NASA has launched an innovative air quality monitoring instrument into a fixed-rotation orbit around Earth. The tool is called TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument, and it keeps an eye on a handful of harmful airborne pollutants in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ground-level ozone. These chemicals are the building blocks of smog.

TEMPO traveled to space hitched to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA says the launch was completed successfully, with the atmospheric satellite separating from the rocket without any incidents. NASA acquired the appropriate signal and the agency says the instrument will begin monitoring duties in late May or early June.

TEMPO sits at a fixed geostationary orbit just above the equator and it measures air quality over North America every hour and measures regions spaced apart by just a few miles. This is a significant improvement to existing technologies, as current measurements are conducted within areas of 100 square miles. TEMPO should be able to take accurate measurements from neighborhood to neighborhood, giving a comprehensive view of pollution from both the macro and micro levels.

This also gives us some unique opportunities to pick up new kinds of data, such as changing pollution levels throughout rush hour, the effects of lightning on the ozone layer, the movement of pollution related to forest fires and the long-term effects of fertilizers on the atmosphere, among other data points. More information is never bad. 

NASA

TEMPO is the middle child in a group of high-powered instruments tracking pollution. South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer went up in 2020, measuring pollution over Asia, and the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite launches in 2024 to handle European and North African measurements. Other tracking satellites will eventually join TEMPO up there in the great black, including the forthcoming NASA instrument to measure the planet's crust.

You may notice that TEMPO flew into space on a SpaceX rocket and not a NASA rocket. This is by design, as the agency is testing a new business model to send crucial instruments into orbit. Paying a private company seems to be the more budget-friendly option when compared to sending up a rocket itself. 

NASA has finally named the astronauts that will orbit the Moon during the Artemis 2 mission. Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch will fly for the US, while the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen will represent his country. The crew will spend up to 21 days aboard an Orion capsule that will spend about 42 hours in high Earth orbit before touring the Moon and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Koch is best known for the longest stay in space by a female astronaut. Wiseman, meanwhile, is a Navy pilot who was also a test pilot in the F-35 Lightning II program. Glover made history by participating in the first operational Crew Dragon mission in 2021. Hansen is a fighter pilot and one of four current Canadian astronauts.

If Artemis 2 remains on track, it should launch in November 2024 and will represent the first time humans have flown to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis 1, an uncrewed lunar flyby mission, launched in November last year and broke an Apollo flight record with its roughly 26-day trip. People won't land on the Moon until Artemis 3's scheduled launch in December 2025. That mission will use a variant of SpaceX's Starship for the actual landing.

NASA has been steadily building publicity for Artemis in recent months. In March, it unveiled the spacesuit for the Artemis 3 landing. The Axiom Space-made prototype accommodates more body types and is more flexible, letting astronauts kneel and otherwise  

The crew selection comes as NASA appears to have overcome the setbacks that plagued its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, including engine trouble, fuel leaks, Hurricane Ian and Tropical Storm Nicole. With that said, the agency originally wanted an Artemis lunar landing in 2024. The current timeline assumes there won't be any significant technical hurdles, and there are no guarantees of that between SpaceX's ongoing Starship issues (it still hasn't conducted an orbital flight test) and the inherent challenges of putting people on the Moon.

Developing...

While its next-generation rocket has yet to fly, that’s not stopping SpaceX from booking Starship flights. On Friday, a startup named Astrolab revealed that it had recently signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s private space firm to reserve a spot on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that could launch as early as mid-2026. “This is SpaceX’s first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface,” Jaret Matthews, CEO of Astrolab, told The New York Times, adding his company was one of a few customers involved in the flight.

Astrolab is building a vehicle it hopes will one day carry equipment, supplies and people across the lunar surface. The Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover is about the size of a Jeep Wrangler, making it a bit bigger than NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. It also features a robotic arm for assisting with cargo and can travel up to 15 miles per hour. Oh, and FLEX can carry up to two astronauts. 

