Month: February 2019

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches on Thursday night from Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

A mild winter breeze blew along the Florida coast when the final Apollo mission roared into the sky shortly after midnight on December 7, 1972. More than half a million people turned out to watch Apollo 17 lift off despite the late hour. Imagine you were lucky enough to be among them.

After the rocket disappears and nighttime closes in, you're musing about when humans might return to deep space, when an aging drifter in a Steppenwolf t-shirt interrupts your reverie.

Won't see that again in our lifetimes.

Huh?

A rocket sending a lander to the Moon. Ain't gonna happen again for nearly 50 years.

That's impossible. NASA is talking about going to Mars in a decade or so.

Well, the next rocket from here that's sending a lander to the Moon won't launch until 2019. 

I can't believe that. And how can you know that—

And that rocket will already have flown twice.

What? Our rockets fall into the ocean.

Yeah, well, there will be a boat to catch this one.

I think I've got to be going.

Oh, and the rocket will be built by a dude from South Africa, and the lander will carry an Israeli flag.

You'd probably better call a cab to get home, old-timer.

In December 1972, Elon Musk was one year old, living in South Africa. Israel was just three months removed from the Munich massacre, in which 11 members of its Olympic team were taken hostage and killed during the summer games. And yet nearly five decades later, Musk's company, SpaceX, would link up with a private Israeli effort to launch a small lander to the Moon's surface.

Enlarge / William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist. (credit: Gage Skidmore)

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that it had obtained a document that suggested the Trump administration was thinking about combining two areas where it has consistently dismissed expert conclusions: climate change and intelligence analysis. While the intelligence community has consistently accepted that climate change creates security risks for the United States, the document suggests that Trump will circumvent its advice by setting up an advisory committee in an effort headed by a retired professor noted for not accepting the conclusions of the scientific community.

The document is a National Security Council discussion paper, and it suggests using an executive order to set up a Presidential Committee on Climate Security. The committee would provide advice to Trump on the current climate and its future changes, and how those affect the national security of the US.

Adversarial

Normally, these functions are provided by the scientific community and the intelligence community respectively. But they've been giving Trump evidence that he's not been interested in accepting.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace)

Welcome to Edition 1.37 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news this week about plans to develop smallsat launchers, from India to Australia to the United Kingdom. We also have some serious shade throwing from Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos, who doesn't think a flight near (but not above) the Karman line will come without an asterisk.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

India smallsat launcher to fly later this year. Indian space officials have confirmed that their new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle will attempt its first flight in "July or August" of this year, The Economic Times reports. The rocket will carry two Indian defense satellites for the mission, each weighing about 120kg. The rocket has undergone a complete technical review, officials said.