Time for my monthly analysis of NOAA’s monthly tracking of the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As always, I have posted NOAA’s updated graph below, adding some details to provide the larger context.
In June the Sun continued the high activity from May, with the sunspot count significantly higher than predicted, 164.2 compared to the prediction of 104.9.
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Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference
after Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur
revealed he could not indict Biden of criminal misuse
of classified materials because Biden was “an elder
man with poor memory.”
In my life I have seen three moments in politics that appeared to change everything. In two of those cases, the appearance turned out to be true. In the third, in the end nothing changed, to the sad detriment of our country.
Last week’s debate between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump appears to be another such potential game-changing event. The change however will not be whether Joe Biden will be the candidate when the election finally rolls around in November, or whether even if he will win or lose the election.
The change, should it happen, will be much more funadmental. I come at this from the point of view of a historian, so bear with me as I attempt to explain.
Of the previous three game-changing moments, the first was the Watergate hearings in 1973. For months prior to those hearings, Republican politicians from all levels of government fought aggressively and with some success the accusations that president Richard Nixon had been involved in the Watergate break-in and the planning of the “dirty tricks” campaign against George McGovern leading up to the 1972 election.
The Watergate hearings however were a game-changer. It forced the entire Republican party to end its unqualified support of Nixon. The hearings, which were televised live each day and covered extensively by the press, were seen by everyone, and showed without doubt the extensive nature of Nixon’s dirty trick activity. It also illustrated bluntly the amount of duplicity and lying that Nixon and his cohorts were willing to do to defend themselves.
Unlike today, in the 1970s the American public did not tolerate lying by their politicians. Though the hearings ended in late June 1973, and Nixon held on until August 1974 before resigning, it was those hearings that ended his popularity and creditability. It was also those hearings that destroyed the creditability of the Republican Party at that time. Too many of them had backed Nixon blindly before the hearings, and were exposed themselves by those hearings as sycophants and toadies. The result: The Republican Party was wiped-out in the 1974 elections, with the Democrats gaining 53 seats in the House, 4 seats in the Senate, and 4 additional governorships.
The second game-changer occurred during the Iran-Contra affair in 1987 against Ronald Reagan. » Read more
The Spanish rocket startup PLD announced last week that it has invested more than $10 million in developing its own launchpad and assembly facility at France’s French Guiana spaceport, and is targeting 2025 for the first orbital launch of its Miura-5 rocket.
The launcher company PLD Space has announced today an investment of 10 million euros in MIURA 5 Launch Complex at Guiana Space Center (CSG), Europe’s spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), owned by the French Space Agency (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA). With the first launch of its rocket at the end of 2025, PLD Space will become the first non-institutional launch operator that will go to orbit from this historical base.
The company is reconfiguring the launchpad used by France to launch its Diamant rocket back in the 1960s and 1970s. It will include “its own launch zone and a preparation area, comprising an integration hangar, a clean room, a control center, and both commercial and work offices.”
Right now it appears that PLD along with several other European rocket startups are going to bypass a number of American rocket startups that had had a significant headstart, but also appear to be stalled in the last year or so because of a new regulatory framework at the FAA.
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
A new Polish suborbital rocket, dubbed “ILR-33 Amber 2K,” and being developed by the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation, will do its next test flight from the Andoya spaceport in Norway.
After four consecutive test missions completed successfully in Poland, the next stage of preparations of the ILR-33 AMBER 2K to reach the edge of space will take place this year in July. Polish technology will be tested in Norway where one of the key European space centers for launching space vehicles is located.
According to this report, this rocket has a core stage with a hybrid-fueled engine plus two strap-on solid-fueled boosters, a configuration rare for suborbital rockets. After this test flight it will then begin operational suborbital flights, run by a Polish company Thorium from 2025 to 2027.
This deal is another competitive blow to the Saxaford and Sutherland spaceports in the United Kingdom. Both started commercial operations years ahead of either Andoya or Esrange, but because of red tape nothing has been yet allowed to launch from either. This Polish deal one of several for both the Andoya and Esrange spaceports that might have gone to the UK otherwise.
Because it appears the trunk section of the service module of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules actually survives re-entry, the company is now studying changes to its de-orbit procedures so that it can guarantee that trunk will not crash on land, as has happened now three times in the past two years.
The solution [a NASA official] said NASA and SpaceX are looking at involves changing deorbiting procedures. Currently, the trunk is released before the capsule performs its orbit burn. That means the trunk can remain in orbit for months before making an uncontrolled reentry.
Instead, [that NASA official] said engineers are examining doing the deorbit burn and then releasing the trunk. That would provide more control of where the trunk reenters, ensuring that any debris that survives reentry lands in unpopulated regions.
To make this new procedure work they need to recalculate the fuel requirements for doing the de-orbit burn. It also requires them to figure out when to detach the trunk after the burn. I expect SpaceX to successfully implement these changes before the next Dragon launch, whether manned or unmanned.
The Japanese startup Ispace announced late last week that its second lunar lander, formerly names Hakuto-R2 and now dubbed Resilience, has successfully completed thermal vacuum testing and is on schedule for a launch before the end of this year.
The testing was completed at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center in Tsukuba, Japan, where the agency operates a large testing facility. The flight model was assembled at the facility and all payloads or testing models were integrated into the lunar lander before testing began. All test success criteria were met; ispace engineers are now reviewing the detailed data that RESILIENCE collected during the ten-day testing regime. The results will allow engineers to optimize the spacecraft thermally for spaceflight as well as improve flight operation procedures.
Thermal vacuum testing is conducted in a large chamber that allows the lunar lander to experience conditions similar to what it will face during its journey through outer space including extreme temperatures in a vacuum environment. Initial test results indicated successful operation of power systems, guidance, navigation and control (GNC) equipment, radio communications, and thermal control of the lander while simulating an actual spaceflight. During testing in the chamber, ispace operators utillized the lander’s onboard radio to assess connections, send commands to, and receive telemetry from the lander, further simulating actual flight operations.
This lander will also carry a mini-rover, and will be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket. The company’s press materials don’t name a location for the lunar landing spot, though one must have been chosen. I suspect, as this mission is a precursor to Ispace’s first NASA lunar landing mission set for 2026, it will be sent to the same location as Ispace’s first Hakuto-R1 test mission, which got to within three miles but then crashed because sensors thought it was just above the surface and shut off the engines prematurely.
