How a Bitter Divorce Battle on Earth Led to Claims of a Crime in Space (archive)
Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer living in Kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. So she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. Had she bought a car? How could she afford that? Ms. Worden put her intelligence background to work, asking her bank about the locations of computers that had recently accessed her bank account using her login credentials. The bank got back to her with an answer: One was a computer network registered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Ms. Worden's spouse, Anne McClain, was a decorated NASA astronaut on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. She was about to be part of NASA's first all-female spacewalk. But the couple's domestic troubles on Earth, it seemed, had extended into outer space. Ms. McClain acknowledged that she had accessed the bank account from space, insisting through a lawyer that she was merely shepherding the couple's still-intertwined finances. Ms. Worden felt differently. She filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and her family lodged one with NASA's Office of Inspector General, accusing Ms. McClain of identity theft and improper access to Ms. Worden's private financial records. Investigators from the inspector general's office have since contacted Ms. Worden and Ms. McClain, trying to get to the bottom of what may be the first allegation of criminal wrongdoing in space.
[...] One potential issue that could arise with any criminal case or lawsuit over extraterrestrial bank communications, Mr. Sundahl said, is discovery: NASA officials would be wary of opening up highly sensitive computer networks to examination by lawyers, for example. But those sorts of legal questions, he said, are going to be inevitable as people spend more time in outer space.
Welcome to the divorce of tomorrow!
Also at Space.com.
Related (McClain): Soyuz Rocket Carrying Crew Successfully Launches and Docks with ISS
Dragon has Docked-But the Real Pucker Moment for SpaceX's Capsule Awaits [Updated]
Related Stories
Two months after mishap, Russian Soyuz rockets back into space with crew
Less than two months after a booster separation issue with a Soyuz rocket caused a dramatic, high-gravity landing, the Russian vehicle soared back into space on Monday at 6:31 ET (11:31 UTC). The launch from Kazakhstan, under mostly clear, blue skies, was nominal as each of the rocket's first, second, and third stages fired normally.
The launch sent NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques, and Russian Oleg Kononenko into space aboard their Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft. After making four orbits around the Earth, their Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the Russian segment of the International Space Station at 12:35pm ET (17:35 UTC) Monday.
According to SpaceFlightNow.com the docking was successful.
Previously: Soyuz Crew Vehicle Fails Mid-Flight, Astronauts OK
Soyuz Failure Narrowed Down to Collision Between Booster and Core Stage
NASA Confident in Soyuz, Ready for Crewed Launch in December
Roscosmos Completes Investigation into October Soyuz Failure, Finds Assembly Issue
[Update (2019-03-08_12:00:00 UTC): Apparently, the NASA channel is rebroadcast on YouTube; no word yet on a separate live stream. --martyb]
Dragon has Docked-But the Real Pucker Moment for SpaceX's Capsule Awaits :
[...] This week after undocking from the station early Friday morning, the spacecraft will burn its thrusters to perform a deorbit burn, essentially slowing its velocity enough to nudge itself out of orbit and begin the process of falling back to Earth. This will occur at around 7:50am ET. Splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean should come at about 8:45am ET.
As the vehicle descends, its speed must slow from a starting point of about 27,000km/hour (~16,777mph) as it steadily encounters thicker atmosphere. Temperatures outside the capsule will exceed those on the surface of the Sun, testing Dragon's heat shield. Rather than breathing fire, Dragon will attempt to survive it.
The two most critical moments will come during entry to Earth's atmosphere and near the end of the descent when Dragon's four main parachutes deploy. At the top of the atmosphere, there is a small chance the vehicle will begin to roll uncontrollably due to Dragon's design, since the capsule is not symmetrical to the placement of engine thrusters. And with Dragon's parachutes—the last critical step to arresting its fall—everything just has to work.
[...] "There's a high pucker factor with re-entry," said Garrett Reisman, a veteran of two space shuttle landings. Still a consultant for SpaceX, Reisman helped lead the design of Dragon for the company from 2011 to 2018. "I'm not saying that I'll be really, really nervous coming home on Friday, but when it finally happens I'll feel really good about it."
Besides great pictures from the launch and through to the docking of Demo-1, there is in-depth discussion of the challenges of using parachutes for the landing as well as the Demo-2 mission's testing of the new emergency escape system.
What started it all:
On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)
I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.
As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.
Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.
NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.
Executive Summary:
An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.
It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.
Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:02PM (8 children)
Whose laws apply on board the ISS? It's called "International". If it had been a US spacecraft, would that have counted as US soil? I doubt any of these considerations will save her though, somehow.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:25PM (3 children)
Consensus of ISS operators is, the law of origin country of a person on board.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:35PM
What if she were married with somebody from another country?
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:20PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:04AM
Captain, ship or aircraft, decides. Can wed, can execute. The only magic word he has to say - it was needed for *safety*.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:37PM (3 children)
US law applies, of course.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:46PM (1 child)
This whole thing is stupid. If you're involved in a messy divorce, leave the other person's shit alone.
Anything either of you do can and will be misinterpreted by the other side in a messy divorce, which tends to bring out the drama queen in people.
One question the story doesn't answer is how come, if the groundhog told the bank to remove the astronut from the account, she (the astronut) still had access? If it was a joint account, then the astronut was legally entitled to access it until such time as a judge rules otherwise (simpler to just open a new bank account, end of problem).
If the astronut's pay was being deposited into a joint account, the groundhog is shit out of luck. One party cannot just tell the bank to terminate access by the other account holder.
Sounds to me like more stupid people tricks, and the groundhog is purposefully trying to stir up shit that she could have easily avoided by opening a separate account.
A real cat-fight.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:15AM
Meantime a hole was drilled in the skin of ISS supposedly to expedite the return. Hmm...
(Score: 3, Touché) by shortscreen on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:40AM
US law applies everywhere. Except off-shore tax havens.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:28PM (1 child)
Just wait until we're dealing with robot divorces.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:46PM
We don't divorce. We remove ssh keys, each keeps its own daughterboards and farewell.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:49PM (2 children)
I saw this show - before long the fomer couple will be Captain and First Officer onboard a starship.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:00PM (1 child)
Next episode is called "Lesbians in Space! (A challenge for Kirk)"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:15PM
Oh man I can just see his wry grin as tells Spock, "I guess my charm isn't what it used to be."
"Indeed."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:11PM
Oh please let this become a thing!!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EJ on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:12PM (2 children)
Does that mean, if someone illegally downloads (or is it upload because space) some digital media in space, they are a space pirate?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:33PM
There was that canadian fellow that recorded the major tom song to youtube.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:31PM
Nice, I like how considerate you are about people's choice of coordinate systems.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:58PM (2 children)
If space existed then we would see a photon from the sun as it travelled from there to the moon. Instead we only see light at the sun, at the moon, etc. No time passes for this photon either.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:57PM
Your dark hole skin and brain absorbs all incoming photons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:41AM
My favorite is the shadow object [theflatearthsociety.org], otherwise known as Gaea. People living on Gaea refer to the Earth as the "mystic moon," thus proving that the Earth is round.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:37AM (1 child)
The first crime in space is committed by a lesbian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:15AM
Its just the first one you know about.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:52AM (7 children)
This is why we need to ban rich people from space, they will just go there to commit their yacht crimes.
Not to mention the new 'black site' will be really black, like the blackness of space, no one can hear you scream, black.
If this is the best the elites can manage the planet earth, and they are STILL trying to blame it on the rest of us after things like epstein, our species has no business in space. Literally, it will not be business, it will just be shenanigans and cruelty as far as the telescope can see unless we solve these problems here now.
And the problem is that people who have a lot of money beyond a certain point begin to think their shit doesn't stink and they did it all themselves, and so why can't they just kidnap a harem of easter european teenagers to reward themselves? And/or claim a piece of the moon as exclusively belonging to their corporation?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:01AM (6 children)
There is no "need" to do anything. Not that you can do anything to stop human advancement into space other than crazy rants.
Even if we actually cared about this, it will be decades before there is a significant amount of crime in space. Activity in space is too visible, high profile, and closely tracked. You will be dead before anyone can get their moon harem. And the thing about a moon harem is that you can get a similar experience in an earthly sex dungeon. Because nobody involved will be hanging around outside for long.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday August 25 2019, @10:12PM (5 children)
perhaps...lol
Who would even want a spaceship/eternal life/spy camera right behind you/invisibility/space harem if everyone knew you had it?
There are some things I am serious about like boycotting victoria's secret and resisting police state infiltration of civilian organiztions, and arresting zuckerberg and bezos for mass espionage, but I admit my campaign for a law banning the wealthy from space would be more like a Yes Men style prank-tivism.
