Image (Credit): Nancy Grace Roman with a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
“I just want to thank everybody, and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television…Jared is doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job, and I’m supplying you all that money.”
–Statement by President Trump to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman after the successful launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Of course, this is the same president that submitted multiple budgets over the years that would have eliminated this same telescope as well as many other NASA programs. In fact, only the bipartisan efforts of Congress made the launch possible by “supplying…all that money.” Given the status of other White House efforts in Iran and elsewhere, it makes sense the president is looking for a win. Let’s hope NASA has plenty more wins coming up to keep the budget ax far away.
SpaceX’s next astronaut mission to the International Space Station won’t launch on Sept. 12 after all. That flight, known as Crew-13, has been delayed due to an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, NASA announced on Saturday (Aug. 29). Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework prior to launch,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. “A new target date will be announced once available.”
Nearly every large galaxy keeps a giant black hole at its center. Some of those giants already weighed a billion Suns when the universe was less than 700 million years old. Astronomers have struggled for decades to explain how anything grew that heavy that fast. A new study built on James Webb Space Telescope observations suggests one possible answer. The researchers describe a young black hole wrapped in gas so dense that the whole object shines like a single enormous star. Astronomers call objects like it black hole stars. The light from this one has been traveling for 13 billion years, since a moment just 660 million years after the Big Bang, and no earlier example has been found.
Based on gravitational measurements that give clues to the Red Planet’s interior structure, Mars’s interior southern hemisphere is around 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the northern half of the planet and partially molten. The surprising finding adds additional context to Martian history and the periods of time in which it may have hosted conditions favorable for life. The research was led by Caltech alumnus Alexander Berne (PhD ’26), who is now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Arizona. The findings are reported in a paper appearing in the journal Nature on August 27.
Image (Credit): NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope aboard a SpaceX rocket transiting the sun during launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier today. (NASA/John Kraus)
The Roman Space Telescope will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, which it can use to view billions of galaxies as well as answer questions about exoplanets, dark energy, dark matter, and more.
Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stated:
Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history…With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our solar system.
Not a bad mission for a repurposed spy satellite donated to NASA back in 2012. I wonder if the National Reconnaissance Office has any other old satellites or spacecraft lying around that it might want to put to use discovering more about the universe.
It’s a promising way to turn swords into plowshares.
In the episode, we learn more about Weyland-Yutani, the company in the 1979 film Alien that employed the crew on the space tug Nostromo. You may remember that this crew eventually became little more than a meal and incubator for more monsters.
Maybe there was another monster on the ship as well. Maybe it was even a bigger monster, because it had already inflected the entire Earth economy. Something called monopsony, which is basically when all of the workers become the quasi-slaves of a few corporations. Unread contracts and absent labor unions became the basis for much abuse on and off the spaceships.
It’s a fun episode that allows you to see the film from the perspective of an economist as well as an everyday worker.
You can also hear from Fede Álvarez, who directed and co-wrote a subsequent film Alien: Romulus. It will probably be no surprise that Weyland-Yutani doesn’t become a better place to work.
Science fiction is often a mirror on society, even if we don’t see our reflection right away. Think about all of those drug commercials on television where everyone is dancing, yet the announcer keeps telling you about the horrible side-effects and possibility of death. Sometimes you just need to close your eyes and listen. The mirror can work even without your eyes.
According to a new executive order signed earlier today (not the Lake Ontario one – that was yesterday), the White House is establishing a US Space Academy.
Space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. American superiority in space depends on the strength, skill, and character of those who explore, secure, and build the industries critical to it. To continue to lead the world in space exploration and technology, while securing and defending our national interests in space, the Nation must prepare the next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers, operators, entrepreneurs, civil servants, and warfighters and ensure that they are capable of advancing American interests in space. Achieving this goal requires us to recruit, train, and retain America’s best and brightest from across the Nation.
Did you notice that little military plug “warfighters”? Just like Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy, we need to make room for the Klingons.
This is the same president who gave us the US Space Force, so the militarization of space continues. At least the astronauts and scientists are named before the warfighters.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will serve as Chair of the Presidential Commission on the US Space Academy. The location of the academy itself was not provided, but we should be hearing more about all of the plans shortly.
As with the military academies, it is likely that foreign students will be allowed at some point. For example, the Naval Academy is allowed to enroll up to 60 foreign students. So it would seem Betazoids are a possibility.
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