Image (Credit): Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft being placed atop an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. (United Launch Alliance)
“Today was a was a huge day for our Commercial Crew Program…All the (international) partners and then our whole team polled ‘go’ to proceed to the launch on May 6. Not only that, but we (signed) what we call an interim human rating for Starliner for this crewed flight test. … It was a was a huge deal for NASA and our entire team.”
-Statement by Steve Stich, manager of the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, as quoted by CBS News. After numerous delays, the Starliner’s first Crew Flight Test will take place on May 6. If successful, the Starliner will start bringing astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2025. This will provide NASA with greater redundancy in its ISS resupply runs.
For months now, the most distant spacecraft to Earth – Voyager 1 – has been talking gibberish on the interplanetary ‘radio’. The repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s it’s sending back to our planet, 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away, has made no sense to scientists until now. Turns out, officials at NASA just needed to give the oh-so-distant craft a bit of a ‘poke’ to ask it how it was feeling. The system returned a software readout to Earth that scientists have now used to confirm about 3 percent of its memory is corrupted. Which is why turning the FDS on and off didn’t resolve the issue back in November of 2023.
Along with funding the commercial development of new rockets, Artemis moon landers and new spacesuits, NASA is pressing ahead with plans to buy an unpressurized moon rover that can carry astronauts, science payloads — or both — across the rugged terrain of the lunar south pole, officials said Wednesday. The agency announced contract awards to three companies to develop competing designs for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, similar in concept to the rovers that carried the last three Apollo crews across the moon’s surface more than 50 years ago.
After two decades of work, scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their collaborators are celebrating the completion of the LSST Camera. Once mounted on Vera C. Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, the 3200-megapixel camera will help researchers observe our Universe in unprecedented detail. During its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the LSST Camera will generate an enormous trove of data on the southern night sky that researchers will mine for new insights into dark energy, dark matter, the changing night sky, the Milky Way and our Solar System.
The International Space Station is not the only orbiting platform for experiments. Varda Space Industries has its own orbiting facility, or at least it had one in orbit for 10 months until it returned to Earth in February (shown below). And now the company has another $90 million in funding to continue to develop its capsules.
Varda, founded in 2020, represents the next phase of the space industry, where lower cost launches allow companies to be creative with their own spacecraft. In this case, biopharma is being asked to consider the advantages of a launches that remove gravity from the equation:
While gravitational forces do not directly impact thermodynamic properties of systems, they do significantly impact kinetic and hydrodynamic processes. Microgravity suppresses convection and sedimentation, resulting in more uniform supersaturation, as well as diffusion-driven transport. The resulting environment enables crystallization outcomes that lead to improvements in bioavailability, enhanced physicochemical properties, differentiated intellectual property, and new routes of administration — all realized by conducting research in microgravity.
While Varda is taking advantage of the lower launch costs made available by reusable rockets, it too wants to have reusable capsules down the line to reduce costs even further. Of course, it is not as glamorous as a permanently manned space station, but these crewless capsules should be sufficient for the needs of many if not most companies.
Note: Varda is also the name of a dwarf planet, which took its name from JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
Image (Credit): The W-1 capsule after landing in the Utah desert. (Varda Space Industries/John Kraus)
A new spacecraft will at last launch its first crew in May, and a fresh group of NASA astronauts say they’re excited to support it. NASA’s newest astronaut group graduated from basic training on March 5, just in time for the first Boeing Starliner test launch with astronauts, which is now expected in May…When it’s up and running, Starliner will regularly carry astronauts to and from the ISS alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, which began its own astronaut flights in 2020. The newest astronaut cohort can’t wait to climb on board the Boeing craft.
It’s not every day that a giant volcano is discovered hiding in plain sight. By reviewing satellite imagery from many missions, scientists have spotted the remains of a colossal volcano on Mars. The volcano, provisionally named “Noctis Mons,” had been imaged repeatedly since the early 1970s, but extensive erosion had concealed it from view. Researchers have also spotted hints at an adjacent glacier buried underneath the volcanic slopes. Noctis Mons is located near the Martian equator, in the eastern part of the Tharsis volcanic province, sandwiched between the vast canyons of Valles Marineris and the fractured maze-like terrain of Noctis Labyrinthus.
The current theoretical model for the composition of the universe is that it’s made of ‘normal matter,’ ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter.’…A University of Ottawa study published today challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter...This discovery challenges the prevailing understanding of the universe, which suggests that roughly 27% of it is composed of dark matter and less than 5% of ordinary matter, remaining being the dark energy.
Our Awesome Universe 