Once it lands on the Moon, Astrolab claims FLEX will become the largest rover to travel the lunar surface. Matthews told The Times Astrolab already has customers waiting to use the rover to carry cargo during the 2026 Starship mission. Looking further to the future, Matthews said FLEX could assist with building a permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond. “Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the Moon and Mars,” he said. “And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy.”

"Birds fly South for the winter and North for the summer," has historically proven to be only slightly less reliable a maxim than the sun always rising in the East and setting in the West. Humanity has been fascinated by the comings and goings of our avian neighbors for millennia, but the why's and how's of their transitory travel habits have remained largely a mystery until recent years. In Flight Paths, science author Rebecca Heisman details the fascinating history of modern bird migration research and the pioneering ornithologists that helped the field take off. In the excerpt below, Heisman recalls the efforts of Dr. Bill Cochran, a trailblazer in radio-tagging techniques, to track his airborne, and actively-transmitting, quarry across the Canadian border.        

HarperCollins

From Flight Paths, Copyright © 2023 By Rebecca Heisman. Reprinted here with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Follow That Beep

Swainson’s thrush looks a bit like a small brown version of its familiar cousin the American robin. Its gray-brown back contrasts with a pale, spotted chest and pale “spectacle” markings around its eyes. These thrushes are shy birds that forage for insects in the leaf litter on the forest floor, where they blend in with the dappled light and deep shadows. Birders know them by their fluting, upward-spiraling song, which fills the woods of Canada and the northern United States with ethereal music in summer. But they don’t live there year-round; they spend the winters in Mexico and northern South America, then return north to breed.

On the morning of May 13, 1973, a Swainson’s thrush pausing on its journey from its winter home to its summer home blundered into a mist net in east-central Illinois. The researchers who gently pulled it from the net went through all the usual rituals—weighing and measuring it, clasping a numbered metal band around its leg—but they added one unusual element: a tiny radio transmitter weighing just five- thousandths of an ounce. They carefully trimmed the feathers from a small patch on the bird’s back, then used eyelash glue to cement the transmitter, mounted on a bit of cloth, in place against the bird’s skin (Generations of ornithologists have learned exactly where to find the eyelash glue at their local cosmetics store. Designed to not irritate the delicate skin of the eyelids when attaching false eyelashes, it doesn’t irritate birds’ skin, either, and wears off after weeks or months.) 

When the thrush was released, it probably shuffled its feathers a few times as it got used to its new accessory, then returned to resting and foraging in preparation for continuing its trek. At only around 3 percent of the bird’s total body weight, the transmitter wouldn’t have impeded the bird noticeably as it went about its daily routine. Then, around 8:40 that evening, after the sun had dipped far enough below the horizon that the evening light was beginning to dim, the thrush launched itself into the air, heading northwest.

It would have had no way of knowing that it was being followed. Bill Cochran — the same engineer who, a decade and a half earlier, had rigged up a tape recorder with a bicycle axle and six thousand feet of tape so that Richard Graber could record a full night of nocturnal flight calls — had been waiting nearby in a converted Chevy station wagon with a large antenna poking out of a hole in the roof. When the thrush set out into the evening sky, Cochran and a student named Charles Welling were following on the roads below.

All they could see in the deepening night was the patch of highway illuminated by their headlights, but the sound of the wavering “beep . . . beep . . . beep” of the transmitter joined them to the thrush overhead as if by an invisible thread. They would keep at it for seven madcap nights, following the thrush for more than 930 miles before losing the signal for good in rural southern Manitoba on the morning of May 20.

Along the way, they would collect data on its altitude (which varied from 210 to 6,500 feet), air and ground speed (eighteen to twenty-seven and nine to fifty-two miles per hour, respectively, with the ground speed depending on the presence of headwinds or tailwinds), distance covered each night (65 to 233 miles), and, crucially, its heading. Because they were able to stick with the bird over such a long distance, Cochran and Welling were able to track how the precise direction the bird set out in each night changed as its position changed relative to magnetic north. The gradual changes they saw in its heading were consistent with the direction of magnetic north, providing some of the first real-world evidence that migrating songbirds use some sort of internal magnetic compass as one of their tools for navigation. Today Bill Cochran is a legend among ornithologists for his pioneering work tracking radio-tagged birds on their migratory odysseys. But it wasn’t birds that first drew him into the field of radio telemetry; it was the space race.

