Month: September 2020

Enlarge / On the left, the newly discovered earthwork and a few possible houses are marked on an aerial image of the site. On the left, you can see the outline of the circular earthwork in the thermal image.

It’s hard to imagine monumental archaeological sites still lying undiscovered beneath the fields of Kansas. But a drone survey just revealed the eroded remains of a wide ditch that once encircled a 2,000 square meter (21,000 square feet) area on a bluff overlooking the Walnut River. Filled in by 400 years of erosion and covered by topsoil and grass, the pre-Columbian earthwork shows up in thermal imaging but is otherwise nearly invisible from above.

“Our findings demonstrate that undiscovered monumental earthworks may still exist in the Great Plains,” said Dartmouth College archaeologist Jesse Casana. “You just need a different archaeological approach to recognize them.”

The newly rediscovered earthwork is part of a cluster of archaeological sites in the area, which was once home to the ancestors of the Wichita people. Those sites, abandoned for centuries and lost beneath cattle pastures and farms, may have been Etzanoa, the “Great Settlement” described by the conquistador Juan de Oñate, who marched a force through the area in 1601.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden speaks in front of Falcon 9 rocket in 2016. (credit: NASA)

Charlie Bolden, a four-time astronaut, served as NASA administrator from mid-2009 through early 2017. During that time, he oversaw the creation and initial development of the agency's large Space Launch System rocket.

Although some NASA officials such as then-Deputy Director Lori Garver were wary of the rocket's costs—about $20 billion has now been poured into development of a launch vehicle based on existing technology—Bolden remained a defender of the large rocket, calling it a lynchpin of the agency's plans to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit, perhaps to the Moon or Mars. He also dismissed the efforts of commercial space companies like SpaceX to build comparable technology.

When I sat down with Bolden for an interview in 2014 at Johnson Space Center, I asked why NASA was investing so much in the SLS rocket when SpaceX was using its own funds to develop the lower-cost Falcon Heavy rocket. His response at the time: “Let’s be very honest. We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.”

Enlarge / Vladimir Putin. (credit: Kremlin.ru)

Fancy Bear—the Russian state hacking group that brought you the smash-and-leak attacks on the Democratic National Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency, the NotPetya worm that inflicted billions of dollars of damage worldwide, and the VPN Filter compromise of 500,000 routers—is targeting organizations involved in elections taking place in the US and UK, Microsoft has warned.

Over a two-week period last month, the group attempted attacks on more than 6,900 accounts belonging to 28 organizations, Microsoft said. Between September 2019 and last June, Fancy Bear targeted tens of thousands of accounts belonging to employees of more than 200 organizations. The hackers use two techniques—one known as "brute forcing" and the other called "password spraying"—in an attempt to obtain targets' Office365 login credentials. So far, none of the attacks has succeeded.

Security researchers from a host of companies widely agree that Fancy Bear works on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. The GRU has been tied to more than a decade of advanced hacking campaigns, including several that have inflicted serious damage to national security. Industry members use an assortment of colorful names to refer to the group. Besides Fancy Bear, there's also Pawn Storm, Sofacy, Sednit, and Tsar Team. Microsoft's name for the outfit is Strontium.

Enlarge / Rocket Lab launches its "I Can't Believe It's Not Optical" mission on August 31. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 3.15 of the Rocket Report! The realm of small lift overflows with news in this edition. And as usual, our report covers news from around the world, spanning this week from Germany, to China, to India, to South America. Ours is a global enterprise.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab launches a Photon satellite. The launch company said it has sent its first in-house-designed and -built operational satellite into orbit. "First Light" was deployed to orbit on Rocket Lab's 14th Electron mission, "I Can't Believe It's Not Optical," which lifted off from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand on August 31. The mission's primary customer was a 100kg microsatellite for Capella Space.