Space News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

SpaceX launches 4 people on a polar orbit never attempted before

Source: CNN/Yahoo

SpaceX on Monday launched its latest mission for paying customers: This time, a Crew Dragon spacecraft is carrying a cryptocurrency billionaire and three guests on a dayslong trip that will orbit directly above Earth’s North and South poles — a feat never attempted before. The mission, called Fram2, launched from SpaceX’s facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida lifted off around 9:46 p.m. ET.

Spearheading the Fram2 mission is Malta resident Chun Wang, who made his fortune running Bitcoin mining operations and paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum of money for this trip. Joining him are a trio of other polar exploration enthusiasts: Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, Germany-based robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips.

After taking off from Florida, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket had to fly south — tracing a path that no human spaceflight mission has ever traveled. The preplanned flight path for Fram2 was also expected to take the crew capsule over Cuba and Panama as the rocket fired the spacecraft toward orbit.

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Launching a group of people — or satellites — on an orbital path that circumnavigates the North and South poles is no small task. And it’s rarely done from Florida: East Coast launch sites are ideal for missions that travel directly eastward, because the Earth’s rotation can give rockets flying that direction a significant natural boost. But Fram2 had to launch southward. Such a trajectory requires the rocket to expend massive amounts of power — resulting in “a significant loss of performance for that launch vehicle in terms of how much mass it can put into orbit,” said Dr. Craig Kluever, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri, during a phone interview last week.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/spacex-launc ... 42303.html

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Four space tourists return to Earth after a private flight over the poles

by Marcia Dunn
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-space-tou ... light.html

Four space tourists who orbited the north and south poles returned to Earth on Friday, splashing down in the Pacific to end their privately funded polar tour.

Bitcoin investor Chun Wang chartered a SpaceX flight for himself and three others in a Dragon capsule that was outfitted with a domed window that provided 360-degree views of the polar caps and everything in between. Wang declined to say how much he paid for the 3 1/2-day trip.

The quartet, who rocketed from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Monday night, returned off the Southern California coast. It was the first human spaceflight to circle the globe above the poles and the first Pacific splashdown for a space crew in 50 years.

[weatheriscool]

NASA may consolidate major facilities due to Trump cuts

Source: Politico

04/07/2025 09:17 PM EDT

NASA may consolidate work in some regional offices, shifting thousands of jobs, but has no plans for massive layoffs or the elimination of major departments, acting administrator Janet Petro said Monday. The changes in the structure of the space agency’s work force reflect both an effort to cut costs and improve collaboration as the Trump administration pushes ambitious space goals, Petro told POLITICO.

“In the past that was never even allowed to be talked about,” she said in an interview, referring to the consolidation of some work. Her comments on the sidelines at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs come as Elon Musk’s DOGE has slashed thousands of government jobs and the billionaire pursues his own space ambitions, both independently and as a NASA partner.

But Petro said there are good reasons to consider consolidating some of NASA’s operations. “I think there would be a lot of stakeholder interest in that,” she said. Such a move could help drive efficiency by improving collaboration between NASA offices working on similar projects, said Petro, who herself heads the Kennedy Space Center. She did not say how many jobs would be shifted under any possible reorganization plan.

Petro has led the agency since January while President Donald Trump’s pick for NASA administrator, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, awaits Senate confirmation. His hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. While NASA maintains a headquarters in Washington, most of NASA’s work is done in multiple offices across the United States, including the historic Kennedy Space Center that manages launches into space and the Johnson Space Center that manages human space flight. Some have massive footprints, with Kennedy alone home to 10,000 employees.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/0 ... s-00277741

[weatheriscool]

Trump Admin to Slice NASA in Half and Cancel New Telescopes

Source: The Daily Beast

So long, space travel. The White House plans to terminate billions of dollars’ worth of ongoing and future National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) missions, effectively cutting the world-renowned scientific agency in half. President Donald Trump’s most recent budget proposal to Congress proposes major reductions that would cut NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion, The Washington Post reported Friday. The SMD is responsible for sponsoring research in several fields: earth science, heliophysics, astrophysics, planetary science, and biological and physical sciences. The astrophysics budget would drop from $1.5 billion to $487 million. The planetary science budget would plunge from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion. No telescope other than the extant Hubble and Webb telescopes will be funded, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a groundbreaking instrument in the works that would study distant galaxies and faraway planets. Not all hope is lost, however, as the budget draft is only the first step in the process in which Trump sends Congress a 2026 fiscal year budget request. Congress, which has the “power of the purse,” could still rescue NASA. The Daily Beast has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-adm ... a-in-half/

[weatheriscool]

Space solar startup preps laser-beamed power demo for 2026
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
April 13, 2025

Space solar power, or what I like to call Starlink for electricity, is at once a ludicrous idea and a bit of a pipe dream. None of that is stopping Baiju Bhatt from giving it a go.

The billionaire co-founder of financial services app Robinhood has a new startup called Aetherflux focused purely on beaming solar power from satellites to receivers on Earth. Having announced it last year, Bhatt has now raised US$50 million in Series A funding from a clutch of Silicon Valley investors, and aims to launch a test next year.

We've heard about other efforts to deliver solar energy to Earth in the last couple of years. In 2022, China built a 246-ft (75-m)-tall 'ground verification system' to enable research into processes involved in receiving wirelessly transmitted solar power. In January of this year, it revealed a plan to build a solar power station in space measuring 0.6 miles wide (1 km).

https://newatlas.com/energy/laser-beame ... 2026-test/

[weatheriscool]

MEV-1 service spacecraft makes history with first satellite undocking
By David Szondy
April 19, 2025

Northrop Grumman has written a new line in the history books, the company's Mission Extension Vehicle 1 (MEV-1) executing the first undocking of two commercial satellites in geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) – heralding a new age of commercial space operations.

