used for air and fuel. The technique unlocks the high amounts of oxygen in regolith using molten salt electrolysis that superheats the dust and migrates the oxygen along the salt until it’s collected at an anode. The basic process has already been used for metal and alloy production, but the ESA tweaked it to ensure oxygen was available to measure.

Then, we learned that AMD pushed out a new vBIOS to its AIB partners as a response to Nvidia’s price cuts on the RTX 2060 in what’s been a back and forth volley between the two companies at the $300 price point.

The new vBIOS ratchets up the TBP (Typical Board Power) to 160W, a 10W increase from the original 150W TBP. This in turn affords AMD’s board partners a higher margin for core and memory clocks. Which brings us to Sapphire, one of AMD’s premiere AIB partners.

As we previously reported, Sapphire’s RX 5600 XT Pulse is now boasting increased base and boost clocks of 1,615 MHz and 1,750 MHz, up from the previous 1,560 MHz and 1,620 MHz. The memory clock is now running at 14Gpbs effective, as opposed to 12Gpbs.

Since the explosion of student debt following the Great Recession, annual repayment rates, or the amount of existing balances lowered, have been just 3%, Moody’s said. Just 51% of borrowers who took out loans from 2010-12 have made any progress at all in paying down their debt.

“While in the past, higher enrollment and rising tuition were the main drivers of growing student loan balances, more recently, slow repayments have become the primary driver,” Jody Shenn, senior analyst at Moody’s, and others said in the report. “Over the next few years, the combination of slow repayments and elevated, if no longer growing, levels of new borrowing will likely fuel further increases in outstanding debt.”

There are multiple reasons why the debt levels are not going down.

Fungus Among Us

The idea is to ship dormant fungus to a Moon base and, once it arrives, give it water and the right conditions to trigger growth, according to a NASA press release. That would also require a supply of photosynthetic bacteria to provide the fungus with nutrients. Once the fungus grows into the shape of a structure, it would be heat-treated, effectively killing it and turning it into a compact brick.

“Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs — a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” lead researcher Lynn Rothschild said in the release. “Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.”