From Sputnik to Ducks

In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. Essentially just a metal sphere that beeped, Sputnik 1 transmitted a radio signal for three weeks before its battery died. (It burned up in the atmosphere in January 1958.) That signal could be picked up by anyone with a good radio receiver and antenna, and scientists and amateur radio enthusiasts alike tracked its progress around and around Earth.

It caused a sensation around the world — including in Illinois, where the University of Illinois radio astronomer George Swenson started following the signals of Sputnik 1 and its successors to learn more about the properties of Earth’s atmosphere. Around 1960, Swenson got permission to design a radio beacon of his own to be incorporated into a Discoverer satellite, the U.S. answer to the Sputnik program. In need of locals with experience in electrical engineering to work on the project, he recruited Bill Cochran (who still had not officially finished his engineering degree — he wouldn’t complete the last class until 1964) to assist.

Cochran, as you may recall, had spent the late 1950s working at a television station in Illinois while studying engineering on the side and spending his nights helping Richard Graber perfect his system for recording nocturnal flight calls. By 1960, no longer satisfied with flight calls alone as a means of learning about migration, Graber had procured a small radar unit and gotten Cochran a part-time job with the Illinois Natural History Survey helping operate it. But along the way, Cochran had apparently demonstrated “exceptional facility with transistor circuits,” which is what got him the job with Swenson. It was the transistor, invented in 1947, that ultimately made both the space race and wildlife telemetry possible.

The beating heart of a radio transmitter is the oscillator, usually a tiny quartz crystal. When voltage is applied to a crystal, it changes shape ever so slightly at the molecular level and then snaps back, over and over again. This produces a tiny electric signal at a specific frequency, but it needs to be amplified before being sent out into the world. Sort of like how a lever lets you turn a small motion into a bigger one, an amplifier in an electrical circuit turns a weak signal into a stronger one.

Before and during World War II, amplifying a signal required controlling the flow of electrons through a circuit using a series of vacuum-containing glass tubes. Vacuum tubes got the job done, but they were fragile, bulky, required a lot of power, and tended to blow out regularly; owners of early television sets had to be adept at replacing vacuum tubes to keep them working. In a transistor, the old-fashioned vacuum tube is replaced by a “semiconductor” material (originally germanium, and later silicon), allowing the flow of electrons to be adjusted up or down by tweaking the material’s conductivity. Lightweight, efficient, and durable, transistors quickly made vacuum tubes obsolete. Today they’re used in almost every kind of electric circuit. Several billion of them are transisting away inside the laptop I’m using to write this.

As transistors caught on in the 1950s, the U.S. Navy began to take a special interest in radio telemetry, experimenting with systems to collect and transmit real-time data on a jet pilot’s vital signs and to study the effectiveness of cold-water suits for sailors. These efforts directly inspired some of the first uses of telemetry for wildlife research. In 1957, scientists in Antarctica used the system from the cold-water suit tests to monitor the temperature of a penguin egg during incubation, while a group of researchers in Maryland borrowed some ideas from the jet pilot project and surgically implanted transmitters in woodchucks. [ed: Although harnesses, collars, and the like are also commonly used for tracking wildlife today, surgically implanting transmitters has its advantages, such as eliminating the chance that an external transmitter will impede an animal’s movements.] Their device had a range of only about twenty-five yards, but it was the first attempt to use radio telemetry to track animals’ movements. The Office of Naval Research even directly funded some of the first wildlife telemetry experiments; navy officials hoped that radio tracking “may help discover the bird’s secret of migration, which disclosure might, in turn, lead to new concepts for the development of advanced miniaturized navigation and detection systems.”

Cochran didn’t know any of this at the time. Nor did he know that the Discoverer satellites he and Swenson were building radio beacons for were, in fact, the very first U.S. spy satellites; he and Swenson knew only that the satellites’ main purpose was classified. Working with a minimal budget, a ten-pound weight limit, and almost no information about the rocket that would carry their creation, they built a device they dubbed Nora-Alice (a reference to a popular comic strip of the time) that launched in 1961. Cochran was continuing his side job with the Illinois Natural History Survey all the while, and eventually someone there suggested trying to use a radio transmitter to track a duck in flight.

“A mallard duck was sent over from the research station on the Illinois River,” Swenson later wrote in a coda to his reminiscences about the satellite project. “At our Urbana satellite-monitoring station, a tiny transistor oscillator was strapped around the bird’s breast by a metal band. The duck was disoriented from a week’s captivity, and sat calmly on the workbench while its signal was tuned in on the receiver. As it breathed quietly, the metal band periodically distorted and pulled the frequency, causing a varying beat note from the receiver.”

Swenson and Cochran recorded those distortions and variations on a chart, and when the bird was released, they found they could track its respiration and wing beats by the changes in the signal; when the bird breathed faster or beat its wings more frequently, the distortions sped up. Without even meaning to, they’d gathered some of the very first data on the physiology of birds in flight.

An Achievement of Another Kind

Bill Cochran enjoys messing with telemarketers. So, when he received a call from a phone number he didn’t recognize, he answered with a particularly facetious greeting.

“Animal shelter! We’re closed!”

“Uh . . . this is Rebecca Heisman, calling for Bill Cochran?”

“Who?”

“Is this Bill Cochran?”

“Yes, who are you?”

Once we established that he was in fact the radio telemetry legend Bill Cochran, not the animal shelter janitor he was pretending to be, and I was the writer whom he’d invited via email to give him a call, not a telemarketer, he told me he was busy but that I could call him back at the same time the next day.

Cochran was nearly ninety when we first spoke in the spring of 2021. Almost five decades had passed since his 1973 thrush-chasing odyssey, but story after story from the trek came back to him as we talked. He and Welling slept in the truck during the day when the thrush landed to rest and refuel, unwilling to risk a motel in case the bird took off again unexpectedly. While Welling drove, Cochran controlled the antenna. The base of the column that supported it extended down into the backseat of their vehicle, and he could adjust the antenna by raising, lowering, and rotating it, resembling a submarine crewman operating a periscope.

At one point, Cochran recalled, he and Welling got sick with “some kind of flu” while in Minnesota and, unable to find a doctor willing to see two eccentric out-of-towners on zero notice, just “sweated it out” and continued on. At another point during their passage through Minnesota, Welling spent a night in jail. They were pulled over by a small-town cop (Cochran described it as a speed trap but was adamant that they weren’t speeding, claiming the cop was just suspicious of the weird appearance of their tracking vehicle) but couldn’t stop for long or they would lose the bird. Welling stayed with the cop to sort things out while Cochran went on, and after the bird set down for the day, Cochran doubled back to pick him up.

“The bird got a big tailwind when it left Minnesota,” Cochran said. “We could barely keep up, we were driving over the speed limit on those empty roads — there aren’t many people in North Dakota — but we got farther and farther behind it, and finally by the time we caught up with it, it had already flown into Canada.”

Far from an official crossing point where they could legally enter Manitoba, they were forced to listen at the border as the signal faded into the distance. The next day they found a border crossing (heaven knows what the border agents made of the giant antenna on top of the truck) and miraculously picked up the signal again, only to have their vehicle start to break down. “It overheated and it wouldn’t run, so the next thing you know Charles is out there on the hood of the truck, pouring gasoline into the carburetor to keep it running,” Cochran recalled. “And every time we could find any place where there was a ditch with rainwater, we improvised something to carry water out of the ditch and pour it into the radiator. We finally managed to limp into a town to get repairs made.”