The point is worth considering, we do have to decide if we want what we have here spreading and this might inform some people to see their own actions with a more healthy and less degenerate perspective.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @10:25PM
We ain't seen nothing yet W.R.T. "smart speakers". I am predicting at least a 100x performance increase, potentially 1,000,000x, with TDPs comparable to Raspberry Pi Zero (0.5 W). And that's classical architecture, not brain-inspired neuromorphic.
Maybe it can be JARVIS-like in utility without needing an internet connection. Or it could edge compute to decide which things you just said are worthy of reporting to the FBI.
May you live in exciting times.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by nekomata on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:55PM (3 children)
just curious, why boycott victoria secret?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 29 2019, @09:52AM (2 children)
les wexner owner of victoria's secret worked directly with Jeffrey Epstein, it is the source of his wealth.
Wexner now claims, now that ten years of pretending the problem doesn't exist, that he cut off ties with epstein in 2008 after the first conviction and that epstein had stolen a lot of money. Which he had never reported lost.
Anyone who thinks victoria's secret was not intergrated with epstein's operation even until last year is really naive and must enjoy being lied to.
This also represents a prominent businesses with tiest to human trafficking, super rich elites and international spy agencies, in this case the Israeli Irgun.
So other companies like google or huawei which are also infested with spies and government agencies, it's a global issue where businesses are pretending to be independent of government when they are not. In the case of victoria's secret, this is especially scandalous because it ties this to the abuse and trafficking of underage girls which is especially degenerate.
To let victoria's secret continue is essentially saying you are ok with this and you admit there is nothing you can do, you are ruled by rich people who can kidnap your daughter if they want to and even if a cop were able to arrest the billionaire, no jail could hold him/her.
There will be no other warning like this, from here on out they will be able to act with even more impunity unless we act now to establish means as civilians to defend ourselves from what is essentially predation by government sanctioned super-classes of sociopaths. Anyone who still wants to support victoria's secret is telling us about themselves, that they are a stooge and a lackey who accepts this arrangement.
This also demonstrates what the israeli spies who are inifiltrating america really think about us, ms maxwell referred to the girls being trafficked as trash. I would expect this from russia and china, but Israel is supposed to be an ally of the united states who protects our children rather than preys upon them in order to operate blackmail schemes.
This indicates that the world is not as advertised to us on CNN, also, which covered this up, and you can see the president himself working against the investigation with the barr/acosta situation. There has never been a bigger corruption scandal, and victoria's secret is at the center of it and is the undeniable symbol for it.
You will notice the 'mainstream' media has carefully led viewers directly away from any arguments such as this and is complicit in helping wexner and israel deny any involvement.
Any questions? Tell me please if you think I'm wrong about any of this.
supercreepy.org
epsteinisvictoria.net
decultification.org
#abusinessisnotacult
#shinethelight
#pickaside
(Score: 1) by nekomata on Thursday August 29 2019, @11:31AM
Uh ok, I was not aware of this, being from Switzerland the whole Epstein story was mostly popcorn munching in disbelief from the sidelines. Awful lot of coincidences etc. ;)
So I have not followed at all in the who is who of the whole story that unfolded. To be perfectly honest, I think the USA is mostly fucked at this point. So much stuff I read is simply impossible to relate to _at all_ over on this side of the pond. Thanks for clarification!
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 29 2019, @06:13PM
this fatalism, ugh
all you have to do is tell people about it, you literally have to do nothing with a boycott. just say you agree with it, you don't want anything to do with this company, tell your friends.
although if someone were to post flyers about epstein and les wexner all over a victoria's secret, that would be effective activism get the idea across to other companies that having anything to do with people like epstein has PR consequences, at this point the notoriety may only help sales.
you should also notice, that even suggesting something like this kindof makes you a little scared, like if you do this, you will really cross some of the bad guys.
The question isn't so much whether you are going to do that or not at this point, it is are you going to let those of us who are hang out to dry. I am not the center of this, some reporters and police are who did the right thing, I am just responding as is only rational. This crap has gone too far and it threatens everything good in the world, it's not going to go away if everyone just goes meh and does their own thing.
Are you sure that your blah reaction is not some kind of sickness, because I frankly can't relate to your reaction.