Built and operated by SpaceLogistics LLC, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, MEV-1 had already made history on February 25, 2020 when it docked with the decommissioned Intelsat IS-901 communications satellite in GEO at an altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 km) above the Earth.

Paradoxically, there was nothing wrong with the US$250-million IS-901 even after 15 years of service. The only reason it was taken out of service and shunted into a graveyard orbit was that it had run out of the propellant that it needed to keep it in its proper orbit and maintain attitude control.

https://newatlas.com/space/mev-1-servic ... undocking/

[caltrek]

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

Dark matter search: Dimming starlight may signal passage of dark compact objects

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-dark-dimm ... mpact.html

[caltrek]

Can There Be Sound in Space?
by Phil Plait
April 25, 2025

Introduction:

(Scientific American) “In space no one can hear you scream.”

That now classic tagline (from Alien, one of the greatest science-fiction horror movies ever made) hinges on a big assumption that most of us broadly make: space is empty. And it is—mostly. But there is stuff out there between the stars, and in some cases there’s enough of it to make a little noise over.

So maybe we should amend that line. In space no one can hear you scream—unless, that is, you scream loudly enough and in the right place.

Additional extract:

A typical density for a brilliantly illuminated gas cloud like the Orion Nebula is around 10,000 particles per cm3. The density in other locations can be quite a bit higher, however. Barnard 68, for example, is a small, cold, dense molecular cloud that has roughly a million particles per cm3. That’s much lower than in a lab-grade vacuum, yet across vast expanses of space, even very low particle densities can add up, so Barnard 68’s tenuous material is still enough to absorb essentially all the light that would otherwise just pass through. Some giant molecular clouds can have dense cores that can spike to a billion particles per cm3.
…
An exploding star, for example, blasts out huge quantities of material into space at exceedingly high speed. That ejecta slams into so much of the interstellar medium so hard that sufficient numbers of particles strike each other to make an acoustic wave.

Read more here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/art ... n-space/

[weatheriscool]

NASA budget axes several missions, SLS and a space station
By David Szondy
May 04, 2025

The release of NASA's latest budget reveals the Orion spacecraft and Lunar Gateway space station are getting the chop. The US$18.8-billion total figure decreases spending by $6 billion, or 24%, as the space agency increases funding for crewed Moon and Mars missions.

The new budget request not only reflects the Trump administration's policy to curb federal spending, it also marks a shift in NASA's priorities that involves more than simple bookkeeping. For decades, NASA has been at the center of a multi-directional tug of war over not only money, but the question of what the American space program should be in the 21st century.

The most conspicuous change that will occur if the budget is approved is that both the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS) will end with the Artemis III mission scheduled to fly in, perhaps, 2027. Already beleaguered by significant delays and cost overruns, there have already been calls to cancel the projects in favor of more advanced and cost effective commercial competitors.

https://newatlas.com/space/orion-moonsh ... sa-budget/

[firestar464]

Axing Orion and SLS isn't a bad idea, but definitely no to cutting funds for the Nancy Grace telescope.

[weatheriscool]

Axing Orion and SLS isn't a bad idea, but definitely no to cutting funds for the Nancy Grace telescope.

Honestly, between the anti-science gop and Elon musk losing his fucking mind...I seriously doubt the united states lands on the moon in the next 15 years. I'd watch china! Elon musk has destroyed himself.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

NASA SPHEREx Is Online and Tracking Hundreds of Millions of Galaxies
Scanning the entire sky in a variety of spectrums means SPHEREx won't miss a thing.
By Jon Martindale May 9, 2025

https://www.extremetech.com/science/nas ... f-galaxies
NASA's SPHEREx orbital observatory has begun imaging hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D, tracking their changing locations and luminance on a scale never done before. For the next two years, it will take thousands of images every day, which is hoped will provide greater insight into the origins of the Milky Way, its surrounding galaxies, and the universe itself.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx to use its catchier name, was launched in March into a polar orbit. It is planned for a two-year mission, during which it will record data on some 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars within the Milky Way. It will produce in-depth maps of the sky as seen from Earth, giving us the most detailed layout of the universe yet captured.

[weatheriscool]

Could the falcon 9 launch it?

[weatheriscool]

Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-universe- ... ously.html
by Netherlands Research School for Astronomy

The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three Dutch scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 1078 years to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 101100 years.

The researchers have published their findings in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The research by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom (all from Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands) is a follow-up to a 2023 paper by the same trio.

[weatheriscool]

New Minor Planet Spotted Past Pluto, One of the Largest Distant Objects in the Solar System
The surprisingly large world has a massive orbit—about 838 times Earth’s distance from the Sun.
By Isaac Schultz Published May 22, 2025 | Comments (0)

There’s a new frozen oddball orbiting the Sun, and it’s not your average space rock. It’s a planet—a minor one, to be fair—but one of the largest yet discovered and with an orbit around the Sun that puts our own planet’s orbit to shame.

The minor world is dubbed 2017 OF201; the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center added the object to its catalog on May 21. Despite its classification, the planet measures somewhere between 290 and 510 miles (470 and 820 kilometers) across. Its upper size limit would put the minor planet in the same wheelhouse as Ceres, the largest asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, boasting a diameter of about 592 miles (952 km).

https://gizmodo.com/new-minor-planet-sp ... 2000605924