Cochran recruited a local pilot to take him up in a plane in one last attempt to relocate the radio-tagged bird and keep going, but to no avail. The chase was over. The data they had collected would be immortalized in a terse three-page scientific paper that doesn’t hint at all the adventures behind the numbers.

That 1973 journey wasn’t the first time Cochran and his colleagues had followed a radio-tagged bird cross-country, nor was it the last. After his first foray into wildlife telemetry at George Swenson’s lab, Cochran quickly became sought after by wildlife biologists throughout the region. He first worked with the Illinois Natural History Survey biologist Rexford Lord, who was looking for a more accurate way to survey the local cottontail rabbit population. Although big engineering firms such as Honeywell had already tried to build radio tracking systems that could be used with wildlife, Cochran succeeded where others had failed by literally thinking outside the box: instead of putting the transmitter components into a metal box that had to be awkwardly strapped to an animal’s back, he favored designs that were as small, simple, and compact as possible, dipping the assembly of components in plastic resin to seal them together and waterproof them. Today, as in Cochran’s time, designing a radio transmitter to be worn by an animal requires making trade-offs among a long list of factors: a longer antenna will give you a stronger signal, and a bigger battery will give you a longer-lasting tag, but both add weight. Cochran was arguably the first engineer to master this balancing act.

The transmitters Cochran created for Lord cost eight dollars to build, weighed a third of an ounce, and had a range of up to two miles. Attaching them to animals via collars or harnesses, Cochran and Lord used them to track the movements of skunks and raccoons as well as rabbits. Cochran didn’t initially realize the significance of what he’d achieved, but when Lord gave a presentation about their project at a 1961 mammalogy conference, he suddenly found himself inundated with job offers from biologists. Sharing his designs with anyone who asked instead of patenting them, he even let biologists stay in his spare room when they visited to learn telemetry techniques from him. When I asked him why he decided to go into a career in wildlife telemetry rather than sticking with satellites, he told me he was simply more interested in birds than in a job “with some engineering company making a big salary and designing weapons that’ll kill people.”

Virgin Orbit’s days of slinging satellites into space aboard aircraft-launched rockets have come to an end Thursday. After six years in business, Virgin’s satellite launch subsidiary has announced via SEC filing that it does not have the funding to continue operations and will be shuttering for “the foreseeable future,” per CNBC. Nearly 90 percent of Virgin Orbit’s employees — 675 people in total — will be laid off immediately.

Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 for the purpose of developing and commercializing LauncherOne, a satellite launch system fitted under a modified 747 airliner, dubbed Cosmic Girl. The system was designed to put 500 pounds of cubesats into Low Earth Orbit by firing them in a rocket from said airliner flying at an altitude of 30,000 - 50,000 feet. Despite a string of early successes — both in terms of development milestones and expanding service contracts with the UK military, LauncherOne’s first official test in May of 2020 failed to deliver its simulated payload into orbit.

A second attempt the following January in 2022 however was a success with the launch of 10 NASA cube sats into LEO, as was Virgin Orbit’s first commercial satellite launch that June. It successfully sent seven more satellites into orbit in January 2022 and quietly launched Space Force assets that July.

In all, Virgin Orbit made six total flights between 2020 and 2023, only four successfully. The most recent attempt was dubbed the Start Me Up event and was supposed to mark the first commercial space launch from UK soil. Despite the rocket successfully separating from its parent aircraft, an upper stage “anomaly” prevented the rocket’s payload from entering orbit. It was later determined that a $100 fuel filter had failed and resulted in the fault.

As TechCrunch points out, Virgin Group founder, Sir Richard Branson, “threw upwards of $55 million to the sinking space company,” in recent months but Start Me Up’s embarrassing failure turned out to be the final straw. On March 16th, Virgin Orbit announced an “operational pause” and worker furlough for its roughly 750 employees as company leadership scrambled to find new funding sources. The company extended the furlough two weeks later and called it quits on Thursday.

“Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company,” Virgin CEO Dan Hart said in an all-hands call obtained by CNBC. “We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes.” 

Impacted employees will reportedly receive severance packages, according to Hart, including a cash payment, continued benefits and a “direct pipeline” to Virgin Galactic’s hiring department. Virgin Orbit’s two top executives will also receive “golden parachute” severances which were approved by the company’s board, conveniently, back in mid-March right when the furloughs first took effect.

If humanity is going to have a long-term presence on the Moon, it's going to need reliable communications — and Lockheed Martin thinks it can provide that link. The company has created a spinoff devoted to lunar infrastructure, Crescent Space, whose first project is a Moon-to-Earth satellite network. Parsec, as it's called, uses a constellation of small lunar satellites to provide a non-stop connection between astronauts, their equipment and the people back home. The system will also provide navigation help.

The technology should help explorers keep in touch, and assist with spacecraft course changes. As Lockheed Martin explains, though, it could prove vital to those on lunar soil. Parsec's nodes create a lunar equivalent to GPS, giving astronauts their exact positions and directions back to base. A rover crew might know how to return home without driving into a dangerous crater, for instance.

Crescent's first Parsec nodes should be operational by 2025, with Lockheed Martin providing the satellites. And before you ask: yes, the company is clearly hoping for some big customers. CEO Joe Landon (formerly a Lockheed Martin Space VP) claims Crescent is "well positioned" to support NASA's Artemis Moon landings and other exploratory missions.

The startup may seem premature when NASA's Artemis program won't even conduct a lunar flyby until late 2024, and a landing at the end of 2025. However, there's already a clear race to the Moon that includes national efforts from the US and China as well as private projects like SpaceX's lunar tourism. Crescent could help Lockheed Martin profit from that rush without disrupting its existing businesses.

China’s Chang’e 5 rover has found tiny glass beads containing water in an impact crater on the Moon. Samples collected from a 2020 mission found beads with water content as high as 2,000 parts per million (PPM). Given the prevalence of these glass spheres on the lunar surface, there may be enough to provide 71 trillion gallons of water.

Some beads formed when asteroids collided with the Moon millions of years ago, while others came from ancient volcanoes. Scientists believe the water originated from a chemical reaction when hydrogen ions emitted from the sun — transported to the lunar surface from solar winds — combined with oxygen atoms inside the beads. The water-filled beads are tiny, ranging from “tens of micrometers to a few millimeters.” Still, there are enough on the Moon’s surface to (theoretically) supply an estimated 270 trillion kilograms of water — enough to fill 100 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

However, scientists haven’t yet figured out how to collect them, and they would need to heat them to around 212 degrees Fahrenheit to extract water. Still, they could be a resource for future lunar settlements, where astronauts could use water for drinking, bathing, cooking, cleaning and even producing rocket fuel.

Scientists believe other moons in our Solar System may have similar beads. “Our direct measurements of this surface reservoir of lunar water show that impact glass beads can store substantial quantities of solar wind-derived water on the moon and suggest that impact glass may be water reservoirs on other airless bodies,” the study’s authors wrote. “The presence of water, stored in impact glass beads, is consistent with the remote detection of water at lower-latitude regions of the Moon, Vesta and Mercury. Our findings indicate that the impact glasses on the surface of Solar System airless bodies are capable of storing solar wind-derived water and releasing it to space.”

The glass beads aren’t our first glimpse at water on the Moon. In 2009, NASA crashed a probe into the Cabeus crater that led to water detection; in 2018, NASA found direct evidence of ice deposits in the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters on its north and south poles. NASA and China / Russia plan to put lunar bases at the Moon’s South Pole within the next decade; the competing initiatives both hope to have inhabitable bases ready by the early-to-mid-2030s.

Blue Origin now has an explanation for the booster failure that cut a New Shepard flight short last September. Jeff Bezos' company has determined that a "thermo-structural failure" in the NS-23 rocket's engine nozzle was to blame. Operational temperatures for the nozzle climbed higher than expected following cooling system design changes, creating fatigue that misaligned the thrust and activated the crew capsule's escape system.

Engineers are already taking "corrective actions" that include redesigning the combustion chamber and operating conditions. Blue Origin has also tweaked the nozzle design to improve its structural integrity. The capsule wasn't damaged and will fly again, Blue Origin says.

The company says it hopes to resume flights "soon," but hasn't provided an exact date. It intends to restart operations by re-flying the research payload from the aborted mission. The Federal Aviation Administration has to accept the incident findings before Blue Origin can move forward.

There's plenty of pressure on Blue Origin to address the issues. The company recently obtained a NASA contract to fly a science mission to Mars using its yet-to-launch New Glenn rocket, and has been pushing for a lunar lander agreement. The sooner Blue Origin can prove that its rocketry is trustworthy, the sooner it can secure customers that include governments and space tourists.

Rivals are facing problems of their own. Relativity Space's first 3D-printed rocket failed to reach orbit earlier this month. SpaceX, meanwhile, has yet to successfully fire all of Starship's engines at the same time. That's not including past problems like Rocket Lab's setbacks. Private spaceflight remains difficult, and Blue Origin is just the latest to illustrate that fact.

Relativity Space has finally launched its 3D-printed rocket after multiple scrubbed attempts, but the results are decidedly mixed. The startup's Terran 1 vehicle successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral late Wednesday, but it failed to reach orbit after the second stage engine ignited only momentarily. It's not clear what led to the failure, but Relativity is promising updates in the "coming days."

The company still characterizes the mission as an accomplishment. Terran 1 endured Max-Q (maximum dynamic pressure), the moment expected to place the most stress on the 3D-printed design. The rocket wasn't carrying a customer payload. Instead, it carried the first metal produced from Relativity's 3D printing system.

As CNNexplains, the two previous launch attempts were plagued with problems. Relatively had trouble cooling propellant in time for the first liftoff, while the second was hampered by both a wayward boat and a software flaw that prompted an automatic engine cutoff shortly after ignition.

Relativity is using the expendable Terran 1 to demonstrate the viability of its 3D printing technique ahead of the reusable Terran R rocket's planned 2024 launch. The manufacturing process theoretically provides simpler, more reliable rockets that are cheaper to make and can be ready within weeks. That, in turn, could lower the costs of delivering satellites and experiments into orbit.

While this launch represents progress, there's mounting pressure to complete testing. Relativity already has contracts that include launching OneWeb satellites and Impulse Space's commercial Mars mission. There's also the simple matter of competition: rivals like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab aren't standing still, and any setbacks limit Relativity's chances to win business.

After 15 years in space, NASA’s AIM mission is ending. In a brief blog post spotted by Gizmodo, the agency said Thursday it was ending operational support for the spacecraft due to a battery power failure. NASA first noticed issues with AIM’s battery in 2019, but the probe was still sending a “significant amount of data” back to Earth. Following another recent decline in battery power, NASA says AIM has become unresponsive. The AIM team will monitor the spacecraft for another two weeks in case it reboots, but judging from the tone of NASA’s post, the agency isn’t holding its breath.

NASA launched the AIM – Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere – mission in 2007 to study noctilucent or night-shining clouds, which are sometimes known as fossilized clouds due to the fact they can last hundreds of years in the Earth's upper atmosphere. From its vantage point 370 miles above the planet's surface, the spacecraft proved invaluable to scientists, with data collected by AIM appearing in 379 peer-reviewed papers, including a recent 2018 study that found methane emissions from human-driven climate change are causing night-shining clouds to form more frequently. Pretty good for a mission NASA initially expected to operate for only two years. AIM’s demise follows that of another long-serving NASA spacecraft. At the start of the year, the agency deorbited the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite following a nearly four-decade run collecting ozone and atmospheric measurements.