Month: December 2020

Enlarge / People watch the first launch of the Long March 8 rocket at Wenchang in south China's Hainan Province on Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020. (credit: Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 3.27 of the Rocket Report! This will be our final report of 2020, and so I wanted to wish all of our regular readers happy holidays—from Christmas through the New Year and beyond. We'll return with weekly reports beginning in the first full week of the new year. And with all sorts of rocket debuts and developmental flights on the calendar, what a year it may be.

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.

Rocket Lab seeks to increase cadence in 2021. Rocket Lab launched seven Electron boosters this year, with six successes and one failure. In an interview with Ars, the company's chief executive, Peter Beck, said the company was on track for 10 to 12 launches this year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the launch anomaly, and other issues. "It has surely been a year of challenges," he said.

Enlarge

The legislation passed by the US Senate Monday was downright frankensteinian: a pile of unrelated bills stitched together. Apart from the pandemic relief measures, it contained thousands of pages of government funding and tax credit extensions, like a semester’s worth of homework stapled to the final exam.

But in the end, it includes the most significant federal energy and climate policy in years, setting the agenda for Department of Energy research programs and authorizing higher funding levels for clean energy priorities.

Cool it

Shortly before the 2016 US election, the Obama administration joined an international agreement to phase out another generation of refrigerants with negative environmental consequences. This agreement—called the Kigali Amendment—was added onto the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-depleting CFCs. Some were replaced with ozone-friendly HFCs, but these turned out to be quite potent greenhouse gases.