Image is of one of the six salvos of the Oreshnik missile striking Ukraine.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that appears to split into six groups of six submunitions as it strikes its target, giving it the appearance of a hazel flower. It can travel at ten times the speed of sound, and cannot be intercepted by any known Western air defense system, and thus Russia can strike and conventionally destroy any target anywhere in Europe within 20 minutes. Two weeks ago, Russia used the Oreshnik to strike the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine, particularly its underground facilities, in which ballistic missiles are produced.
Despite the destruction caused by the missile, and its demonstration of Russian missile supremacy over the imperial core, various warmongering Western countries have advocated for further reprisals against Russia, with Ukraine authorized by the US to continue strikes. Additionally, the recent upsurge of the fighting in Syria is no doubt connected to trying to stretch Russia thin, as well as attempting to isolate Hezbollah and Palestine from Iran; how successful this will have ended up being will depend on the outcome of the Russia and Syrian counteroffensive. Looking at recent military history, it will take many months for the Russians and Syrians to retake a city that was lost in about 48 hours.
Even in the worst case scenario for Hezbollah, it's notable that Ansarallah has had major success despite being physically cut off from the rest of the Resistance and under a blockade, and it has defeated the US Navy in its attempts to open up the strait. Israel has confirmed now that their army cannot even make significant territorial gains versus a post-Nasrallah, post-pager terrorist attack Hezbollah holding back its missile strike capabilities. In 2006, it also could not defeat a much less well-armed Hezbollah and was forced to retreat from Lebanon.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
One of the most well-connected spaceflight journalists, Eric Berger, has bumped his earlier 50/50 coinflip prediction of the possible cancellation of SLS up to 75% likely. This is certainly due to Trump nominating Jared Isaacman to be his NASA Administrator. Isaacman is the rich guy who's flown twice on SpaceX's Crew Dragon on privately-contracted flights, not through the NASA astronaut corps. He was also the guy who did that suit-test spacewalk a few months ago on one of those private flights. Isaacman won't have the authority to cancel SLS on his own but it's definitely a capital-M Message to the US senate to fall in line. It's probably the most
of 
moments, because fuck SLS.
There have been 14 Administrators and only 3 have ever flown to space. Richard Truly, Charles Bolden, and the current one Bill Nelson. Bolden was Obama's pick. He has expertise and flight experience, but his whole management style at NASA was "don't rock the boat even when the boat needs to be rocked". Nelson deserves an asterisk on his "spaceflight" record, he only did it once on the Space Shuttle, and it was basically a political publicity stunt as he did no actual work on the flight. In NASA's astronaut corps Nelson's nickname is "Ballast". Nelson has been merciless in helping Biden and the US senate cut NASA's science program budgets.
Isaacman is a very interesting pick. I was expecting someone much worse, like some flat-earther or a climate change denier or just some idiot Trump ally looking for a cushy job to coast in. Isaacman is none of those things. He's someone with a very high level of technical knowledge and personal spaceflight experience doing actual work in space (the aforementioned suit tests, which are neither safe nor easy). He's popular in NASA's Science Directorate because for years he's been penning letters to US politicians to increase funding for existing and planned science missions. One of the most notable was his letter directly to Biden to try to reverse cuts to the Chandra space telescope program. Chandra is a very special kind of orbiting telescope. It sees in X-rays which our atmosphere blocks. There's not many orbiting X-ray telescopes, and Chandra is one of the best of them. Chandra is vital for observing very high-energy events and objects. It's still fully functional and likely will be for another 10 years. The budget cuts were just plain bureaucratic cruelty.
For those unfamiliar with SLS, it's the US senate's ongoing project to keep sending billions in cash to the former Space Shuttle contractors. It's a dreadful rube-goldberg of a rocket with Boeing as the prime contractor. It's made from leftover Space Shuttle components and tooling, like the RS-25 main engines, the solid rocket boosters (the kind that killed the Challenger crew), the big orange hydrogen/oxygen propellant tank, etc. SLS is the 2nd attempt at this sort of rehash program. The earlier cancelled Ares rocket series was the first attempt. SLS has an expected per-launch cost of about $4 billion (on top of the $20 billion and counting development costs), with a construction rate of about one every 18 months. And it has less payload capacity than the original Saturn V. You can easily play spot-the-similiarities between the three launch systems. The US senate micromanages NASA's budget. "Space is expensive" because the US defence contractors paying US senators' bribes want it to be expensive.
