Elon Musk, the US’s would-be dictator, isn’t content with lying about the Boeing Starliner astronauts, who unexpectedly spent much longer in space than they planned after the Boeing craft had thruster failures. When Andreas Morgensen, a Danish astronaut, called the lies what they were, Musk replied with offensive name-calling.
It’s “going to look a little different” as it migrates to a more general science site, according to NASA. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and researchers have been archiving environmental data in case it starts to disappear from federal websites.
The Biden administration’s climate and economic justice screening tool, a federal website on reproductive rights, and NASA’s diversity and inclusion pages appear to be down.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who has taken some of the best photos of the stars and Earth ever captured aboard the International Space Station, recently shared a video on X highlighting how easy it is to juggle and swap big camera lenses in zero gravity. Keeping dust out of lenses is still an issue, but accidentally dropping one is not.
A British startup has miniaturized the interfaces Apollo astronauts used aboard the command and lunar modules to create the DSKY Moonwatch. In addition to basic calculator functions the watch has GPS waypoint navigation and a battery good for 24 hours of use between charges with a USB cable.
You can preorder it now for £649 (around $814) and delivery is expected sometime in Q1 of 2025.
Can privately owned space stations replace the ISS? And what becomes of the research?
Need something more intense than a burning log to help you relax this season? NASA now has its own festive fireplace featuring an eight hour loop of the burning RS-25 engines used for the launch of the Artemis I mission two years ago. The fireplace can be streamed on NASA Plus, or you can watch it on YouTube.
NASA and other federal agencies launched a new website last week that shows past, present, and future sea level rise along America’s coastlines. It combines data from satellites with readings from sensors on the ground to create an interactive map.
[U.S. Sea Level Change]
At 9:10AM ET, the agency will kick off a livestream of the start of the Crew-9 mission meant to bring stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams back to Earth next year.
Out of the loop? Check our storystream on the Boeing Starliner issues that left them stuck on ISS. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:17PM ET today.
The Starliner debacle fueled speculation that the space agency would dump Boeing. But if it did, it would be left with SpaceX — and Elon Musk.
The troubled spacecraft successfully undocked from the ISS without issue just after 6PM ET, and now it is scheduled to land at 12:01AM ET on Saturday at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.
Boeing’s first crewed Starliner launch got Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station in June, but with issues including helium leaks, will the same vehicle still bring them home?
We expect to find out during NASA’s press conference that was scheduled to start at 1PM ET following an Agency Test Flight Readiness Review.
Will astronauts Barry ”Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams come home from the ISS on the Starliner, or will they wait to hitch a ride home from SpaceX next year without protective space suits?
We may find out on Saturday:
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and leadership will hold an internal Agency Test Flight Readiness Review on Saturday, Aug. 24, for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test. About an hour later, NASA will host a live news conference at 1 p.m. EDT from Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Getting to Mars will be easy. It’s the whole ‘living there’ part that we haven’t figured out.
In the meantime, NASA officials said on a media call that they will weigh the risks of bringing Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
The spacesuits they brought wouldn’t work, so they’d have to return without the protection of wearing one. Staying in space longer, however, could expose the astronauts to extra radiation.
It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.
Scientists realized they’d found a field of pure sulfur stones after the Curiosity rover accidentally crushed one of them, exposing the crystals, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote this week.
The rover then collected samples to try to explain them, as elemental sulfur “shouldn’t be there,” according to one of the project’s scientists.
