NASA is once again preparing to launch Artemis 1 after technical issues and hurricanes upended previous attempts. The next launch window for the uncrewed test flight around the Moon will be open for two hours, starting at 1:04AM ET on November 16th. In case NASA has to scrub it once again, the agency has scheduled another backup launch window, which opens at 1:45AM on November 19th.

The agency had penciled in a launch attempt for November 14th, but Hurricane Nicole forced a slight delay to those plans. NASA kept the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft on the launch pad as the hurricane battered the Kennedy Space Center. They sustained minor damage, but not enough to force a lengthier delay.

NASA first tried to send Artemis 1 into space on August 29th, but engine issues and a hydrogen fuel leak forced the agency to scrub the initial launch attempts. The next stab at a launch in late September didn't work out either. NASA took the SLS and Orion back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to protect them from Hurricane Ian. Here's hoping NASA can finally send them on their way this time.

You can watch a livestream of the latest launch attempt below. Alternatively, you can watch the launch in virtual reality. If you happen to be in Florida or the south east region of Georgia, you may be able to see the SLS and Orion soar into the skies by going outside, if conditions are favorable enough.

NASA has once again delayed the launch of Artemis 1 in the face of a potentially dangerous weather system. The agency had penciled in the launch for the early morning of November 14th, but it's now retargeting liftoff for November 16th. The current two-hour launch window opens at 1:04AM ET. There's a backup launch opportunity scheduled for November 19th.

The latest delay is due to the threat posed by Tropical Storm Nicole. The new launch window is dependent on conditions being safe enough for NASA employees to return to work, as well as inspections after the weather system has passed. The agency says that pushing back the launch date "will allow the workforce to tend to the needs of their families and homes, and provide sufficient logistical time to get back into launch status following the storm."

Teams are securing equipment, property and facilities at the space center, which is in HURCON (Hurricane Condition) III status. Some personnel in a “ride-out” team will remain in place to monitor conditions across the site, including the SLS and Orion.

The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft will stay on the launch pad this time. Before Hurricane Ian bore down on the Kennedy Space Center, NASA rolled back the rocket and spacecraft to the safety of the Vehicle Assembly Building. It rolled Artemis out to the launch pad again last week. The SLS can withstand winds of up to 85MPH (74.4 knots) and Nicole isn't expected to bring winds exceeding that speed. The rocket is also able to deal with heavy rain and NASA has secured the hatches to prevent water from getting inside.

Artemis 1 is a test mission that's scheduled to fly around the Moon. It's a precursor to humans returning to the lunar surface for the first time in over half a century. However, NASA's attempts to launch the SLS and Orion over the last few months have been beset by technical issues and inclement weather.

For the second time this year, the uncontrolled remnants of a Chinese Long March 5B came crashing to Earth. On Friday morning, US Space Command confirmed pieces of the rocket that carried the third and final piece of China's Tiangong space station to orbit had re-entered the planet’s atmosphere over the south-central Pacific Ocean, reports The New York Times. The debris eventually plunged into the body of water, leaving no one harmed.

The episode marked the fourth uncontrolled re-entry for China’s most powerful heavy-lift rocket following its debut in 2020. Unlike many of its modern counterparts, including the SpaceX Falcon 9, the Long March 5B can’t reignite its engine to complete a predictable descent back to Earth. The rocket has yet to harm anyone (and probably won’t in the future). Still, each time China has sent a Long March 5B into space, astronomers and onlookers have anxiously followed its path back to the surface, worrying it might land somewhere people live. On Friday, Spain briefly closed parts of its airspace over risks posed by the debris from Monday’s mission, leading to hundreds of flight delays.

As he did earlier this year following China’s Wentian mission, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the country for not taking the appropriate precautions to prevent an out-of-control re-entry. “It is critical that all spacefaring nations are responsible and transparent in their space activities, and follow established best practices, especially, for the uncontrolled re-entry of a large rocket body debris — debris that could very well result in major damage or loss of life,” he said.

