Tag: politics

Payload for the last launch of Avio’s Vega rocket now heading to French Guiana

9:44 am

While it remains unclear when the launch will occur, the two-satellite payload for the last launch of Europe’s Vega rocket is now heading to French Guiana.

The payload is two satellites that will be placed in orbits 180 degrees apart in order to make it possible to make fast repeat coverage of the Earth.

This particular launch is long delayed, for several reasons, one of which has been extremely embarrassing for Avio, the Italian company that builds the Vega family of rockets.

In December 2023, European Spaceflight reported that Avio had lost two of four propellant tanks required for the upper stage of the rocket’s final flight. The tanks were later found crushed, forcing the company to find an alternative. At the time, it proposed either using test articles of the tanks that had been used during the vehicle’s qualification phase in 2012 or modifying Vega C upper stage propellant tanks. It’s not clear which of the two options Avio selected to pursue.

The lack of any announced launch date suggests Avio might still have not come up with a solution, or if it has, the solution is not yet fully implemented.

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Survey: Major shift rightward in Israel since October 7

10:43 pm

According to a series of surveys taken from August 2023 through June 2024, the Israeli population shifted significantly rightward in Israel after the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.

The shift was not so much ideological — leftists still professed support for socialist policies — but mostly related to security issues and attitudes towards the Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. For example,

According to the Agam Labs survey, 52 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose the government’s wartime facilitation of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and just 30 percent support the policy—roughly the reverse of the numbers prior to Oct. 7.

Support for direct Israeli aid to and cooperation with the Palestinians has fallen even faster and farther, down to roughly one-fifth of the public in both cases.

One former leftist is quoted in the article as follows, “They can have aid in Gaza when they give us back our hostages. That’s how I feel,” she said. “I guess that makes me a right-wing extremist.”

I would say this survey proves Israel is the perfect example of a liberal who becomes a conservative after getting mugged.

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Pushback: Jury awards former BlueCross researcher almost $700K for firing her vindicatively for not getting the jab

12:10 pm

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennesse, eager to blacklist
…and now paying for it.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A jury has now awarded Tanja Benton, a former BlueCross research scientist, $687,000 in back pay and punitive damages against BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee for firing her vindicatively in 2021 after she asked for an exemption from getting the COVID jab due to religious concerns.

I call the firing vindicative because by all measures, the fact tell us it was so.

Hamill [Benton’s attorney] said Benton’s job rarely involved direct interaction with clients, with only 1% of her total annual working hours involving client interaction. In the lawsuit, Hamill said Benton “never performed any work or attended any meetings in medical facilities where patients were being treated” and “physical in-person interaction with co-workers was never a job requirement.”

Moreover, for nineteen months prior to her firing, Benton had done all her work remotely, as ordered by BlueCross itself due to the COVID panic. As noted in her lawsuit:
» Read more

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Democrats: You got what you asked for when the Supreme Court ruled presidents have absolute immunity for official actions

3:18 pm

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!

As always, the Democrats have once again demonstrated their utter inability to reflect even slightly on the consequences of their actions.

On July 1, 2024 the Supreme Court, faced with an appeal from Donald Trump that claimed he as president should have immunity from prosecution when his political opponents gain power, ruled that yes, Trump is right, that presidents do have absolute immunity for their “official” actions while in office.

The majority opinion finds that presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. This immunity does “not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress,” and unofficial acts taken while in office receive no immunity at all.

The court ruled that President Trump’s conversations with the acting attorney general were core conduct subject to absolute immunity. It also ruled that his conversations with the vice president about the counting of the votes were part of his official duties, thus subject to presumptive, but not absolute, immunity—finding that Judge Chutkan should now assess whether prosecution of these actions intrudes on the authority and functions of the executive branch, and prosecutors will have to rebut the presumption of immunity if so.

Since then Democrat politicians and pundits have been gnashing their teeth in horror, claiming that this ruling now allows presidents to do almost anything once in office, from assassinating their opponents to using the military to arrest and eliminate judges he or she does not like.

