Space Thread

spaminator

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New rocket site could reduce Canada’s dependence on U.S. launches
Canada is one of the only space-faring nations without a sovereign launch capability

Author of the article:David Pugliese • Ottawa Citizen
Published Jan 10, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 3 minute read

The Department of National Defence says that a new commercial rocket launch facility being built in Nova Scotia will help reduce Canada's reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.
The Department of National Defence says that a new commercial rocket launch facility being built in Nova Scotia will help reduce Canada's reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.
A rocket launch facility being developed on the east coast could provide valuable services to the U.S. as well as score Canada points in convincing Americans it is doing its part on the security front, according to federal government officials.


An internal Department of National Defence briefing on Maritime Launch Services also pointed out that the new capability will help reduce Canada’s reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.

Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian firm founded in 2016 and headquartered in Nova Scotia, is building the country’s first spaceport. The company completed its first suborbital launch on July 7, 2023 and is planning its first orbital launch in 2026 from its location near Canso, N.S.

The DND memorandum, prepared in January 2024, noted that Canada is one of the only space-faring nations without a sovereign launch capability. It has relied on other countries including, in the past, Russia to launch spacecraft.


The Maritime Launch Services project could be a definite asset for Canada, noted the document prepared for Defence Minister Bill Blair by then deputy minister Bill Matthews.

Such a capability would reduce Canada’s dependency on other nations, give it the flexibility to launch its own satellites when needed, and possibly reduce launch costs.

“It would also contribute to the broader defence and security goals across North America, and would further raise Canada’s standing in the eyes of allies, in particular the US, who has been critical of Canada’s insufficient investments in defence,” noted the document, obtained by the Ottawa Citizen using the Access to Information Act. “Canada adding a launch capability on the east coast of North America will allow access to a range of key orbits of interest to the U.S. and would add to Canada’s relevance and credibility in the international space community by also offering additional launch options to other allies and partners.”


But despite the highly positive briefing, the DND and Canadian Forces are non-committal to the Maritime Launch Services (MLS) initiative.

“The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces has not provided any funding for Maritime Launch nor has it committed to using its capabilities in the future,” DND spokeswoman Andrée-Anne Poulin said in an email.

No further comment or information was provided.

Maritime Launch Services did not respond to a request for comment.

The company announced in September that is working with another firm to install a new ground station at its spaceport. That is expected to be operational sometime this year.

The Canadian government provided a $120,000 repayable contribution to Maritime Launch Services to prepare for the installation of specialized tracking and communications equipment at its spaceport.


Access to space is becoming more difficult because of a lack of launch facilities, according to various studies.

A 2023 study by Deloitte consultants noted the space launch infrastructure in the U.S. is running out of capacity as public and private sector demand for access to space is accelerating faster than ever before.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 5 that U.S. government officials and industry executives fear that backed-up launch sites would restrict payloads from getting to space in a timely manner. In 2024, there were 145 orbital launches from the U.S., five times as many as in 2017, the newspaper noted. SpaceX, a commercial firm headed by Elon Musk, conducted 134 of the launches in 2024.

China has also expanded its launch capabilities, opening up the first commercial facility last year to supplement government-run spaceports. It conducted its first launch in December, according to Chinese state media.


Some in the Canadian military and government have long advocated for the country to develop its own launch capabilities, in particular a rocket system.

In 2011, the Ottawa Citizen reported that government officials argued Canada has the technological ability to build its own rocket to launch small satellites.

In addition, a 2009 briefing package produced by the military’s Chief of Force Development noted that the development of a launcher for small satellites is a key focus area for DND’s future research and development.

But little progress has been made and Canada continues to rely on allies and foreign companies for rockets and launch capabilities.
 

spaminator

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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to debut new rocket in SpaceX challenge
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Loren Grush
Published Jan 10, 2025 • 4 minute read

(Bloomberg) — After more than a decade of development, hype and pent-up demand, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture Blue Origin will at long last attempt to put a rocket into orbit.


New Glenn, originally intended to launch as early as 2020, is slated to fly on Sunday out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a nearly four-hour launch window that begins at 1 a.m. local time.

The mission aims to put a Blue Origin test satellite into orbit and then land the rocket’s lower portion on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The flight will serve as a critical demonstration for Blue Origin, which has struggled for years to execute on its ambitious plans for space exploration. Though the company has shuttled paying tourists to the edge of space and back, it has lacked the capability of sending people and satellites to orbit.

That stands in stark contrast to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been in operation for much of the same time as Blue Origin but has far surpassed Bezos’ firm in launch capability. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is the most prolific orbital vehicle globally. Like Musk, Bezos is one of the world’s richest people with numerous business interests, including having founded Amazon.com Inc. and owning the Washington Post.


A successful launch of New Glenn would at last put the company in an elite circle of US ventures that can send satellites to orbit, as well as put Blue Origin on a path toward challenging SpaceX’s ironclad grip on the launch market.

But perhaps even more critical for the company, New Glenn stands to become the much needed centerpiece for Bezos and his long-term dreams for the future of spaceflight. In the immediate future, New Glenn will help the company clear a $10 billion backlog in customer contracts. Longer term, Blue Origin plans to use the rocket to launch moon missions and eventually whole industries off the planet.

“We need to lower the cost of access to space,” Bezos said at the NYT Dealbook Summit last year.

“We can set up the preconditions where the next generation, or the generation after that, will be able to move polluting industry off Earth, and then this planet will be maintained as it should be,” he added later.


Long road
Before any of that can happen, though, New Glenn needs to fly, and it’s been a long and bumpy road to get to the launchpad.

Bezos formally announced plans for New Glenn in 2016, though the rocket had been in development many years prior, with a goal of flying it before the end of the decade.

But Blue Origin ran into numerous hurdles and delays – particularly with the development of the vehicle’s main BE-4 engines, built in-house. The engines were finished years behind schedule but have since successfully powered the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

And unlike SpaceX, which performs frequent test flights and breaks things along the way, Blue Origin has taken a more traditional engineering approach: years of painstaking development behind the scenes before attempting a full test flight, with the goal of minimizing any unplanned explosions.


Most new rockets do fail on their first launch, though. A successful debut would showcase Blue Origin’s engineering chops and mark a major achievement in Bezos’ attempt to catch up to SpaceX.

“Pulling it off would send a message,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive officer of BryceTech, a space analytics firm. “A very meticulous performance would map to the ‘we took our time and got it right’ story.”

Blue Origin also hopes to show New Glenn’s potential for reusability. Similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the main core of New Glenn is designed to come back to Earth after launch and land upright on a barge nicknamed Jacklyn. Blue Origin aims to fly each booster a minimum of 25 times.

Sticking the landing is ultimately a secondary objective for this launch, but if Blue Origin can pull it off, it’ll make the company just the second one to perform this kind of landing technique after SpaceX.


“They have shown that they are just as ardent believers in reusability and some cutting edge technologies that legacy industry had shunned,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a consulting firm.

Customer demand
New Glenn will be launching a demonstration satellite designed to test technologies for the company’s Blue Ring initiative, which aims to build satellites that can service other spacecraft in orbit.

Originally, New Glenn’s inaugural flight was supposed to fly satellites to Mars for NASA. However, Blue Origin switched up the manifest when it realized New Glenn wouldn’t be ready to launch in the fall, when Mars was closest to Earth.

Blue Origin plans to use this launch as one of a handful it needs to perform in order to receive certification from the US Defense Department to loft sensitive national security satellites.


And even with all of the delays, the company still managed to book significant commercial missions to launch satellites for Telesat, AST Space Mobile and Amazon.

Blue Origin hasn’t stated publicly how much one flight on the New Glenn costs, though Henry says the company has “priced contracts very competitively with SpaceX.”

New Glenn also boasts some capabilities the Falcon 9 doesn’t have. For one, it can launch more mass to orbit per mission than SpaceX’s workhorse rocket and send heavier payloads to higher orbits.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to develop its new Starship rocket, which is slated to become the most powerful, commercially operational rocket on the planet and could potentially overshadow New Glenn’s capabilities.

But even then, it’s likely there will be demand for New Glenn.

“They’re not SpaceX,” Henry said of Blue Origin. “And there are plenty of companies out there that are waiting for an alternative ride to space.”
 

spaminator

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2 private lunar landers head toward the moon in a roundabout journey
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 15, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 3 minute read

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, soars into orbit after lifting off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 15, 2025. USA's Firefly and Japan's ispace aim to build on the success of Texas-based Intuitive Machines, which last year became the first company to successfully touch down on Earth's celestial neighbor.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — In a two-for-one moonshot, SpaceX launched a pair of lunar landers Wednesday for U.S. and Japanese companies looking to jumpstart business on Earth’s dusty sidekick.


The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the latest in a stream of private spacecraft aiming for the moon. They shared the ride to save money but parted company an hour into the flight exactly as planned, taking separate roundabout routes for the monthslong journey.

It’s take 2 for the Tokyo-based ispace, whose first lander crashed into the moon two years ago. This time, it has a rover on board with a scoop to gather up lunar dirt for study and plans to test potential food and water sources for future explorers.

Lunar newcomer Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is flying 10 experiments for NASA, including a vacuum to gather dirt, a drill to measure the temperature below the surface and a device that could be used by future moonwalkers to keep the sharp, abrasive particles off their spacesuits and equipment.


Firefly’s Blue Ghost — named after a species of U.S. Southeastern fireflies — should reach the moon first. The 6-foot-6-inches-tall (2-meter-tall) lander will attempt a touchdown in early March at Mare Crisium, a volcanic plain in the northern latitudes.

The slightly bigger ispace lander named Resilience will take four to five months to get there, targeting a touchdown in late May or early June at Mare Frigoris, even farther north on the moon’s near side.

“We don’t think this is a race. Some people say ‘race to the moon,’ but it’s not about the speed,” ispace’s founder CEO Takeshi Hakamada said this week from Cape Canaveral.

Both Hakamada and Firefly CEO Jason Kim acknowledge the challenges still ahead, given the wreckage littering the lunar landscape. Only five countries have successfully placed spacecraft on the moon since the 1960s: the former Soviet Union, the U.S., China, India and Japan.


“We’ve done everything we can on the design and the engineering,” Kim said. Even so, he pinned an Irish shamrock to his jacket lapel Tuesday night for good luck.

The U.S. remains the only one to have landed astronauts. NASA’s Artemis program, the successor to Apollo, aims to get astronauts back on the moon by the end of the decade.

Before that can happen, “we’re sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that,” NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said on the eve of launch.

If acing their respective touchdowns, both spacecraft will spend two weeks operating in constant daylight, shutting down once darkness hits.

Once lowered onto the lunar surface, ispace’s 11-pound (5-kilogram) rover will stay near the lander, travelling up to hundreds of yards (meters) in circles at a speed of less than one inch (a couple centimetres) per second. The rover has its own special delivery to drop off on the lunar dust: a toy-size red house designed by a Swedish artist.

NASA is paying $101 million to Firefly for the mission and another $44 million for the experiments. Hakamada declined to divulge the cost of ispace’s rebooted mission with six experiments, saying it’s less than the first mission that topped $100 million.

Coming up by the end of February is the second moonshot for NASA by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. Last year, the company achieved the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half-century, landing sideways near the south pole but still managing to operate.
 

Tecumsehsbones

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The two "stuck" astronauts on the space station are now scheduled for a (hoped) return in April. They'll have been there eleven months.

They'll be weak as kittens after nearly a year in free fall.
 

spaminator

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SpaceX loses spacecraft after catching rocket booster at the launch pad in latest Starship test
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 16, 2025 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 2 minute read

011625-SpaceX-Starship-Launch
SpaceX's mega rocket Starship booster returns to the launch pad during a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo by Eric Gay /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight Thursday, but the spacecraft was destroyed following a thrilling booster catch back at the pad.


Elon Musk’s company said Starship broke apart — what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one during ascent, with contact lost just 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

The spacecraft — a new and upgraded model making its debut — was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them.

A minute before the loss, SpaceX used the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms to catch the returning booster, a feat achieved only once before. The descending booster hovered over the launch pad before being gripped by the pair of arms dubbed chopsticks.

The thrill of the catch quickly turned into disappointment for not only the company, but the crowds gathered along the southern tip of Texas.

“It was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot. “It’s a flight test. It’s an experimental vehicle,” he stressed.



The last data received from the spacecraft indicated an altitude of 146 kilometres and a velocity of 21,317 km/h.

Musk said a preliminary analysis suggests leaking fuel may have built up pressure in a cavity above the engine firewall. Fire suppression will be added to the area, with increased venting and double-checking for leaks, he said via X.

The 400-foot (123-metre) rocket had thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean. But the shiny retro-looking spacecraft never got nearly that far.

SpaceX had made improvements to the spacecraft for the latest demo and added a fleet of satellite mockups. The test satellites were the same size as SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites and, like the spacecraft, were meant to be destroyed upon entry.


Musk plans to launch actual Starlinks on Starships before moving on to other satellites and, eventually, crews.

It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars.

Hours earlier in Florida, another billionaire’s rocket company _ Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — launched the newest supersized rocket, New Glenn. The rocket reached orbit on its first flight, successfully placing an experimental satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the first-stage booster was destroyed, missing its targeted landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
1737186050428.png
 

spaminator

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Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket reaches orbit on first test flight
The rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits

Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 16, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 4 minute read

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Photo by John Raoux /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.


Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.

Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.

All seven main engines fired at liftoff as the rocket blazed through the predawn sky to the delight of spectators lining nearby beaches. Bezos took part in the action from Mission Control and Blue Origin employees erupted in cheers once the craft successfully reached orbit 13 minutes later, a feat that drew praise from SpaceX’s Elon Musk.


The first-stage booster missed its landing on a barge in the Atlantic, but the company stressed that the more important goal was achieved. Bezos said before the flight it was “a little crazy” to even try to land the booster on the first try.

“We did it!” Blue Origin’s CEO Dave Limp said via X about reaching orbit. “On to spring and trying again on the landing.”

For this test, the satellite was meant to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. Plans called for the second stage to be placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA’s practices for minimizing space junk.

New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.


Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times taller.

Blue Origin poured more than $1 billion into New Glenn’s launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company’s control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, with the next one coming up this spring.

In a weekend interview, Bezos declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Musk’s SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.


“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said, adding that this was the “very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry … to lower the cost of access to space.”

New Glenn is the latest in a series of big, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency’s successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.

The biggest rocket of all, at approximately 400 feet (123 meters), is SpaceX’s Starship. Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could occur later Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he pulled off in October, catching the returning booster at the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.


Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. The first two moon landings under the space agency’s Artemis program, which follows the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, will see crews descending from lunar orbit to the surface in Starships.

Blue Origin’s lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will make its debut on the third lunar touchdown by astronauts.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed for competing moon landers similar to the strategy to hire two companies to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Nelson will step down when President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday.

Trump has tapped tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to run NASA. Isaacman, who has twice rocketed into orbit on his own privately financed SpaceX flights, must be approved by the Senate.

New Glenn’s debut was supposed to send twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. But the space agency pulled them from last October’s planned flight when it became clear the rocket wouldn’t be ready in time. They will still fly on a New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. The two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are meant to study the Martian atmosphere and magnetic environment while orbiting the red planet.
blue-origin-new-rocket[1].jpg
 

spaminator

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How to glimpse a parade of planets in the January night sky
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Adithi Ramakrishnan
Published Jan 17, 2025 • 1 minute read

NEW YORK — Six planets grace the sky this month in what’s known as a planetary parade, and most can be seen with the naked eye.


These planetary hangouts happen when several planets appear to line up in the night sky at once.

“They’re not in a straight line, but they’re pretty close together on one side of the sun,” said Hannah Sparkes, planetarium supervisor at the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Florida.

The astronomical linkup is fairly common and can happen at least every year depending on the number of planets. A similar parade took place last June, but only two planets could be seen without any special equipment.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are visible to the naked eye this month and for part of February. Uranus and Neptune can be spotted with binoculars and telescopes.

During this latest spectacle, Mars shines especially bright because it’s located directly opposite the sun. And on Friday and Saturday night, skygazers will see Venus and Saturn snuggle up extra close — just two degrees apart.


Any clear, cloudless night this month is ideal to spot the planets. To get in on the sighting, go outside on a clear night a few hours after sunset and face south, said Kevin Williams, planetarium director at Buffalo State University.

Venus and Saturn will glow in the southwestern sky, with Jupiter in the southern sky and Mars in the southeast or east. The planets will shine brighter than the stars, and Mars will look like a reddish-orange dot.

Consider downloading stargazing apps to help with where to look, Sparkes said.

A faint Mercury is set to join the parade as a bonus seventh planet at the end of February, and the planets will slowly make their exit through the spring.

“It gives us a little bit better sense of our place in the solar system and the universe,” Williams said.
 

spaminator

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SpaceX launch accident likely caused by fire that sent trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean

Jan. 16, 2025.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX suspects a fire may have caused its Starship to break apart during liftoff and send trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean.


SpaceX’s Elon Musk said preliminary indications are that leaking fuel built up pressure in the cavity above the engine firewall. The resulting fire would have doomed the spacecraft.

On Friday, the company promised “a thorough investigation” in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The 400-foot Starship — the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket — launched from the southern tip of Texas on a test flight early Thursday evening. The booster made it back to the pad for a catch by giant mechanical arms, only the second time in Starship history. But the engines on the still ascending spacecraft shut down one by one, and communication was lost 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

Dramatic video taken near the Turks and Caicos Islands showed spacecraft debris raining down from the sky in a stream of fireballs. Flights near the falling debris had to be diverted.


SpaceX said Starship remained in its designated launch corridor over the Gulf of Mexico and then the Atlantic. Any surviving wreckage would have fallen along that path over water, the company said on its website.

Starship had been shooting for a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world. Ten dummy satellites, mimicking SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, were on board so the company could practice releasing them.

It was the seventh test flight of a Starship, but it featured a new and upgraded spacecraft. The booster and spacecraft for the eighth demo are already built and undergoing testing.

Musk said on X the accident was “barely a bump in the road” in his plans to build a fleet of Starships to carry people to Mars.


NASA already has booked two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade under its Artemis program, the successor to Apollo.

“Spaceflight is not easy. It’s anything but routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X after the accident. “That’s why these tests are so important.”

Earlier Thursday, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company also had mixed results with the debut of its massive New Glenn rocket. It achieved orbit on its first try, putting a test satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the booster was destroyed after failing to land on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
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spaminator

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Scientists detect chirping cosmic waves in an unexpected part of space
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Adithi Ramakrishnan
Published Jan 22, 2025 • 2 minute read

NEW YORK — Scientists have detected cosmic waves that sound like birds chirping in an unexpected place.


These bursts of plasma, called chorus waves, ripple at the same frequency as human hearing. When converted to audio signals, their sharp notes mimic high-pitched bird calls.

Researchers have captured such sounds in space before, but now they have sensed the chirping waves from much farther away: over 100,000 kilometres from Earth, where they’ve never been measured before.

“That opens up a lot of new questions about the physics that could be possible in this area,” said Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the University of Iowa who was not involved with the work.

Scientists still aren’t sure how the perturbations happen, but they think Earth’s magnetic field may have something to do with it.

The chorus has been picked up on radio antennas for decades, including receivers at an Antarctica research station in the 1960s. And twin spacecraft — NASA’s Van Allen Probes — heard the chirps from Earth’s radiation belts at a closer distance than the newest detection.


The latest notes were picked up by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale satellites, launched in 2015 to explore the Earth and sun’s magnetic fields. The new research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Chorus waves have also been spotted near other planets including Jupiter and Saturn. They can even produce high-energy electrons capable of scrambling satellite communications.

“They are one of the strongest and most significant waves in space,” said study author Chengming Liu from Beihang University in an email.

The newfound chorus waves were detected in a region where Earth’s magnetic field is stretched out, which scientists didn’t expect. That raises fresh questions about how these chirping waves form.

“It’s very captivating, very compelling,” Jaynes said. “We definitely need to find more of these events.”

— The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
 

spaminator

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Newly spotted asteroid has a tiny chance of hitting Earth in 2032
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 29, 2025 • 2 minute read

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032, space agency officials said Wednesday.


Scientists put the odds of a strike at slightly more than 1%.

“We are not worried at all, because of this 99 percent chance it will miss,” said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. “But it deserves attention.”

First spotted last month by a telescope in Chile, the near-Earth asteroid — designated 2024 YR4 — is estimated to be 130 to 330 feet (40 to 100 mettrs) across.

Scientists are keeping close watch on the space rock, which is currently heading away from Earth. As the asteroid’s path around the sun becomes better understood, Chodas and others said there’s a good chance the risk to Earth could drop to zero.

The asteroid will gradually fade from view over the next few months, according to NASA and the European Space Agency. Until then, some of the world’s most powerful telescopes will keep monitoring it to better determine its size and path. Once out of sight, it won’t be visible until it passes our way again in 2028.


The asteroid came closest to Earth on Christmas Day — passing within roughly 800,000 kilometres of Earth, about twice the distance of the moon. It was discovered two days later.

Chodas said scientists are poring over sky surveys from 2016, when predictions show the asteroid also ventured close.

If scientists can find the space rock in images from then, they should be able to determine whether it will hit or miss the planet, he told The Associated Press. “If we don’t find that detection, the impact probability will just move slowly as we add more observations,” he said.

Earth gets clobbered by an asteroid this size every few thousand years, according to ESA, with the potential for severe damage. That’s why this one now tops ESA’s asteroid risk list.

The potential impact would occur on Dec. 22, 2032. It’s much too soon to know where it might land if it did hit Earth.

The good news, according to NASA, is that for now, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1%.
 

spaminator

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NASA’s returned asteroid samples hold the ingredients of life from a watery world
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 29, 2025 • 3 minute read

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday.


The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.

“That’s the kind of environment that could have been essential to the steps that lead from elements to life,” said the Smithsonian Institution’s Tim McCoy, one of the lead study authors.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 122 grams (4 ounces) of dust and pebbles from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, delivering the sample canister to the Utah desert in 2023 before swooping off after another space rock. It remains the biggest cosmic haul from beyond the moon. The two previous asteroid sample missions, by Japan, yielded considerably less material.


Small amounts of Bennu’s precious black grains — leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago — were doled out to the two separate research teams whose studies appeared in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy. But it was more than enough to tease out the sodium-rich minerals and confirm the presence of amino acids, nitrogen in the form of ammonia and even parts of the genetic code.

Some if not all of the delicate salts found at Bennu — similar to what’s in the dry lakebeds of California’s Mojave Desert and Africa’s Sahara — would be stripped away if present in falling meteorites.

“This discovery was only possible by analyzing samples that were collected directly from the asteroid then carefully preserved back on Earth,” the Institute of Science Tokyo’s Yasuhito Sekine, who was not involved in the studies, said in an accompanying editorial.


Combining the ingredients of life with an environment of sodium-rich salt water, or brines, “that’s really the pathway to life,” said McCoy, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of meteorites. “These processes probably occurred much earlier and were much more widespread than we had thought before.”

NASA’s Daniel Glavin said one of the biggest surprises was the relatively high abundance of nitrogen, including ammonia. While all of the organic molecules found in the Bennu samples have been identified before in meteorites, Glavin said the ones from Bennu are valid — “real extraterrestrial organic material formed in space and not a result of contamination from Earth.”

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-half of a kilometre across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks. The latest results suggest this parent body had an extensive underground network of lakes or even oceans, and that the water evaporated away, leaving behind the salty clues.


Sixty labs around the world are analyzing bits of Bennu as part of initial studies, said the University of Arizona’s Dante Lauretta, the mission’s chief scientist who took part in both studies.

Most of the $1 billion mission’s cache has been set aside for future analysis. Scientists stress more testing is needed to better understand the Bennu samples, as well as more asteroid and comet sample returns. China plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission this year.

Many are pushing for a mission to collect rocks and dirt from the potentially waterlogged dwarf planet Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus also beckon as enticing water worlds. Meanwhile, NASA has core samples awaiting pickup at Mars, but their delivery is on hold while the space agency studies the quickest and cheapest way to get them here.

“Are we alone?” McCoy said. “That’s one of the questions we’re trying to answer.”
 
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Canadians want research on UFO sightings, but don’t want to pay for it
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Kyle Duggan
Published Feb 05, 2025 • 2 minute read

OTTAWA — The truth is out there and Canadians think they should know about it — but they don’t want to pay for research into reports of strange objects spotted in the night sky.


Canada’s chief science adviser hired a third-party consulting firm to poll Canadians on how they feel about UFOs, now broadly referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The survey says the public wants the federal government to proactively release any documents it has on unidentified sightings in the night sky, but there’s little desire to fund investigations.

About half of Canadians think the government needs to do something about reports of UAP sightings and a third said it’s “very important” for the government to make information on reported sightings available to the public.

But only one in 10 feel it’s urgent for the government to shell out funds to investigate those reports.

“Despite the general interest in government action, there is little appetite for public spending on UAP investigations,” the report said. “Enabling citizen science could be used to bridge this contradiction in order to fill the apparent desire for information without a high level of spending.”


Earnscliffe conducted the survey of 1,008 Canadian adults in August last year. The report was only made public by the government recently. It does not carry a margin of error because it’s an online poll.

Interest in UAPs got a big boost in early 2023, when a Chinese spy balloon travelled across Alaska and Western Canada before U.S. forces shot it down off the coast of California.

The polling was purchased to inform the Sky Canada Project, which was launched in 2022 to assess the state of Canada’s procedures for UAP sightings.

Most Canadians do not know what’s behind those uncanny objects in the night sky.

“This is particularly true for those who do not pay attention to stories about UAP,” the survey said.

Just 10 per cent believe it could be aliens or extraterrestrial life — twice as many as those who point to natural causes like weather.


More than a quarter said they have seen an unidentified object in the sky in their lifetime, but only one in 10 reported the event.

About one in every five said they are “very likely” to use a mobile app to document UAP sightings with photos, videos or sound recordings.

The science adviser released an initial report last month that said sightings reported by Canadians are “scattered across multiple government and non government organizations,” since there’s not one dedicated agency to receive them.

It recommends tapping one federal department to be responsible for managing public UAP data, such as the Canadian Space Agency.
 

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Telescopes spy a monster radio jet streaming from a bright and early object in the universe
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Feb 06, 2025 • Last updated 2 days ago • 1 minute read

This image provided by NSF's NOIRLab shows an artist's illustration of the largest radio jet ever found in the early Universe.
Photo by M. Garlick /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Telescopes around the world have spotted a monster radio jet streaming from a quasar dating back to the first 1 billion years of the universe.


At double the width of our Milky Way galaxy, this jet of radio waves is the biggest ever detected so early in the history of the universe, astronomers reported Thursday.

Radio jets like this are not uncommon in our cosmic neighbourhood. But they’ve been elusive in the distant early universe — until now — because of the obscuring cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

“It’s only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away,” lead author Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation’s NoirLab said in a statement.

Observatories across Europe and in Hawaii and Texas contributed to the study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The double-sided radio wave is estimated to be at least 200,000 light-years across. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

Discovered just a few years ago, the quasar powering this jet formed when the universe was just 9% of its current age — within the first 1.2 billion years. Some of the brightest objects in the universe, quasars are galactic cores with gas and dust falling into a black hole, releasing a tremendous amount of energy that makes them exceedingly luminous.

The mass of this quasar is equivalent to 450 million times our sun with a black hole that is not particularly massive.
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Space telescope spots rare ’Einstein ring’ of light around galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Feb 10, 2025 • 1 minute read

Euclid imaging data used in this work, and in which Altieri’s lens was discovered. The main panel shows a composite false colour image produced by combining the VIS and NISP data. The higher resolution broadband VIS IE image is used to set the brightness, with the colour provided by the lower resolution NISP YE, JE, and HE passband images. The central light of the galaxy is suppressed to make the lensed arc more visible. The inset shows only the higher resolution VIS data in the central 8″ of the image, indicated by the square in the main panel.
Euclid imaging data used in this work, and in which Altieri’s lens was discovered. The main panel shows a composite false colour image produced by combining the VIS and NISP data. The higher resolution broadband VIS IE image is used to set the brightness, with the colour provided by the lower resolution NISP YE, JE, and HE passband images. The central light of the galaxy is suppressed to make the lensed arc more visible. The inset shows only the higher resolution VIS data in the central 8″ of the image, indicated by the square in the main panel. Photo by supplied /Astronomy and Astrophysics
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Europe’s Euclid space telescope has detected a rare halo of bright light around a nearby galaxy, astronomers reported Monday.


The halo, known as an Einstein ring, encircles a galaxy 590 million light-years away, considered close by cosmic standards. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

Astronomers have known about this galaxy for more than a century and so were surprised when Euclid revealed the bright glowing ring, reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

An Einstein ring is light from a much more distant galaxy that bends in such a way as to perfectly encircle a closer object, in this case a well-known galaxy in the constellation Draco. The faraway galaxy creating the ring is more than 4 billion light-years away.



Gravity distorted the light from this more distant galaxy, thus the name honouring Albert Einstein. The process is known as gravitational lensing.

“All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special, because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful,” lead author Conor O’Riordan of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement.

Euclid rocketed from Florida in 2023. NASA is taking part in its mission to detect dark energy and dark matter in the universe.
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Deep-sea neutrino telescope spots the most energetic ghost particle yet
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Adithi Ramakrishnan
Published Feb 12, 2025 • 1 minute read

Scientists prepare the KM3NeT/ARCA detection unit for deployment.
Scientists prepare the KM3NeT/ARCA detection unit for deployment.
NEW YORK — A neutrino detector submerged in the Mediterranean Sea has sniffed out the most energetic ghost particle yet, scientists reported Wednesday.


The newly detected neutrino is around 30 times more active than the previous recordholder. Scientists think it came from outside the Milky Way galaxy but its exact source remains a mystery.

Neutrinos spew from stars like the sun and trillions stream through our bodies every second. They’re known as ghost particles because their mind-bogglingly small mass makes them difficult to spot.

Scientists aren’t able to detect neutrinos zipping around on their own. Instead, they measure what happens when the particles bump into other bits of matter.

Two years ago, a neutrino collided with matter and produced a tiny particle called a muon that pinged through the underwater detector, producing flashes of blue light. The researchers worked backward to estimate the energy of the neutrino and published their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.



“This is part of trying to understand the highest-energy processes in the universe,” said study co-author Aart Heijboer from the National Institute for Subatomic Physics Nikhef in the Netherlands.

The detector that made the discovery is part of a deep-sea neutrino observatory that’s still under construction. Neutrino detectors are often located underwater, beneath ice or deep underground to protect against radiation at the Earth’s surface.

Finding this energetic neutrino so early could mean there are more out there than scientists initially thought.

“It’s a sign that we’re on the right track, and it’s also a hint that maybe there might be a surprise,” said physicist Denver Whittington from Syracuse University who was not involved with the new research.

It’s too early to pin down the source of the neutrino, said physicist Mary Bishai with Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“It’s one event,” said Bishai, who was not involved with the study. “We have to see what the other telescopes are also observing.”
 

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Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin to cut 10% of its workforce
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Eric Johnson, Loren Grush and Sana Pashankar
Published Feb 13, 2025 • 1 minute read

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin LLC is cutting about 10% of its workforce, a significant pullback aimed at slashing costs and refocusing resources after years of development work.


The rocket and engine maker laid out the personnel shakeup during an all-hands employee meeting with Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp Thursday morning, confirming a workforce reduction first reported by Bloomberg.

In a memo sent to employees, Limp said the company’s growth led to “more bureaucracy and less focus” than needed after a hiring spree over the past few years. After years of expansion bankrolled by Bezos, who started Amazon.com Inc. and is the world’s third-richest person, Blue Origin is looking to trim manager ranks as it works to clear some $10 billion worth of launch contracts. With a staff of more than 10,000, the layoffs stand to impact over 1,000 roles.

Blue Origin is eliminating positions in engineering, research and development, and project management, as well as “thinning out our layers of management,” Limp wrote in the email, which was viewed by Bloomberg.


The surprise round of layoffs comes about a month after Blue Origin debuted its flagship New Glenn rocket following years of delays and development setbacks.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. Since then, the company’s payroll has gone as high as roughly 14,000 employees spread across its headquarters in the Seattle area and sprawling manufacturing and launch operations sites in Florida, Texas and Alabama. Blue Origin maintains an ambitious space portfolio that includes space tourism, a moon lander, space station and supplying rocket engines.

Blue Origin has drawn unfavorable comparisons to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which leapfrogged many startups over the past quarter century to become the world’s most prolific rocket launcher. Limp, an ex-Amazon leader, was hired in 2023 to help shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump.

Limp added that the company is looking to the future, including landing an uncrewed vehicle on the moon in 2025 and increasing the cadence of New Glenn and New Shepard launches.
 

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Why asteroid 2024 YR4 is unlikely to hit Earth in 2032 and how scientists keep track
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Feb 13, 2025 • 2 minute read

asteroid 2024 YR4
This handout picture provided by NASA on January 31, 2025 shows asteroid 2024 YR4 as observed by the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope at the New Mexico Institute of Technology on January 27, 2025 Photo by HANDOUT/NASA/Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope/New Mexico Institute of Technology/Ryan /AFP via Getty Images
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The threat of a newly discovered asteroid has risen slightly in the past few weeks, as the world’s telescopes rush to track its course.


But the chance of an impact is still quite slim.

New calculations suggest there’s a 2% chance the space rock 2024 YR4 will smack Earth in 2032. This also means there’s a 98% chance it will safely pass our planet. The odds of a strike will almost certainly continue to go up and down as the asteroid’s path around the sun is better understood, and astronomers said there’s a good chance the risk likely will drop to zero.

NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb Space Telescope will observe this near-Earth asteroid in March before the object disappears from view. Once that happens, scientists will have to wait until 2028 when it passes our way again.

WHAT’S AN ASTEROID?

Asteroids are space rocks orbiting the sun that are considerably smaller than planets. Scientists believe they’re the leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago.


There are so many asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter — millions of them — that this region is known as the main asteroid belt. They sometimes get pushed out of the belt and can end up all over the place.

HOW DO SCIENTISTS TRACK POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS ASTEROIDS?

A telescope in Chile discovered the asteroid 2024 YR4 in December. It’s estimated to be 130 feet to 300 feet (40 meters to 90 meters) across. Observations by the Webb telescope should provide a more precise measurement, according to NASA.

NASA and the European Space Agency initially put the odds of a strike at just over 1%. By Thursday, it had risen to roughly 2%. NASA describes that as still “extremely low.”

Until scientists have a better understanding of the asteroid’s path around the sun, they caution the odds will continue to fluctuate — and quite possibly fall to zero.


In 2021, NASA gave the all-clear to another potentially worrisome asteroid, Apophis, after new telescope observations ruled out any chance of it hitting Earth in 2068.

SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT ASTEROID 2024 YR4?

It’s way too soon to fret over this asteroid, according to the experts.

“No one should be concerned that the impact probability is rising. This is the behavior our team expected,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in an email. “To be clear, we expect the impact probability to drop to zero at some point.”

Since the asteroid’s size and orbit are uncertain, it’s unclear where it might hit and what the possible impacts would be should it strike Earth. If the asteroid is on the smaller end, ESA said any potential impacts would be local similar to the Tunguska event that flattened thousands of square miles of forest in remote Siberia in 1908. But if it’s close to 330 feet (100 meters), “the consequences would be significantly worse.”


Chodas said once Webb pinpoints the asteroid’s size, NASA can predict “how serious an impact this asteroid could produce and how difficult a task it might be to deflect this asteroid.”

NASA already has some experience nudging an asteroid. The space agency’s Dart spacecraft deliberately rammed a harmless asteroid in 2022 in the first planetary defense test of its kind, altering its orbit around its larger companion asteroid.
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Elon Musk calls for ending NASA’s space station program early
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Loren Grush
Published Feb 20, 2025 • 2 minute read

(Bloomberg) — SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recommended hastening the end of the International Space Station on his social media site X, arguing that the orbiting laboratory should be taken out of orbit within two years instead of the current five-year target.


“The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible,” Musk wrote on his social media site X. He argued that the ISS “has served its purpose” and that there “is very little incremental utility.”



Musk then reiterated his ultimate plan: “Let’s go to Mars.”

Built in partnership with the Canadian, European, Japanese and Russian space agencies, the International Space Station has been a staple of NASA’s human spaceflight initiatives for the last three decades, serving as the primary location where astronauts live and conduct research in orbit.

Since November of 2000, the ISS has always had at least one crew member on board at all times.

The Biden administration in 2021 extended the planned lifetime of the ISS through the end of 2030, and last June awarded Musk’s SpaceX a $843 million contract to develop a spacecraft that could attach to the ISS and guide it out of orbit then. Such a disposal would cause the ISS to break up as it plunges through the atmosphere.


The spacecraft is also meant to guide the ISS to an unpopulated area of the Earth so that any surviving pieces do not pose a risk to people on the ground.

SpaceX is a major partner on the ISS program, with NASA contracts to deliver astronauts and cargo to the station.

NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s X posts.

As the leader of the government cost cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has established himself as one of President Donald Trump’s top advisers.

Responding to a question about conflicts of interest involving Musk and his companies, Trump said on Tuesday that he would not let the world’s richest person partake in government work related to space.


If Trump takes Musk’s recommendation, ending the ISS program ahead of schedule may prove controversial with lawmakers in Congress, who are responsible for funding NASA’s programs.

Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, recently called for a renewed focus on the ISS and developing commercial space stations in low Earth orbit.

“One of my top near-term priorities is ensuring that we do not cede American leadership in low Earth orbit,” Cruz said on Feb. 12 at an industry conference in Washington DC. “We’ve invested more than $100 billion into the International Space Station, and it would be exceptionally foolhardy to prematurely send all that infrastructure and all those tax dollars to the bottom of the ocean.”

In preparation for the ISS’s retirement, NASA is funding the development of commercial space stations that astronauts can visit in the future. NASA plans to award final contracts for these ISS replacements in 2026.
 

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Private lunar lander Blue Ghost aces moon touchdown with special delivery for NASA
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Mar 02, 2025 • 4 minute read

Blue Ghost
This handout photograph taken and released by Firefly Aerospace on March 2, 2025, shows the Firefly's Blue Ghost lander's shadow on the moon's surface during its lunar landing as part of the Ghost Mission 1. Photo by HANDOUT/Firefly Aerospace /AFP via Getty Images
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.


Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“You all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” Firefly’s Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, reported.

An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.


A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun’s glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies _ had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.


Firefly’s Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander’s exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust _ a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.


The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 metres tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometres) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.


The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.

“It really does open up a whole new way for us to get more science to space and to the moon,” Fox said.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots,” Kim said.
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Astrologer tells Gayle King to ditch Blue Origin space trip
Author of the article:Jane Stevenson
Published Mar 03, 2025 • 2 minute read

Gayle King was already “terrified” about making an all-female Blue Origin space trip in the spring and now an astrologer has warned the CBS Mornings co-host about a potential violent accident.


A Los Angeles-based astrologer says that King’s horoscope says she’s should stay home instead.

“Ms. King is headed to space, okay,” said astrologer Ashley Sipes in a TikTok. post, per the U.K.’s Daily Mail. “She’s getting in a rocket mid-spring, I believe, I don’t know the exact date, so we’re going April 15 and her gut is telling her not to go, and I’m telling her not to go. I’m not saying something terrible or tragic is going to happen, but this just doesn’t feel right to me.”

Sipes then goes on about some astrological information indicating a warning about “accident and violence in travel.”

“‘Not trying to be negative or fearmonger,” said the astrologer. “I think it’s great if this is what she wants, but in the video she’s clearly upset, and that in combination makes me extremely distraught as well.’


Last Thursday, the 70-year-old news anchor revealed she’s joining Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry and an all-women crew heading to space briefly in one of Jeff Bezos’ rocket ships this spring.

However, King told her co-hosts she’s terrified but agreed to go after consulting her kids and pal Oprah Winfrey.

“I don’t know how to explain being terrified and excited at the same time. It’s like how I felt about to deliver a baby,” the anchor said.

“Once Kirby and Will and Oprah was fine with it, I was fine. I thought Oprah would say no, no. She said, ‘I think if you don’t do it, when they all come back and you had the opportunity to do it, you will be kicking yourself.’ She’s right.”



Former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe is also in the Blue Origin rocket ship along with civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn.

Some folks have suggested King is a hypocrite for accepting a free ride valued at $300,000 from the Trump-supporting Bezos.

Former CNN media analyst Oliver Darcy wrote King’s space trip “seem(s) like a conflict of interest,” given CBS News strict policies on its anchors accepting freebies.

Over on BlueSky, another person joked;: “I would not touch that (dude’s) rocket with a barge poll.”