Rocket startup company Astra has suffered from a second launch failure this year as its LV0010 launch vehicle failed to get to orbit with a pair of NASA weather satellites on board. "The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," the company tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data review."
The launch was backed by NASA as part of its mission to eventually deliver six TROPICS CubeSat weather satellites into orbit. Those low-cost satellites were designed to help NASA keep better track of developing tropical storms.
NASA was disappointed but remained upbeat about the Astra program. "Although today’s launch with Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA's associate science division administrator Thomas Zuburchen. "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know there is value in taking risks in our overall NASA science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."
Astra's last mission also ended in failure, with the loss of four CubeSats including three from universities. The company blamed that on two separate problems, a wiring error and software flaw.
It's not unusual for launch failures early in the life of a rocket company — RocketLab has suffered from three since it started launching in 2017, and even SpaceX failed with its first three Falcon 1 launches from 2006-2008. However, Astra's streak is starting to look like an issue. Of seven attempted orbital launches, five have ended in failure, with issues ranging from guidance problems to software flaws to engine failures.
NASA wants a deeper understanding of the many unexplained, flying objects that appear in the sky. The agency is launching a study team this fall to observe UFOs, now known as UAPS (unidentified aerial phenomena). While it may be tempting to think of UFOs as the stuff of sci-fi and conspiracy theories, NASA’s announcement states right off the bat that there is “no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.” Instead, the focus of the mission appears to be on gathering data and furthering our scientific understanding of UAPs. There’s a practical reason why. Unexplained flying objects — no matter the origin — can pose a threat to flight safety and national security, as military officials have noted.
“The limited number of observations of UAPs currently makes it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events. Unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere are of interest for both national security and air safety. Establishing which events are natural provides a key first step to identifying or mitigating such phenomena, which aligns with one of NASA’s goals to ensure the safety of aircraft,” said the agency in its announcement.
NASA is far from the only US government agency with an interest in UAPs. Last month, Congress held its first hearing on UFOs in over 50 years, where Pentagon officials noted that reports of UAPs are more frequent now than in the past. More than 143 incidents of unidentified flying objects have been reported to the Pentagon since 2004 and remain unexplained, according to a report released last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
NASA’s UAP study will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel of the Simons Foundation and NASA’s Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The study will take nine months to complete, and the team will consult with a field of experts in science, aeronautics and data analytics.
Upon the study’s conclusion, NASA promises to make both its findings and all the collected data public. “All of NASA’s data is available to the public – we take that obligation seriously – and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study,” Evans said in a statement.
Astronomers everywhere have high hopes for NASA's James Webb telescope. It's supposed to give us an insight into the first stars and galaxies that ever formed and into the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. That is why NASA and its partners had engineered it to be able to withstand harsh situations, such as being bombarded by micrometeroids flying at extremely high velocities. Between May 23rd and May 25th, a micrometeoroid that's larger than expected hit one of the telescope's primary mirror segments. The event was significant enough for NASA to pick up a "marginally detectable effect in the data," but not enough to affect the telescope's performance.
In NASA's announcement, it said that the James Webb team performed an initial analysis and found that it still performs at a level that "exceeds all mission requirements." The space agency explained that its engineers relied on simulations and did actual test impacts on mirror samples when it was building the telescope to make sure it was adequately fortified. For instance, the telescope's flight teams can perform maneuvers to turn its optics away from known meteor showers. The recent impact it sustained was classified as an unavoidable chance event, though, and the micrometeoroid was larger than what engineers could have tested on the ground.
The good news is that James Webb has the capability to adjust mirror positions in order to correct and minimize the results of impacts like this. Its engineers have already made the first of several adjustments to make up for the damage on the affected segment. The agency has also formed a team of engineers to look into ways to mitigate effects of hits this scale in the future. Seeing as James Webb is meant to be Hubble's replacement and is expected to provide us invaluable data over the next 10 years — or 20, if everything goes well — NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency will most likely do the best they can to protect the space telescope.
Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA Goddard, said:
"With Webb’s mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time. Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed. We will use this flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the imaging performance of Webb to the best extent possible for many years to come."
