SpaceX will test sun visor on its internet satellites New shade will be part of devices in Sunday launch

SpaceX’s next group of 60 internet satellites will carry with them a sun visor to test if the company can complete a long-term solution to its ongoing brightness problem.

Elon Musk’s rocket company has been on an aggressive timeline to get its internet service, called Starlink, up by the end of the year in North America.

Short-term, SpaceX wants to have 1,500 Starlinks in low-Earth orbit by the end of 2020. The longterm goal is to have tens of thousands of satellites in space, helping to blanket the Earth with high-speed internet connections.

The number will be at 480 after Sunday’s launch, scheduled for 3:53 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s launch complex 40. It’ll be the sixth Starlink launch this year and eighth overall since the program started last year. It will come less than a month from SpaceX’s most recent Starlink launch on April 22.

The company’s big ambitions for Starlink have come against criticism from the astronomical community, which says that satellites are too bright, affecting observations

ULA to launch experimental plane for US Space Force from Florida

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is scheduled to launch Saturday morning from the Space Coast on a mission for the newly christened U.S. Space Force.

It’s been three years since the spaceplane designed by Boeing to fly in low-Earth orbit has launched from the Space Coast. the program has been launching since 2010. The craft resembles a space shuttle but is about one-fourth the size of one.

It is scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s launchpad 41 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with a reported launch window of 8:24 a.m. to 10:53 a.m. and data collection. On April 30, people across Florida mistook them for UFOs as a train of Starlinks passed across the night sky from the Space Coast to Broward County.

SpaceX already flew a darkened satellite in January to test whether a coating could work on the Starlinks without affecting the satellites’ thermal properties. SpaceX said the coating reduced brightness by about 55% but concerns lingered about how hot the spacecraft could get with dark paint.

This time, SpaceX will test a different solution. The mission will carry a test of the company’s deployable visor, a sunshade that will help make the Starlink spacecraft less visible to ground-based telescopes.

The visor prevents light from reflecting off antennas on the satellites by blocking the light from reaching the antennas altogether, SpaceX said, helping to address the thermal concerns and leading to better brightness reduction overall.

By the ninth flight, scheduled for June, all future Starlink satellites will have sun visors, SpaceX said. The company added that it’s also posting information on its satellites’ orbits on spacetrack.org “to facilitate observation scheduling for astronomers.”

“We are interested in feedback on ways to improve the utility and timeliness of this information,” SpaceX said.

BALTIMORE — U.S. retail sales tumbled by a record 16.4% from March to April as business shutdowns caused by the coronavirus kept shoppers away, threatened the viability of stores across the country and further weighed down a sinking economy.

The Commerce Department’s report Friday on retail purchases showed a sector that has collapsed so fast that sales over the past 12 months are down a crippling 21.6%. The severity of the decline is unrivaled for retail figures that date back to 1992. The monthly decline in April nearly doubled the previous record drop of 8.3% — set just one month earlier.

“It’s like a hurricane came and leveled the entire economy, and now we’re trying to get it back up and running,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist for the consultancy Maria Fiorini Ramirez.

Shapiro said he thinks retail sales should rebound somewhat as states and localities reopen their economies. But he said overall sales would remain depressed “because there is going to be a big chunk of the lost jobs that don’t come back.”

The sharpest declines from March to April were at clothing, electronics and furniture stores. A longstanding migration of consumers toward online purchases is accelerating, with that segment posting a 8.4% monthly gain. Measured year over year, online sales surged 21.6%.

Other than online, not a single retail category was spared in April. Auto dealers suffered a monthly drop of 13%. Furniture stores absorbed a 59% plunge. Electronics and appliance stores were down over 60%. Retailers that sell building materials posted a drop of roughly 3%. After panic buying in March, grocery sales fell 13%.

Clothing-store sales tumbled 79%, department stores 29%. Restaurants, some of which are already