Space debris landing on Earth isn’t a problem unique to China. In August, for instance, a farmer in rural Australia found a piece of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that landed on his farm. However, many experts stress that those incidents differ from the one that occured on Friday. “The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, an Aerospace Corporation consultant, told The Times. “We haven’t done that for 50 years.” China will launch another Long March 5B rocket next year when it attempts to put its Xuntian space telescope into orbit.

You're about to get your last chance at witnessing a total lunar eclipse for quite some time. NASA has pointed out that the last such eclipse until March 2025 begins in the early morning hours of November 8th in North America. Parts of Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South America can also get a glimpse. The partial eclipse will start at 4:09AM Eastern, with totality lasting from 4:16AM through 5:42AM. The ending partial phase will finish at 6:49AM. Those on the eastern US coast will miss some or all of that last segment as the Moon sets. However, you might not have to venture outside if it's too chilly — there are ways to watch from the warmth of home.

Livestreams will be available. Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona will offer multiple telescope views of the total lunar eclipse starting at 4AM Eastern. Timeanddate.com will have streams in multiple cities, including its own view from Roswell, New Mexico as well as feeds from San Diego and Perth in Australia. The Virtual Telescope Project will also provide international coverage.

You'll want to have a look even if 2025 doesn't seem that far away. Total lunar eclipses (where the Earth sits directly between the Moon and Sun) earn their "blood Moon" nickname due to the optical tricks that paint the lunar surface a dramatic red. Where short-wavelength blue light tends to get caught in the particles of Earth's atmosphere, the longer wavelengths of red, orange and yellow help them complete the cosmic journey. It's a stunning effect you can see with your naked eyes. And if you have a telescope, you may even spot Uranus in the distance.

There will be partial and penumbral lunar eclipses during the interval. The first visible in the Americas will take place on October 28th, 2023, with others due on March 25th and September 18th the following year. You're not completely out of luck, then, even if those events won't be quite so eye-catching.

Bioprinted body parts could prove vital to future medical treatments, and scientists are going to great lengths to test it — in a very literal sense. NASA, Redwire and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Center for Biotechnology (4DBio3) are sending a new 3D printer to the International Space Station, Redwire's BioFabrication Facility, to bioprint a human knee meniscus in orbit and study the result on Earth. Ideally, this will lead to treatments for the meniscal injuries that US soldiers all-too-frequently face.

Redwire hopes to 3D print whole organs in space, although it characterizes this as a "long-term" goal. The company is also using NASA's Advanced Plant Habitat for a project to identify genes for space-friendly plants. Another investigation will use a NASA furnace to create and demo passive cooling for electronics in low gravity.

The BFF printer will fly to the ISS aboard a supply rocket launching as soon as November 6th from NASA's Wallops Island spaceport. The mission will carry three extra payloads.

This isn't NASA's first spaceborne 3D printer. Last year, NASA carried a Redwire printer to the ISS to demonstrate printing lunar soil. That technology could one day help Moon colonists build habitats without carrying an abundance of supplies from Earth. The bioprinter is more immediately practical, of course. If the research pans out, doctors could replace damaged body parts without resorting to donations or inorganic implants.

Frictions exerted during atmospheric reentry are enough to rend spacecraft into comets of glowing slag if not properly mitigated — that’s a good thing, when intentional, but otherwise nearly always very bad. The Space Shuttle, when it was still in service, was designed to hit the outermost edges of Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around Mach 25 (~17,000 MPH), then ride a wave of superheated plasma — generated because frictional forces are so great that they literally tear the surrounding air apart at the molecular level — down into the atmosphere until aerodynamic surfaces regain their effectiveness.

“Utilizing atmospheric drag is the most mass-efficient method to slow down a spacecraft,” NASA notes. To survive those intense 3000-degree F temperatures, the Shuttle relied on layers of ablative heat shielding tiles that would melt and slough off, carrying extra heat away with them, but for tomorrow’s reusable spacecraft, NASA has something better in mind, something inflatable.

