The Russian authorities want recognition of all illegally occupied Ukrainian territories. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said that a future peace agreement with Kyiv should “secure” the neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear status of our country, as well as “recognition of existing territorial realities”, that is, the occupied Crimea and the so-called “L/DNR”. President Zelensky has made it quite clear Ukraine does not plan to cede its territories.
fyi, change.org has a petition to kick Russia out of the United Nations. If you agree with that, click here to sign the petition as I did. More than 35,000 have signed so far.
Boeing announced its X-37B space plane, which is owned by the US Air Force, has been in orbit for 781 days, a record on its seventh flight. Its appearance is like a mini space shuttle and it is launched into orbit on top of an Atlas 5 rocket then re-enters the atmosphere then lands like a glider autonomously. Its mission is shrouded in secrecy. It is not weaponized, but many think it is testing future surveillance technologies. No landing date has been announced.
Reporting on last week’s update on NASA’s CAPSTONE mission to the moon, it has successfully completed its Trans-Lunar Injection maneuver, which sends it out of Low Earth Orbit on a ballistic trajectory towards the moon. This is different from a “direct transfer” like previous lunar missions and takes several months to complete. Specifically, the orbit is called near-rectilinear halo orbit. This particular type of orbit has never been used before and such has been selected as a pathfinder, which is the primary mission for CAPSTONE, because it has low “Delta-V”, or change in velocity requirements. Change in velocity requires fuel and fuel increases mass and more mass requires more fuel, which requires a bigger rocket, and so on. CAPSTONE is set to arrive in lunar orbit on November 13th, 2022.
– Aaron J. Patrick
No change. Making progress on Reflection Attitude. Travel, meetings, and other matters have kept me busy, but I accomplished a lot of editing this week. The final cover is ready. Based on upcoming travel, it is looking likely I will have to push the publication to September, but might make it in August.
Nice to see green instead of more red. The NASDAQ techs are gaining more ground but still a long way to go. Gammat stocks up to $8.2 trillion again. Regulators and politicians are after big tech but likely big tech will outsmart them. Amazon seems to be caving though to pressure about its private label products which are viewed as unfair competition since the data to create them comes from Amazon sellers.
Crypto is in a rally but has a very long way to get back to recent highs. Bitcoin and Ethereum are leading the way. The two combined represent 59% of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies. The other more than 20,000 cryptocurrencies are mostly junk. There are some exceptions. I dabble in Dogecoin and Shiba Inu but not significantly. Creative people are trying to change how banking and insurance work and doing it without regulation. Fraud and failures are not surprising. When you see the promised high interest rate on crypto balances and low rates on borrowing, you know something is not copasetic. VCs invested $4 billion in the second quarter in crypto and related startups. This is down from prior quarters but still substantial.
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