• Where Should NASA Travel To In The Years to Come?

    In a recent posting, the non-profit Planetary Society is recommending NASA consider a return to Neptune and its moon Triton, noting that such a mission was part of the plan in the last Decadal Survey in 2010 along with trips to Mars and Europa (both of which are underway). NASA was aiming for Uranus or…

  • SpaceX Junkets?

    I guess once was not enough. Billionaire Jared Isaacman wants to spend even more money sending private citizens into space aboard SpaceX spacecraft. He funded his first private flight last September, called Inspiration 4, and now wants to do three more of these flights. The first one raised funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,…

  • Pic of the Week: The Flame Nebula

    This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Flame Nebula in the constellation Orion, as explained by NASA: The Flame Nebula, also called NGC 2024, is a large star-forming region in the constellation Orion that lies about 1,400 light-years from Earth. It’s a portion of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, which includes such…

  • Television: Space Force, the TV Show

    It did not take long for the newly-created U.S. Space Force to be the butt of jokes, but its mission is critical, as has already been noted in earlier postings on this site. Even so, a little bit of humor goes a long way, and the Netflix series Space Force has plenty of humor to…

  • James Webb Space Telescope Selfie

    NASA has shared the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which includes the selfie of the 18-part mirror shown above. The space telescope is still aligning these mirror segments before prime time, so we will probably see more selfies and related shots for the time being, such as the images below (one…

  • Podcast: Joe Rogan and Brian Cox

    While Joe Rogan has been in some hot water recently, I think we can agree that many of his broadcasts were less controversial and simply fun. He is a good host with plenty of though-provoking questions. I do not want to get into politics, but rather focus on science. And in that case, his two-and-a-half…

  • Television: The Silent Sea

    Netflix’s new series from South Korea, The Silent Sea, was released right before Christmas and did not get a lot of attention. It may not deserve a lot of attention, and would have probably been better as a short film (which is how it started) rather than an 8-part series, but it was passable as…

  • Disarming Space Will Have to Wait

    Politico reported this week that Russia has asked that next week’s discussion at the United Nations (U.N.) about arms in space be delayed. It is possible the Russians are busy preparing for war in Ukraine and have little time to look up. But it should be possible to resolve matters here on the surface and…

  • Chinese Space Debris Clean-up or Something Else?

    Phys.org reported the success of a Chinese mission to retrieve a dead satellite, a hopeful sign given the increasing number of satellites and related debris in orbit. The story, “A Chinese space tug just grappled a dead satellite,” discusses how the Chinese spacecraft, Shijian-21, retrieved a dead navigation satellite belonging to the Chinese CompassG2 network. The…

  • Pic of the Week: Distant Dancing Galaxies

    The image above is from the Hubble Space Telescope and shared on NASA’s site last month under the title “Hubble Spots a Starship-Shaped Galactic Pair.” While the author of the story below sees the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, I see a decloaking Klingon Bird-of-Prey. Here is the full description from NASA: The subject of…