And now for something completely different

A little research project that got prompted by something a lot of us have seen over the last few years.  

The point of interest is the position of the north magnetic pole and its migration over the last hundred or so years.  This plot sums it up nicely. 

As the graphic itself says, it's from a graphics site called Dreamstime.com, and that's really just about all we know about it. 

The point of this plot is to show the movement of the magnetic pole in the solid, light blue line, with dates in red dots along the line.  The line is fairly neatly shown; it doesn't wander much, and the dates are easy to read.  At the bottom end, the distance between 1904 and 1831 is much smaller than between 1904 and 1948 and it's clearly quite a bit wonky from 1831 and the other dates on the left, but the overall impression is still a steady, relentless movement of the pole toward the top of the map - that middle circle with all the lines converging toward its center is the geographic north pole, so the magnetic pole has gone "over the pole" and is moving into Asiatic Russia at the top.  

There's a group of people who think this is evidence that the pole is about to flip from being the north here with the south somewhere down near Antarctica over to this being the south pole, swapping positions between north and south.  The essence of the argument is that this has happened before and there's evidence that it has happened many times.  Because of that, "we're due" for another flip. 

Because of that, I started trying to look for other examples of the north pole's movement and stumbled across a great example this week. I'd like to know what the "historical normal" looks like. This is the movement of the pole from 200 AD until 2007, which is pretty easy to spot on the previous map.  Sorry about the clip off on the right - this is from a file available on Research Gate.

 

The start of the curve is in the "upper left" and marked 200 AD.  The path, in red with some dates printed, wraps around the physical north pole several times, and in bottom-center area you'll see familiar dates from the previous map and the relatively straight, simple path tracked out with yellow dots until 2007, so it's only slightly smaller than the previous map.  It ends in 2007 instead of 2020. 

So why is this here?  First of all, I find it interesting.  Second, it shows that the movement of the north magnetic pole isn't unusual.  It moves all the time.  It becomes obvious when you look at distances between the spots that the speed the pole moves goes up and down over and over, too. Nobody knows why for sure. Since we don't have charts like this from the last N/S pole reversal we have no idea if looked like this, or if it had more or even less pole movement before the last swap.  The last pole flip was 780,000 years ago, but the average time is 450,000 years between pole swaps. 

No we don't know if this is leading to a magnetic pole swap. We don't know if disasters are coming or if it's just plain "life as usual." Like most other disasters in life.

European Space Agency signs contract for a Starship Clone

Low in the news this week were reports that the European Space Agency had signed a contract with one of their regular contractors, Italian rocket supplier Avio, to produce a reusable rocket upper stage. Avio is a contractor on other ESA launch vehicle contracts, like Vega 6 and the Ariane.  

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Avio signed a two-year contract worth 40 million euros (about $47 million U.S. at current exchange rates) on Monday (Sept. 29) at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here in Sydney, Australia, with the goal of preparing for in-flight demonstration of a reusable upper stage.  

In the bigger picture sense, the ESA has talked about reusability for some time, and we've covered it here over the years - like about three weeks ago. This contract will cover the preliminary design and the technologies for the ground and flight segments required for an upper stage demonstrator.

It's too soon to know what the test vehicle will look like, but ESA put out a possible signpost on Monday. The agency posted on X a rendering that looks a lot like SpaceX's Starship megarocket upper stage. 

"I am glad to sign this contract since its importance is two-fold: on one side it addresses technological criticalities in the short-term; on the other side, it paves the way for the preparation of Europe's long-term future in space," ESA's Director of Space Transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen said in their statement.

ESA says the move capitalizes on progress made in advanced liquid propulsion, reentry, recoverability and reusability technologies. The upper stage could be used on future Vega rockets, also developed by Italian multinational Avio, or other European rockets.

The ESA started down this path almost exactly three years ago with an upper stage called Susie - or Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration.  I can't find any records of a vehicle equipped with a Susie ever flying.  

EDIT 10/3/25 0820 EDT to add:  Link to the original source article

 

 

Artemis II has a date, a time, and a mission plan

Within the last week or so, there was a flareup of hype about the Artemis II mission.  Part of this is from the emphasis on the moon that has come with President Trump, Sean Duffy as NASA administrator and other changes, but it resulted in solid changes to the Schedule. 

Artemis II, if you're new to it, will be the next flight of an SLS and the Artemis program.  The mission's crew of four will be the first NASA crew to be launched to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. This won't be a mission that lands on the moon; it won't even orbit the moon, unlike Apollo 8  in 1968. It will just loop around the moon and return to Earth without going into orbit around our neighbor. 

Naturally it's early in the sequence of things that need to happen, but the launch is now set for No Earlier Than Thursday February 5, 2026 at 8:09 PM EST, from LC-39B at Kennedy Space Center.  Delays further down the calendar are always possible.  

Artemis II flight plan. Credit: NASA

The crew is Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, and Payload Specialist Christina Koch.  They come across as rather excited with the coming flight, yet trying to balance the things they're required to do by the mission with the things they need to do.  Like sleep. 

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen put it this way:

"You know me, personally, I hope to take a very short nap on the pad," he said. "There's enough time built in there to have a nap. I’ve been practicing falling asleep. So if the loops are quiet enough, and I get a minute, I’ll try for a nap."
...
That Hansen is contemplating a nap on the launch pad of the Artemis II mission underscores just how frenetic the opening day of this mission will be as the astronauts test out the Orion spacecraft to ensure it is indeed ready to fly them to the Moon. It will be a super-busy, high-stress time, during which everything must go right or they'll have to come straight back to Earth. So yes, maybe the crew should grab some sleep when they can.

Hansen also has a different concern he's preparing for.  He's the only one of the four who hasn't been to space before, so he doesn't know if he'll be susceptible to problems getting up and to work.  

Nearly half of all astronauts experience "space adaptation syndrome" during their first flight to orbit, and there is really no way to predict who it will afflict beforehand. This is a real concern for Hansen, a first-time flier, who is expected to hop out of his seat and start working. 

Hansen: I'm definitely worried about that, just from a space motion sickness point of view. So I'll just be really intentional. I won't move my head around a lot. Obviously, I'm gonna have to get up and move. And I'll just be very intentional in those first few hours while I'm moving around. And the other thing that I'll do—it's very different from Space Station—is I just have everything memorized, so I don't have to read the procedure on those first few things. So I'm not constantly going down to the [tablet] and reading, and then up. And I'll just try to minimize what I do.

Hansen and Christina Koch will set up and test essential life support systems on the spacecraft. To put it bluntly, if the bathroom doesn't work, they're not going to the Moon. If the water supply doesn't work, they're not going to the moon. There are more systems we could mention, but you get the picture. 

The big, overriding issue, though, is they're the first people who will fly the Artemis system in space.  Nobody knows what it handles like, nobody knows what it feels like. The only flight of an Artemis craft was unmanned, flown by remote control.  For a few days, they're going to the center of attention for millions, perhaps billions, of people.  Concern about that seems like a pretty normal response. There are more details in the source article.