Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

India’s space agency ISRO today successfully launched a mission, dubbed Spadex, to make its first attempt to do an in-space unmanned docking between two satellites, its PSLV rocket lifting off from its coastal Sriharikota spaceport. From the Spadex mission webpage:

The SpaDeX mission consists of two small spacecraft (about 220 kg each) to be launched by PSLV-C60, independently and simultaneously, into a 470 km circular orbit at 55° inclination, with a local time cycle of about 66 days. The demonstrated precision of the PSLV vehicle will be utilized to give a small relative velocity between the Target and Chaser spacecraft at the time of separation from the launch vehicle. This incremental velocity will allow the Target spacecraft to build a 10-20 km inter-satellite separation with respect to the Chaser within a day. At this point, the relative velocity between the Target will be compensated using the propulsion system of the Target spacecraft.

At the end of this drift arrest maneuver, the Target and Chaser will be in the same orbit with identical velocity but separated by about 20 km, known as Far Rendezvous. With a similar strategy of introducing and then compensating for a small relative velocity between the two spacecraft, the Chaser will approach the Target with progressively reduced inter-satellite distances of 5 km, 1.5 km, 500 m, 225 m, 15 m, and 3 m, ultimately leading to the docking of the two spacecraft. After successful docking and rigidization, electrical power transfer between the two satellites will be demonstrated before undocking and separation of the two satellites to start the operation of their respective payloads for the expected mission life of up to two years.

For India’s plans to build a manned space station this capability is essential. It will also be needed for its plans to send humans to the Moon.

As this was only India’s fifth launch in 2024, the leader board for the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:

136 SpaceX
65 China
17 Russia
14 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 156 to 98, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 136 to 118.

At the moment only one more launch remains in 2024, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch scheduled for tomorrow night. I will be publishing my year-end global launch report later this week.

Click for full resolution graph.

Research that the political activists in the climate field (posing as scientists) refuse to cite is increasingly documenting two important and very encouraging facts about atmospheric carbon dioxide.

First, CO2’s ability to warm the climate is much more limited than claimed, suggesting just one more error (out of many) in the many global-warming climate models that have consistently failed to correctly predict the actual climate for at least two decades, as indicated by the graph to the right, published in January 2024. This new error involves the point where an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can no longer cause any increase in warming.

The Taiwanese scientists found that ground temperature warming of 0.3°C was associated with the increase from 100 ppm to 350 ppm and there was no additional warming at all as CO2 rose further from 350 ppm to 400 ppm. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 420 ppm.

Seven Austrian scientists have also recently concentrated on CO2 and the infrared spectrum, noting that a future doubling of the gas up to 800 ppm “shows no increase in the IR absorption for the 15 u-central peak”. It is concluded that this can lead to 0.5°C warming at most. The scientists argue that climate models and their CO2 influences should be revised. Much more experimental evidence about IR radiation should be collected “before appointing current warming trends and climate change mechanisms monocausal to greenhouse gas theories”.

The second paper can be read here [pdf]. In their conclusion the scientists bluntly state that “Climate models and their CO 2 forcings should be revised.”

Nor are these two papers the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Research by others in the last two years repeatedly show that CO2 has a limited ability to warm the climate. Furthermore, all the global-warming climate models in the graph above have always recognized this fact, in that they don’t really depend on CO2 to do the warming. Instead, they depend on a convoluted theory whereby the small increase in CO2 will interact with the large amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (the real global warming component) to cause it to significantly warm the climate. This hypothesis is clever, but it continues to fail in all of its predictions.

The second positive consequence in the increase in atmospheric CO2 is its impact on plant life. It is causing a greening of the planet, which can only mean bigger crops, more food, and less starvation for every human being on Earth.
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