Good post, thank you. I hate the Senate Launch System, goddamn shameful thing to do to an RS-25.
Every single thing about the SLS is something that sounds like a smart idea for savings if you're a total fucking moron but actually costs way more than designing something actually good from the ground up
No kidding. NASA can't even get a damn launch tower without some defence contractor like Bechtel doing a shitty job and soaking NASA for more cash.
I consider it a crime to put those RS-25s at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, instead of in places of honour in aerospace museums. The space shuttle program had a whole lot of dumb engineering decisions. Those engines were not among them. They're works of art and should be preserved.
They absolutely are, the RS-25 is one of the most impressive rocket designs of all time, one of the only good parts of the terrible stupid Shuttle program. SLS doesn't even use the two big standout features of the engine, reusability and off axis thrust.
The original value proposition for the RS-25 was "yes they're very expensive but that's okay literally the whole vehicle is designed around bringing them back and reusing them."
You're right, dropping them in the Atlantic just to cut NASA's R&D budget is a crime against both the past and future of spaceflight.
The US simply doesn't care about Space Flight. For them it was always a Dick measuring contest against commies and the motivation later changed to filling billionaire pockets by creating fake hype and achieving nothing. The Soviet Union planned for decades into the future and the US plans for 4 months into the future.
Hopefully China carries on the Soviet Unions legacy and ushers mankind into a new era of spaceflight.
The Chinese space program is well planned and has already been accomplishing a good list of firsts on the way to a crewed moon base. They've been building infrastructure and thoroughly testing each step, in human spaceflight with Tiangong, in lunar landing with Chang'e, and in lunar far side communication and control with Queqiao.
Hey comrade just wanted to let you know that I enjoy all your rocket and space posts. I though I knew some stuff about rocket designs, having spent way too much time and retina cells reading up on all that, but you always have some fact, opinion or perspective I didn't know about. For example I didn't even know how messed up the Shuttle design process was until you pointed it out. (repeatedly, lol)
Please never hesitate to post or comment on space stuff. Thank you!
Thanks! Though to be honest buckycat is much more knowledgeable on the Space Shuttle (and therefore SLS) stuff in specific than I am. If you ever see one of their posts correcting or clarifying something in one of my posts, they're almost certainly the one who's right.
I'm mostly a nerd about science missions, telescopes both earthbound and spaceborne, probes and landers and orbiters and rovers. I got an early obsessive start on this courtesy of Arthur C. Clarke novels in elementary school. Learning about the rockets used to get those science missions to where they need to go actually came much later. Most of what I know comes from a youtuber named Tim Dodd (aka "everyday astronaut"). He does long-form documentary videos on all sorts of rocket technology and history. A really great one to start with is "Why don't rocket engines melt? How engineers keep engines cool". It's less than half an hour long, gives you a good sense of his presentation style, and is a good foundation for everything else.
He's also good at giving credit where credit is due to non-American aerospace development. He's definitely not a jingoist. For example, he did a 90 minute documentary on the history of Soviet rocket engines - and it was highly complimentary to everyone involved. That one should wait until watching the various "basics" videos because it is extremely technical. But it also really gives one an appreciation for the accomplishments of the USSR's space exploration and is well worth watching eventually.
Another thing I really love about his videos is how he keeps his language child-friendly. I'd feel perfectly comfortable letting kids of any age watch any of his videos, if they're old enough to have the attention span and interest.
Warning: He does occasionally do interviews with people in "New Space" companies. So you'll probably see interviews with a certain majority-ownership-of-SpaceX shithead, or a certain ex-Amazon-CEO who owns Blue Origin, etc. And sometimes there are clips of those interviews in his other videos if there's some particular technical point. He doesn't really get into the politics of it all - either for good or for ill. He's laser focused on the science and engineering.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2: