At 10:21pm PT that day, NASA will "intentionally crash the DART spacecraft into an asteroid to see if that is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future," SpaceX said in a tweet.
A static fire test is one of several steps in getting a launch vehicle ready to deploy, and it checks engine startup performance, measuring things like pressure and temperature. With this stage complete, SpaceX and NASA look set to go ahead next week.
DART is targeting a binary asteroid with two bodies called Didymos (the Greek word for "twin"). Didymos B is 160 meters (about 174 yards) large, and orbits the larger Didymos A, which is 780 meters in size. The binary asteroid would have passed Earth safely in 2022 and again in 2024 — they weren't on track to make contact with our planet.
But NASA has already identified at least 23 objects that could potentially collide with us over the next 100 years. Coming up with a defense strategy is key to protecting humanity should Armageddon ever be on the horizon.
SpaceX's hopes for a timely Starship orbital flight haven't gone according to plan, to put it mildly, but there might be hope on the horizon. According to TechCrunch, Elon Musk told a joint meeting of space research boards that his company is aiming for the first Starship orbital flight in January 2022. The chief executive was quick to admit there was a "lot of risk" and that SpaceX might not succeed, but he figured the team would at least make "a lot of progress."
There could be around a dozen further launches in 2022, Musk added. The timing also hinges on an FAA environmental impact review of SpaceX's Boca Chica launch facility. The agency intends to finish its review before the end of 2021, but a delay might push back upcoming Starship launches.
Whenever Starship reaches orbit, the vehicle might become economical relatively soon afterward. Musk reckoned SpaceX could start selling Starship launches for less than Falcon 9 in roughly two years. That, in turn, could win valuable business and help SpaceX build more Starships for space tourism and journeys to Mars. Musk told meeting members Earth might need about 1,000 launch systems for truly interplanetary life, and he intended to produce Starships relatively quickly.
On Monday, astronauts on the International Space Station had to seek safety aboard their transport craft when the station passed uncomfortably close to a field of orbital debris. According to the Associated Press, US Space Command started tracking the space junk in the early hours of the morning. The situation saw the station pass the debris field every 90 minutes, forcing those on board to close and reopen several compartments multiple times throughout the day. The four American, one German and two Russian astronauts aboard the ISS will need to stay on alert for the next several days.
"Thanks for a crazy but well-coordinated day, we really appreciated all the situational awareness you gave us," US astronaut Mark Vande Hei told NASA mission control before he and the other crew members aboard went to bed at 12PM EST. "It was certainly a great way to bond as a crew, starting off our very first workday in space." Four of the astronauts arrived at the station late last week.
The U.S. State Department confirms and condemns that Russia conducted an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) test in low Earth orbit.
Neither NASA nor the US government has said what created the debris field that put the ISS in danger. However, later in the day, the US State Department condemned a Russian missile test that destroyed one of the country’s own satellites and created more than 1,500 trackable pieces of orbital debris. “The test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, as well as to other human spaceflight activities,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said. “Russia’s dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long term sustainability of outer space and clearly demonstrates that Russia’s claims of opposing the weaponization of space are disingenuous and hypocritical.”
The State Department said the US would work with its allies to respond to Russia’s act. Per Reuters, the country has yet to comment on the incident.
Along with their partners, NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency frequently move the International Space Station to avoid incoming space junk. They did that last week when the station was threatened by fragments of a Chinese satellite that was destroyed in a 2007 missile test.
Gene Roddenberry was a man ahead of his time, accurately predicting the development of fantastical gadgets like flip phones, tablet computers, Bluetooth and bionic eyes — even tractor beams. But one technology Roddenberry called for in the 1960s has yet to make it off the screen: teleportation. It's not only that "we just don't have enough power," as Scotty would say, we also lack the fundamental knowledge base to make it a reality. For now, at least. In their latest book, Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe, Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson delve into this and a host of other quandaries facing humanity — from whether there's an afterlife, why aliens haven't made contact with us yet, or if our observable existence is actually a computer simulation.
If your dream of teleportation is to be here in one moment, and then be in a totally different place the next moment, then we are sad to tell you right off the bat that this is impossible. Unfortunately, physics has some pretty hard rules about anything happening instantaneously. Anything that happens (an effect) has to have a cause, which in turn requires the transmission of information. Think about it: in order for two things to be causally related to each other (like you disappearing here and you appearing somewhere else), they have to somehow talk to each other. And in this universe, everything, including information, has a speed limit.
Information has to travel through space just like everything else, and the fastest anything can travel in this universe is the speed of light. Really, the speed of light should have been called the “speed of information” or “the universe’s speed limit.” It’s baked into relativity and the very idea of cause and effect, which are at the heart of physics.
Even gravity can’t move faster than light. The Earth doesn’t feel gravity from where the Sun is right now; it feels gravity from where the Sun was eight minutes ago. That’s how long it takes information to travel the ninety-three million miles between here and there. If the Sun disappeared (teleporting off for its own vacation), the Earth would continue in its normal orbit for eight minutes before realizing that the Sun was gone.
So the idea that you can disappear in one place and reappear in another place instantly is pretty much out of the question. Something has to happen in between, and that something can’t move faster than light.
Fortunately, most of us aren’t such sticklers when it comes to the definition of “teleportation.” Most of us will take “almost instantly” or “in the blink of an eye” or even “as fast as the laws of physics will allow” for our teleportation needs. If that’s the case, then there are two options for making a teleportation machine work:
1. Your teleportation machine could transmit you to your destination at the speed of light.
2. Your teleportation machine could somehow shorten the distance between where you are and where you want to go.
Option #2 is what you might call the “portal” type of teleportation. In movies, it would be the kind of teleportation that opens up a doorway, usually through a wormhole or some kind of extradimensional subspace, that you step through to find yourself somewhere else. Wormholes are theoretical tunnels that connect points in space that are far away, and physicists have definitely proposed the existence of multiple dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with.
Sadly, both of these concepts are still very much theoretical. We haven’t actually seen a wormhole, nor do we have any idea how to open one or control where it leads. And extra dimensions aren’t really something you can move into. They only represent extra ways in which your particles might be able to wiggle.
Much more interesting to talk about is Option #1, which, as it turns out, might actually be something we can do in the near future.
Getting There at Light Speed
If we can’t appear in other places instantly, or take shortcuts through space, can we at least get there as fast as possible? The top speed of the universe, three hundred million meters per second, is plenty fast to cut your commute down to a fraction of a second and make trips to the stars take years instead of decades or millennia. Speed-of-light teleportation would still be awesome.
To do that, you might imagine a machine that somehow takes your body and then pushes it at the speed of light to your destination. Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea, and it’s that you’re too heavy. The truth is that you’re too massive to ever travel at the speed of light. First, it would take an enormous amount of time and energy just to accelerate all the particles in your body (whether assembled or broken up somehow) to speeds that are close to the speed of light. And second, you would never get to the speed of light. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been dieting or working on your CrossFit; nothing that has any mass can ever travel at the speed of light.
Particles like electrons and quarks, the building blocks of your atoms, have mass. That means that it takes energy to get them moving, a lot of energy to get them moving fast, and infinite energy to reach the speed of light. They can travel at very high speeds, but they can never achieve light speed.
That means that you, and the molecules and particles that make up who you are right now, would never actually be able to teleport. Not instantaneously, and not at the speed of light. Transporting your body somewhere that quickly is never going to happen. It’s just not possible to move all the particles in your body fast enough.
But does that mean teleportation is impossible? Not quite!
There is one way it can still happen, and that’s if we relax what “you” means. What if we didn’t transport you, your molecules or your particles? What if we just transmitted the idea of you?
You Are Information
One possible way to achieve speed-of-light teleportation is to scan you and send you as a beam of photons. Photons don’t have any mass, which means they can go as fast as the universe will allow. In fact, photons can only travel at the speed of light (there’s no such thing as a slow-moving photon).*
Here’s a basic recipe for speed-of-light teleportation:
Step #1: Scan your body and record where all your molecules and particles are.
Step #2: Transmit this information to your destination via a beam of photons.
Step #3: Receive this information and rebuild your body using new particles.
Is this possible? Humans have made incredible progress in both scanning and 3D printing technologies. These days, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can scan your body down to a resolution of 0.1 millimeters, which is about the size of a brain cell. And scientists have used 3D printers to print increasingly more complicated clusters of living cells (known as “organoids”) for testing cancer drugs. We’ve even made machines (using scanning tunneling microscopes) that can grab and move individual atoms. So it’s not hard to imagine that one day we might be able to scan and then print whole bodies.
The real limitation, though, might not be technological but philosophical. After all, if someone made a copy of you, would it actually be you?
Remember, there’s nothing particularly special about the particles that make up your body right now. All particles of a given type are the same. Every electron is perfectly identical to every other electron, and the same is true for quarks. Particles don’t come out of the universe factory with personalities or any sort of distinguishing features. The only difference between any two electrons or any two quarks is where each of them is and what other particles they’re hanging out with.*
But how much would a copy of you still be you? Well, it depends on two things. The first is the resolution of the technology that scans and prints you. Can it read and print your cells? Your molecules? Your atoms, or even your individual particles?
The even bigger question is how much your “you-ness” depends on the tiny details. What level of detail does it take for the copy to still be considered you? It turns out that this is an open question, and the answer might depend on how quantum your sense of self is.
After a few delays, SpaceX is finally (hopefully) ready to start its Crew-3 mission. SpaceX and NASA expect to lauch the Crew Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral at 9:03PM Eastern, and you can watch the livestream either here using the company's YouTube channel, through the SpaceX website or NASA TV. Live coverage starts at 4:45PM ET.
This is an instantaneous launch window, so any faults or weather issues will prompt officials to delay Crew-3 liftoff to a "backup" on November 11th at 8:40PM ET. SpaceX and NASA pinned previous setbacks on weather, a minor crew medical issue and the desire to make way for Crew-2's (since successful) return.
This is SpaceX's fifth crewed spaceflight. If all goes well, mission commander Raja Chari and crew members Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron and Matthias Maurer (the latter from the ESA) will dock with the International Space Station on November 11th at 7:10PM ET. They'll conduct science and otherwise participate in station activities until April 2022.
NASA is once again struggling to keep the Hubble Space Telescope running. Wiredreports the Hubble team is slowly reviving its telescope following multiple instrument sync failures that prompted a switch to "safe mode" in late October. Engineers reactivated the Advanced Camera for Surveys on November 7th, but they'll need to verify the device's output this week before they enable any other affected components.
The problems began October 23rd, when NASA noticed that instruments weren't receiving sync messages from Hubble's control unit. Those communication problems continued for two days, prompting the emergency shutdowns. The space agency can't revive Hubble quickly — rapid power and temperature changes risk shortening the telescope's lifespan.
The failure is the second in 2021 to prompt an extended shutdown (the June payload flaw prompted NASA to invoke a month-long "coma" in July), and that's on top of previous problems. NASA had to restart Hubble's gyroscopes in 2018, for instance. The mounting problems suggest the 31-year-old observer is running out of time, and there's no Space Shuttle available if a hardware replacement is necessary.
Astronomers might not be too worried. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to launch December 18th and may serve as a spiritual successor to Hubble, even if it's not focusing on the same wavelengths. Hubble is also contributing to significant discoveries to this day. In that sense, Hubble is effectively signalling that it's ready to pass the torch.
NASA has officially adjusted its timeline for the Artemis III mission and won't be landing on the Moon in 2024. The agency is now aiming to land the first woman and next American man on the lunar surface in 2025 at the earliest, NASA administrator Bill Nelson has announced. NASA was originally targeting a 2028 launch date for its return to the Moon, but the Trump administration moved that date up by four years back in 2017. In a conference call with reporters, Nelson said "the Trump administration's target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility."
In addition to the unrealistic deadline, Nelson blamed Blue Origin's lawsuit against the agency for the delay. It had to put its contract with SpaceX on hold and pause work on the lunar lander that's meant to take astronauts to the surface of the Moon for a couple of times. NASA lost almost seven months of work on the lander as a result, which had cast doubts on the 2024 landing even before Nelson made his announcement.
If you'll recall, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship-based lunar landing system back in April. The agency historically works with more than one contractor for each mission, but in this instance, it inked a deal with Elon Musk's company alone. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin sued NASA over that decision, arguing that it wasn't given the chance to revise its bid for the project.
Based on legal documents The Verge obtained in September, however, NASA felt that Blue Origin "gambled" with its proposed $5.9 billion lunar lander bid. The company allegedly set the price higher than necessary, because it assumed that NASA would award it a contract but negotiate for a lower price. The Federal Court of Claims ultimately ruled against Blue Origin a few days ago, dismissing its claims that NASA ignored "key flight safety requirements" when it awarded SpaceX the lunar lander contract.
Nelson's announcement comes shortly after NASA moved the uncrewed Artemis I flight test launch from this year to February 2022. That's assuming everything will go as planned — the Orion capsule and Space Launch System that will be used for the mission will still have to go through a battery of tests before NASA can schedule it for blastoff.
Nearly 40,000 years ago, humanity had its best idea to date: transform the age's apex predator into a sociable and loyal ally. Though early humans largely muddled through the first few thousand years of the process, the results have been nothing short of revolutionary. The practice of domestication underpins our modern world, without which we wouldn't have dogs or cats or farm animals — or even farms for that matter. In her latest book, Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, Anthropologist and American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow, Pat Shipman, explores the early days of domestication and how making dogs out of wolves fundamentally altered the course of human history.
To answer the question of whether or not the first dog evolved in Asia or Europe, we need to go back and create a good working definition of domestication.
“Domestication” has a very specific meaning. The term is derived from the Latin for “dwelling” or “house”: domus. In its broadest sense, domestication is the process of rendering an animal or plant suitable for or amenable to living in the domus, for being a member of, and living intimately with, the family.
Even in this general sense, the precise meaning of domestication is elusive. Are plants domesticated? Certainly some of them are spoken of as domesticated, as needing deliberate care and cultivation, and sometimes fertilization, by humans and, conversely, as having been genetically modified through human selection to have traits considered desirable. I am not talking about the relatively recent process of genetically engineering changes to plants; these modified products, such as soybeans, are known colloquially as GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Selection has been carried out for millennia by hunters, gatherers, foragers, gardeners, farmers, and breeders of various species through old-fashioned means, not in the laboratory. If you want, for example, violets with white stripes, what do you do? You try to nurture the seeds of those that show white stripes and pull up the ones that don’t, until you always get striped ones (if you ever do).
We can understand the general principle of selecting or choosing the most desirable plants — those that yield the most food under particular conditions, for example — but the practice of selection is somewhat paradoxical. The individual plants that produce rich fruits or seeds or tubers are the ones you would most want to eat — and those are the very ones you must save for the next planting season. Which is the most practical strategy? Why did people start saving the best seed? It is an awkward conundrum. As the late Brian Hesse wisely observed in his studies of early domestication, people who are short of food, even starving, do not save food for next season or next year. They simply try to live until next week.
The habit of saving seeds for another day must have arisen in relatively good times, when food was plentiful enough to keep some for the distant future. This implies that the motivation for domestication is not to ensure a stable food supply because undertaking the initial process of domestication makes sense only if you already have enough food. Plant domestication seems to be about improving the plant species in the long run. But you really don’t care if the plant is happy to see you or plays nicely with the children.
What is more, strictly speaking, domesticated plants — crops — do not exactly live with humans or in the home. In fact, because some of them, such as nuts and fruits, grow on trees, and most require sunlight, they could not possibly live indoors. Domesticated plants certainly do not participate in family life in any active way, though their needs and locations may shape the seasonal and daily round of activities and the locations of settlements. They don’t join the family. There is an odd sort of remote intimacy between crops and those who harvest or farm them.
The more you ponder the domestication of plants, the fuzzier the concept of “domesticating” them becomes. The earliest farmers or gardeners did not know enough about the mechanics of reproduction or genetic inheritance to know how to get a particular plant to fertilize some other particular plant and produce bigger corms, or juicier fruits, or non-exploding seed heads (which are easier to harvest), or tubers that were richer in carbohydrates. Domesticating plants was not a matter of learning which individual plants were friendliest or least aggressive toward people. And yet, over time, wisdom accumulated, sometimes accompanied by good luck, and humans did find out how to alter some plants’ genetics to foster a more desirable outcome. This discovery is often spoken of as the Neolithic revolution or the dawn of agriculture. It is generally thought to have occurred around 11,000 years ago. Agriculture as an organized system of growing food transformed at least some people who had traditionally hunted, gathered, and foraged for their daily food — mobile people living off the land — and turned them into more sedentary farmers, tied to fields and villages and dwellings.
The Neolithic revolution was not a win-win proposition at the outset. Several studies have shown that early farming peoples experienced a decline in their general health because they often had monotonous diets based on a very few staple resources. Having a narrower range of staple foods meant that those people were more vulnerable to normal variations in weather, such as too much or too little rain, or too hot or too cold or too short a growing season; and of course there were plant diseases, which spread easily when a whole field is planted with a single species. Growing crops also caused humans to live in more permanent settlements, which exacerbated problems with sanitation, water supply, and human crowd diseases.
Though farming supported more people living in higher densities than hunting and foraging, it also created perfect conditions for the spread of contagious diseases and parasites and for recurrent episodes of starvation in bad years. And then there was warfare. Among nomadic foraging and hunting peoples, disputes are often settled by one group moving away from the other. But clearing and fencing fields, planting and tending crops, and building storage facilities takes a lot of work, so people begin to defend territories — or to raid others’ territories when times are bad and their own crops fail. Excess foods, such as the seeds for next year or the vegetables saved for winter, could be stolen during a raid. Abandoning a cleared or planted field and a store of food is an expensive proposition, much more risky than simply shifting your hunting to another area when game gets scarce or your brother-in-law becomes annoying.
As best we know at present, the domestication of plants began about 11,000 years ago with fig trees, emmer wheat, flax, and peas in the Near East. At about the same time, foxtail millet was domesticated in Asia. How do we know this at all? We know it because of plant remains preserved under special conditions. Seeds can be preserved and sometimes were.
Many edible plants also contain starch grains and phytoliths, microscopic silica structures that are much more resistant to decay than leaves or stems. If found, these can also be used to identify plants that were used in the past; techniques such as radiocarbon dating can tell us when this occurred.
Historically, it was often assumed that plants were domesticated earlier than animals, but modern science shows that this idea is unquestionably mistaken. There is no logical reason why it should be true. The attributes and needs of domesticated crops differ a great deal from those of hunted or gathered foods; knowing how to raise wheat tells you little about how to look after pigs. Like fields, particularly rich hunting grounds could be invaded by others and were worth defending. But many hunters and gatherers or foragers were nomadic and lived in low densities out of necessity. Staying too long in one area depleted the local prey population. Whereas agriculturalists can store crops for the future, hunters cannot store meat for long in temperate or tropical climates, though extreme cold works well to keep meat frozen. Over time, crops are more vulnerable to theft than carcasses.
Domesticating animals involves other issues. Domestic animals are not normally hunted; indeed, they are not always confined and may be free ranging. Still, domestic animals can be moved to a new area much more easily than a planted field, a store of grain, or a pile of tubers, which simply will not get up and walk to a new locale. Such animals may even transport household goods as they are being moved. Moving domestic animals is a very different proposition from moving plant foods.
So why do we use the same word, domesticates, to describe both plant and animal species, and a single word, domestication, to describe the process by which an organism becomes domesticated? I think it is a grave mistake that has been based on outdated ideas and faulty assumptions. I do not believe that a single process is involved. I argue that plant and animal domestication are radically different because the nature of the wild species from which domestication might begin is also radically different. As well as having the inherent genetic variability that causes some individuals to exhibit more desirable traits, animals must also cooperate to some extent if they are to be domesticated. Animals choose domestication, if it is to succeed. Plants do not. Like animals, plants have to have enough genetic variability to be exploited by humans during domestication, but plants do not decide whether or not to grow for humans. Animals must decide whether or not to cooperate.
SpaceX's Crew-2 mission is ready to come back after half a year at the International Space Station. NASA has confirmed that Crew-2 will return starting November 7th at 11:10AM Eastern, when astronauts close the Endeavour capsule's hatch. The vehicle undocks at 1:05PM, and should splash down on November 8th around 7:14AM Eastern. You can watch live coverage starting November 7th at 10:45AM through NASA's YouTube channel, below.
Astronauts Akihiko Hoshide (JAXA), Thomas Pesquet (ESA), Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur (both from NASA) will have spent 199 days aboard the ISS, and will be coming back with both hardware and science experiments. Crew-2 has been a crucial mission for SpaceX on multiple fronts. It's not just additional proof that private spacecraft are a viable option for NASA operations — Endeavour is SpaceX's first reused Crew Dragon capsule. If all goes well, the company will have lowered the practical costs for ferrying people to space in the post-Space Shuttle era.
The ISS will be crowded for a little while. NASA and SpaceX currently expect to launch Crew-3 on November 3rd and dock that same day. Not that either outfit necessarily minds. The third ISS trip marks the start of a routine where NASA-oriented Crew Dragon flights are no longer rare. This is, effectively, the new normal.
Blue Origin has failed in its lawsuit against NASA over SpaceX's lunar lander contract. CNBCreports the Federal Court of Claims has ruled against Blue Origin, dismissing the company's claims. While the opinion is currently sealed, Blue Origin's case had revolved around accusations NASA ignored "key flight safety requirements" when handing the Human Landing System to SpaceX.
The opinion will be publicly available sometime after November 18th, when both sides of the lawsuit are expected to supply redactions. NASA put SpaceX's work on hold following the lawsuit, but efforts should resume November 8th.
Blue Origin previously challenged the contract through the Government Accountability Office only to be rejected in July, leading Jeff Bezos' outfit to respond with a lawsuit. The firm even tried drastically undercutting SpaceX with a $2 billion bid, arguing at the time that NASA has historically awarded contracts to multiple partners to make sure a mission launches on time.