There’s plenty riding on NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System, the modern-day rocket that will carry the Artemis missions. But after delaying its most recent test to make urgent repairs to the fuel system, the SLS is once again ready for another milestone. Today, the craft is on its way over to Launch Pad 39B to prepare for its “wet” dress rehearsal (so they fuel it, even if they have no intention of launching) later this month.
That test will take the rocket all the way to the countdown procedure while fully fuelled, giving engineers plenty of new data ahead of a planned real-world launch. If that all goes to plan, we could be a few months away from sending an uncrewed vehicle into orbit around the Moon. Give it a couple more years, and we’ll hopefully send a crew beyond Earth’s gravity for the first time since 1972.
The Diablo Immortal reviews all said pretty much the same thing: There’s a good game hidden beneath all of that loot-box crud. Unfortunately, if you were using a Samsung phone with one of the company’s own Exynos chipsets, the game feels a lot more broken than that. It appears as if the title isn’t working well with that silicon, making the title almost unplayable. A Blizzard spokesperson said the company is exploring the problem and may block downloads of the title to some affected phones while they scramble for a fix.
NASA has purchased an extra raft of crewed missions from SpaceX to ensure the International Space Station retains its full personnel complement until 2030. The five trips are enough to provide an “uninterrupted” US presence on the station until its planned retirement date. Not only will it help give NASA options during its launch program, it’ll also cover any gaps made by Boeing’s yet-to-be-certified Starliner vehicle, which isn’t due to fly until next year. If nothing else, that’s some egg on the face of the aerospace giant, which has lost ground to its upstart rival in the spaceflight world for some time now.
It’s the week of Apple’s big developer event, which means we’re likely to get a whole host of new hardware and software announcements as part of the main show. But if you were hoping the next-generation MacBook Air would have the same bunch of color options as the new iMac, prepare for disappointment. Those in the know claim an updated M1 MacBook Air will only sell in four hues: space gray, silver, blue and gold. That said, it’s hard to know what the company will announce given the factory closures caused by China’s fresh round of COVID-19 lockdowns.
The country’s homegrown space station is getting a big push toward completion.
Astronauts aboard China’s Shenzhou-14 mission have successfully arrived on the nation’s Tiangong space station. The crew of three will spend the next six months on the station to make a significant stride toward completing its setup. Next month, the country will launch a lab module to expand the station’s footprint, with a second unit going up in October, and astronauts will conduct several EVAs to get everything connected and ready. If successful, the nation expects Tiangong to be fully operational by the end of the year.
Stellantis, parent company of Fiat Chrysler and PSA Group, has pleaded guilty to charges of criminal conspiracy after covering the extent of its diesel emissions. The automotive giant was accused of violating the Clean Air Act, misleading regulators around tailpipe emissions and installing defeat devices to cheat government tests. As part of the settlement, the company must submit compliance reports to the Justice Department for three years. Meanwhile, three of its employees are awaiting criminal charges. Given the outsize impact that tailpipe emissions have both on people’s health and the climate, and that the company’s net profit was reportedly nearly $15.2 billion in 2021, the penalty seems like something of a bargain.
China’s Shenzhou-14 mission has successfully docked with the country's Tiangong space station on Sunday. According to CNN, the three-person crew of the spacecraft arrived at the Tianhe “Harmony of the Heavens” crew module at 5:42PM local time after launching from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert earlier in the day. The arrival marks the start of a six-month stay at the station for the mission’s astronauts that will see China attempt to make significant progress toward the completion of Tiangong.
The country hopes to finish building the station by the end of the year. Next month, it will launch the first of two lab modules that will expand Tiangong’s capabilities, with the latter to follow in October. The modules will allow Chinese astronauts to conduct microgravity and life science research. After the country completed its first-ever tandem spacewalk last year, the Shenzhou-14 crew will conduct multiple EVAs to prepare the station for expansion. Among the three astronauts is Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to make it to space nearly a decade ago during the country’s Shenzhou-9 mission.
Once complete, the entire t-shaped structure will be about a fifth of the size of the International Space Station, with long-term accommodation for three astronauts. According to Reuters, China is exploring the possibility of allowing commercial space flights to visit Tiangong. It has also invited international space agencies to visit the station. The successful launch of Shenzhou-14 caps off a busy week in space travel, with NASA preparing to begin testing its next-generation SLS rocket again and Blue Origin successfully completing its fifth crewed flight on Saturday.
Weeks after NASA decided to postpone testing of its next-generation Space Launch System to make repairs to the rocket, it’s ready to try again. Starting at 12:01AM on June 6th, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida will begin rolling out the spacecraft from the facility’s Vehicle Assembly Building. It will take approximately eight to 12 hours for NASA to transport Artemis 1 along the four-mile road to Launch Pad 39B, with the agency planning to livestream part of the event on YouTube.
As Space.com notes, the overnight rollout is a concession toward utility. Moving the vehicle at night means NASA can avoid subjecting it to the worst of Flordia’s hot and humid daytime weather. Once Artemis 1 is back at Pad 39B, NASA plans to restart the rocket’s “wet dress rehearsal” on June 19th. The test is designed to replicate the countdown procedure it will undergo when the Artemis 1 mission hopefully gets underway later this year.
Following an initial attempt on April 1st, NASA attempted to complete a modified version of the trial on April 14th, but that was cut short after technicians discovered a hydrogen leak in the SLS mobile launch tower. NASA eventually decided to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to fix the issues that had come up in its previous test attempts and give a critical gaseous nitrogen supplier time to complete capacity upgrades.
Provided there aren’t further setbacks, the June 19th fueling trial will take about 48 hours to complete. If all goes according to plan, the earliest Artemis 1 could get underway is on July 26th, though it’s among dozens of potential launch dates NASA has plotted out between now and the end of 2022, with more dates available next year.
The modern world as we know it simply would not exist if not for the mind of Sir Isaac Newton. His synthesis of differential calculus and pioneering research on the nature of gravity and light are bedrocks of the scientific method. However in his later years, Newton's interests were admittedly drawn towards a decidedly non-scientific subject, alchemy. Does that investigation invalidate Newton's earlier achievement, asks theoretical physicist and philosopher, Carlo Rovelli in the excerpt below. His new book of correspondence and musings, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World, Rovelli explores themes spanning from science to history to politics and philosophy.
In 1936 Sotheby’s puts up for auction a collection of unpublished writings by Sir Isaac Newton. The price is low, £9,000; not much when compared to the £140,000 raised that season from the sale of a Rubens and a Rembrandt. Among the buyers is John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, who was a great admirer of Newton. Keynes soon realizes that a substantial part of the manuscript writings deal with a subject that few would have expected Newton to be interested in. Namely: alchemy. Keynes sets out to acquire all of Newton’s unpublished writings on the subject, and soon realizes further that alchemy was not something that the great scientist was marginally or briefly curious about: his interest in it lasted throughout his life. “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason,” Keynes concludes, “he was the last of the magicians.”
In 1946 Keynes donated his unpublished Newtoniana to the University of Cambridge. The strangeness of Newton in alchemical guise, seemingly so at odds with the traditional image of him as the father of science, has caused the majority of historians to give the subject a wide berth. Only recently has interest in his passion for alchemy grown. Today a substantial amount of Newton’s alchemical texts have been put online by researchers at Indiana University and are now accessible to everyone. Their existence still has the capacity to provoke discussion, and to cast a confusing light over his legacy.
Newton is central to modern science. He occupies this preeminent place because of his exceptional scientific results: mechanics, the theory of universal gravity, optics, the discovery that white light is a mixture of colors, differential calculus. Even today, engineers, physicists, astronomers and chemists work with equations written by him, and use concepts that he first introduced. But even more important than all this, Newton was the founder of the very method of seeking knowledge that today we call modern science. He built upon the work and ideas of others — Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, etc — extending a tradition that goes back to antiquity; but it is in his books that what we now call the scientific method found its modern form, immediately producing a mass of exceptional results. It is no exaggeration to think of Newton as the father of modern science. So, what on earth does alchemy have to do with any of this?
There are those who have seen in these anomalous alchemical activities evidence of mental infirmity brought on by premature aging. There are others who have served their own ends by attempting to enlist the great Englishman among critics of the limitations of scientific rationality.
I think things are much simpler than this.
The key lies in the fact that Newton never published anything on alchemy. The papers that show his interest in the subject are extensive, but they are all unpublished. This lack of publication has been interpreted as a consequence of the fact that alchemy had been illegal in England since as early as the fourteenth century. But the law prohibiting alchemy was lifted in 1689. And besides, if Newton had been so worried about going against laws and conventions, he would not have been Newton. There are those who have portrayed him as some kind of demonic figure attempting to glean extraordinary and ultimate knowledge that he wanted to keep exclusively for himself, to enhance his own power. But Newton really had made extraordinary discoveries, and had not sought to keep those to himself: he published them in his great books, including the Principia, with the equations of mechanics still used today by engineers to build airplanes and edifices. Newton was renowned and extremely well respected during his adult life; he was president of the Royal Society the world’s leading scientific body. The intellectual world was hungry for his results. Why did he not publish anything based on all those alchemical activities?
The answer is very simple, and I believe that it dispels the whole enigma: he never published anything because he never arrived at any results that he found convincing. Today it is easy to rely on the well-digested historical judgment that alchemy had theoretical and empirical foundations that were far too weak. It wasn’t quite so easy to reach this conclusion in the seventeenth century. Alchemy was widely practiced and studied by many, and Newton genuinely tried to understand whether it contained a valid form of knowledge. If he had found in alchemy something that could have withstood the method of rational and empirical investigation that he himself was promoting, there can be no doubt that Newton would have published his results. If he had succeeded in extracting from the disorganized morass of the alchemical world something that could have become science, then we would surely have inherited a book by Newton on the subject, just as we have books by him on optics, mechanics and universal gravity. He did not manage to do this, and so he published nothing.
Was it a vain hope in the first place? Was it a project that should have been discarded even before it began? On the contrary: many of the key problems posed by alchemy, and quite a few of the methods it developed, in particular with reference to the transformation of one chemical substance into another, are precisely the problems that would soon give rise to the new discipline of chemistry. Newton does not manage to take the critical step between alchemy and chemistry. That would be down to scientists of the next generation, such as Lavoisier, to achieve.
The texts put online by Indiana University show this clearly. It is true that the language used is typically alchemical: metaphors and allusions, veiled phrases and strange symbols. But many of the procedures described are nothing more than simple chemical processes. For example, he describes the production of “oil of vitriol” (sulfuric acid), aqua fortis (nitric acid) and “spirit of salt” (hydrochloric acid). By following Newton’s instructions, it is possible to synthesize these substances. The very name that Newton used to refer to his attempts at doing so is a suggestive one: “chymistry.” Late, post-Renaissance alchemy strongly insisted on the experimental verification of ideas. It was already beginning to face in the direction of modern chemistry. Newton understands that somewhere within the confused miasma of alchemical recipes there is a modern science (in the “Newtonian” sense) hidden, and he tries to encourage its emergence. He spends a great deal of time immersed in it, but he doesn’t succeed in finding the thread that will untie the bundle, and so publishes nothing.
Alchemy was not Newton’s only strange pursuit and passion. There is another one that emerges from his papers that is perhaps even more intriguing: Newton put enormous effort into reconstructing biblical chronology, attempting to assign precise dates to events written about in the holy book. Once again, from the evidence of his papers, the results were not great: the father of science estimates that the beginning of the world happened just a few thousand years ago. Why did Newton lose himself in this pursuit?
History is an ancient subject. Born in Miletus with Hecataeus, it is already fully grown with Herodotus and Thucydides. There is a continuity between the work of historians of today and those of antiquity: principally in that critical spirit that is necessary when gathering and evaluating the traces of the past. (The book of Hecataeus begins thus: “I write things that seem to me to be true. For the tales of the Greeks are many and laugh‑ able as they seem to me.”) But contemporary historiography has a quantitative aspect linked to the crucial effort to establish the precise dates of past events. Furthermore, the critical work of a modern historian must take into account all the sources, evaluating their reliability and weighing the relevance of information furnished. The most plausible reconstruction emerges from this practice of evaluation and of weighted integration of the sources. Well, this quantitative way of writing history begins with Newton’s work on biblical chronology. In this case too, Newton is on the track of something profoundly modern: to find a method for the rational reconstruction of the dating of ancient history based on the multiple, incomplete and variably reliable sources that we have at our disposal. Newton is the first to introduce concepts and methods that will later become important, but he did not arrive at results that were sufficiently satisfactory, and once again he publishes nothing on the subject.
In both cases we are not dealing with something that should cause us to deviate from our traditional view of the rationalistic Newton. On the contrary, the great scientist is struggling with real scientific problems. There is no trace of a Newton who would confuse good science with magic, or with untested tradition or authority. The reverse is true; he is the prescient modern scientist who confronts new areas of scientific inquiry clear-sighted, publishing when he succeeds in arriving at clear and important results, and not publishing when he does not arrive at such results. He was brilliant, the most brilliant—but he also had his limits, like everyone else.
I think that the genius of Newton lay precisely in his being aware of these limits: the limits of what he did not know. And this is the basis of the science that he helped to give birth to.
After delaying the planned launch from May 20th due to an issue with backup systems, Blue Origin is finally ready to send New Shepard on its next journey to the edge of space. The NS-21 mission is New Shepard's 21st flight and its fifth with passengers on board. It takes place today at 9AM ET and you can watch it live below. The stream will start an hour before launch.
The passengers include electrical engineer and former NASA test lead Katya Echazarreta, who will become the first Mexican-born woman and youngest American woman to fly to space. She's making the trip as part of Space for Humanity’s sponsored Citizen Astronaut Program.
Civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha, meanwhile, will become the second Brazilian to reach space. The other passengers are business jet pilot Hamish Harding, co-founder of private equity firm Insight Equity Victor Vescovo, Dream Variation Ventures co-founder Jaison Robinson and investor Evan Dick, who was part of the NS-19 mission in December.
Blue Origin's first crewed flight took place last July, with founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark and, at the time, the youngest and oldest people to travel above the Kármán line on board. William Shatner became the oldest person to reach space on the second crewed mission. Subsequent flights took place in December and March.
NASA might not have to lean on Russia again to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Ars Technicanotes the agency has bought five extra crewed ISS flights from SpaceX, or enough to maintain "uninterrupted" US staffing aboard the station until its expected 2030 demise. While NASA still intends to use Boeing's Starliner, the new SpaceX missions will be necessary to fulfill plans for alternating between the two companies once both are an option.
The extra flights could be used as soon as 2026. They'll help with redundancy and keep the ISS operating safely if any problems prevent Boeing or SpaceX from launching in a timely fashion, NASA said. At present, SpaceX is the only private company certified to fly astronauts. Boeing isn't expected to fly its first operational mission until 2023.
This might not deprive Boeing of more chances to fly astronauts to the ISS. If NASA doesn't order more flights, however, the company will have missed its big chance to one-up SpaceX. The current arrangement provides a total of 14 Crew Dragon missions versus just six Starliner trips — the aerospace giant will have lost a large chunk of its potential business to a relative newcomer.
NASA's going to need new suits to accompany astronauts to the Moon for its Artemis I mission, and now we know who's going to be making them: Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace. The two companies will develop next-generation suits that'll be used both for spacewalks on the ISS, in addition to Moon exploration. NASA says it has defined the technical and safety standards around the new "xEMU" equipment (Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit), but it's up to these partners to deal with "design, development, qualification, [and] certification" as well as building the necessary support equipment.
According to NASA, the new suits could be ready as soon 2025, following testing in either the ISS or a simulated environment. While the space agency is also gearing up for other new equipment, like lunar landers from SpaceX and more companies, having new suits is among its most important tasks for future missions. Currently, astronauts are still relying on space gear designed around 45 years ago for the Space Shuttle program. In an August 2021 report, NASA noted that its xEMU plans likely won't hit its original 2024 target, and that it has spent around $420 million developing the new suits.