The irony here of course escapes the Democrats. First, hasn’t Biden and his Department of Justice and the FBI been doing a milder form of the same abuse of power in their lawfare against Trump and those who worked for him?

Second, this case would never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place if the Democrats had not started that lawfare campaign. By prosecuting Trump on numerous weak and sometimes utterly bogus charges, it forced the issue to the courts, which was then forced to rule.

The biggest irony of this whole issue is that the Democrats are right. » Read more

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Florida approves expansion of spaceport territories

9:32 am

Map of potential Florida spaceports

The Florida legislature has now approved two new locations in Florida where rocket launches can take place.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed off on a bill that, as of Monday, will add South Florida’s Homestead Air Reserve Base and the panhandle’s Tyndall Air Force Base to Florida’s growing spaceport territories.

The map to the right shows the spaceport locations within Florida. While the state government might now allow launches from these locations, it is unclear if either military facility is entertaining the idea.

Regardless, the Florida government is clearly intent on encouraging and attracting this new industry to its state.

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Sunspot update: The Sun keeps its boom going

4:45 pm

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.
» Read more

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PLD pushes for first orbital launch from French Guiana in 2025

10:40 am

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.

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New Polish suborbital rocket to be test flown from Andoya spaceport in Norway

10:26 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
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.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes thermal vacuum testing

10:01 am

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.

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Japan’s H3 rocket launches successfully for the second time

9:24 pm

Japan’s space agency JAXA today successfully completed the second successive launch of its new H3 rocket, placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit.

This was the third launch of the H3, with the first in May 2023 a failure, and the second a success in February 2024.

I have embedded the video of the launch below, cued to T-15 seconds. This was Japan’s third launch in 2024, exceeding last year’s total of two and matching its total from 2024.

The leader board for the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:

69 SpaceX
29 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 80 to 44, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 69 to 55.
» Read more

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Chinese first stage breaks free during static fire test; launches, crashes

10:08 am

The first stage of Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer’s new Tianlong-3 rocket, intended for its first launch this summer, crashed and burned today during a static fire test when the equipment holding it down failed.

Video of this spectacular failure is embedded below. The rocket is essentially a copy of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with that first stage designed to eventually become reusuable in the same way.

This pseudo-company recently announced it had raised $207 million in private investment capital, bringing the total it has raised to $552 million. It was also the first Chinese pseudo-company to launch an orbital rocket using liquid fuels, successfully doing so with its Tianlong-1 rocket in April 2023.

Though static fire engine tests have failed before, this appears to be the very first ever to actually break free and launch itself. Fortunately, according to both government and Space Pioneer officials, no one was hurt.

What impact this will have on China’s pseudo-private rocket industry is unknown. This incident isn’t the first, with a tank test by pseudo-company Landspace in January 2024 injuring three.

Moreover, there are hints that the Chinese government might be repossessing control from these companies (as I have expected from the start). Landspace, as well as two other pseudo-companies, Expace and Ispace, have been testing methane-fueled rockets, with Landspace having completed one orbital launch in December 2023 and all three successfully completing hop tests of their first stages.

Last week however a Chinese government agency successfully completed a 10-kilometer hop test of its own methane-fueled first stage. I wonder how much of its design was developed independently, or taken from these three pseudo-companies by the government. I suspect the latter, since none of these companies are really privately owned. They might seem so, but the communists can confiscate everything they have at any moment, and clearly supervises and dictates what they do, step-by-step.
» Read more

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France awards contract to French startup to launch two robotic satellite servicing missions

10:03 am

Capitalism in space: France has awarded the French startup Infinite Orbits a contract to launch two robotic satellite servicing missions, one to attach itself to a still-unnamed satellite to extend its life, and a second to test rendezvous and proximity maneuvers near a defunct and thought-to-be tumbling weather satellite.

The key tidbit however is that the contract award is part of a French government program to encourage commercial space:

The France 2030 initiative is a €54 billion investment programme that aims to transform sectors of the French economy with technological innovation.

I was unaware of this French government program. It appears it signals a shift in financial support from the European Space Agency’s commercial entity Arianespace to new competitive French companies. If so, this is a very good sign for its aerospace industry.

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