Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / A fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy rocket on Thursday morning in South Texas. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica)

Welcome to Edition 4.32 of the Rocket Report! There are plenty of international happenings this week, with progress in Europe, Asia, and North America. But the biggest news may have come from SpaceX’s Starship presentation last night, hosted by company founder Elon Musk in South Texas. Expect full coverage on Ars Technica later this morning.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe via 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 and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Astra launch attempt from Florida fails. The California company’s Rocket 3.3 failed to reach orbit after entering into a tumble about three minutes into flight on Thursday afternoon, Spaceflight Now reports. The rocket launch was Astra’s first attempt from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Four NASA-sponsored CubeSats were lost in the mishap.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Prior to the pandemic, the opposition to vaccines was apolitical. The true believers were a small population and confined to the fringes of both major parties, with no significant representation in the political mainstream. But over the past year, political opposition to vaccine mandates has solidified, with a steady stream of bills introduced attempting to block various ways of encouraging or requiring COVID vaccinations.

This naturally led vaccine proponents to ask why these same lawmakers weren’t up in arms in the many decades that schools, the military, and other organizations required vaccines against things like the measles and polio. After all, pointing out logical inconsistencies like that makes for a powerful argument, right?

Be careful what you wish for. Vaccine mandate opponents have started trying to eliminate their logical inconsistency. Unfortunately, they’re doing it by trying to get rid of all mandates.

Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows a close-up view of Proxima d, a planet candidate recently found orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

We’ve now cataloged thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. For most of them, our knowledge is limited to basic statistics: their size, mass, and orbital distance from their host star. And, due to the difficult-to-comprehend distances within our galaxy, it’s likely that this will remain the sum of our knowledge about them for generations.

For the small number of planets closer to Earth, however, there’s the chance to learn much more. Plans are already underway to study the atmospheres of planets within about 30 light years of Earth over the next few decades, and improvements in existing technologies have the potential to reveal even more. So the discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, was exciting news. We now have the potential to learn much more about this rare planet.

And now, scientists have confirmed that this planet isn’t alone; at least one more planet orbits Proxima Centauri. And it turns out to be an unusually light one, with only about double the mass of Mars.

Enlarge / Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. (credit: Tesla)

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) sued Tesla on Wednesday, alleging systemic racial segregation in the workplace.

“After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment,” DFEH Director Kevin Kish said in a statement published in a Wall Street Journal article and a Bloomberg story.

The lawsuit was filed in Alameda County Superior Court but doesn’t appear to be publicly available yet. We asked DFEH for a copy of the lawsuit and will update this story if we get it.