NASA has scheduled a launch window beginning November 9th for the LOFTID mission. It will fly out of Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a ULA Atlas rocket, alongside a new NOAA “polar weather satellite.” After the satellite separates from the Atlas rocket’s upper stage, the LOFTID will unfurl and inflate in low earth orbit ahead of its reentry.

“One of the biggest differences is before we were doing suborbital tests, coming in at roughly 5,600 miles per hour or 2.5 kilometers per second, which is already difficult,” Steve Hughes, LOFTID aeroshell lead at NASA's Langley Research Center said in a press release. “But with LOFTID, we’ll be coming in at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per second. That is about three times as fast, but that means nine times more energy.”

NASA

The LOFTID heatshield offers four layers of protection against all that energy. The outermost layer is made from ceramic and silicon carbide yarn woven into cloth on the same sorts of industrial weavers that make denim. The second and third layers are two kinds of insulation, they’re there to protect the fourth layer — the actual inflatable bits. Everything is stacked into a series of concentric rings — themselves constructed from a woven polymer ten times stronger than steel by weight — that will help guide the shield’s expansion.

NASA has been developing Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology for more than a decade. LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) is the latest iteration of that tech, a new kind of heat shield that potentially avoids many of the issues NASA has with the current generation of rigid aeroshells. These hard shields have a hard limit on their size, dictated by the diameter of the rocket’s shroud. Soft aeroshells don’t face that limitation and can be extended far past the shroud’s edge, enabling NASA to protect larger and heavier payloads as they enter atmo.

This is especially important to our future solar system exploration plans, because the other issue with current heat shields is that they only work in Earth’s atmosphere. You try to set something the size of the Space Shuttle down on the surface of Mars and that exercise is going to end with your spacecraft a very long streak smeared across the Red Planet — or one very short crater if you’re especially unlucky. Mars’ atmosphere simply isn’t thick enough to generate sufficient friction against modern-sized heat shields to safely slow the Shuttle’s descent. So, NASA is testing out an inflatable one that is.

When it begins its descent, LOFTID will be traveling at more than 25 times the speed of sound. NASA hopes that by the end, LOFTID will be crawling along at a relatively pokey 609 MPH. Throughout its flight, the test shield’s onboard data recorder will transmit the most pertinent sensor and video data while storing as much as possible onboard in an ejectable recorder. Should everything go according to plan, the LOFTID shield will slow sufficiently to deploy a landing chute before setting down in the Pacific Ocean ahead of retrieval by the ULA.

Starship's first orbital test flight could finally take place next month. Mark Kirasich, a senior NASA official overseeing the development of the Artemis moon program, has revealed the information during a livestreamed NASA Advisory Council meeting. According to Reuters, Kirasich said that NASA tracks four major Starship flights and that the first one is coming up in early December. 

Based on the plans SpaceX previously released, the Starship spacecraft with its Super Heavy booster will launch from the company's Boca Chica facility in Texas. The booster will break off three minutes into the flight and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship vehicle itself will go into orbit before reentering and making an ocean landing near Hawaii. The company expects the entire test flight to last for 90 minutes. 

SpaceX has been planning Starship's first orbital flight since mid-2021, but it kept getting pushed back due to various technical and regulatory reasons. The space corporation's launch facility in Boca Chica, for instance, only recently cleared the FAA's environmental assessment. And even then, the FAA required the company to make more than 75 changes to mitigate the environmental impact of its flights before it grants the company a launch license for the site. 

An FAA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency will grant the company a launch license "only after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it." As SpaceNews notes, SpaceX must also conduct and clear more tests before the flight, including a static fire test of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster. 

A static fire test of the Starship in July ended up in flames when propellants ignited under the booster. SpaceX's next attempt in August went smoothly, but the company only fired a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy that time. In addition, Starship must go through a full wet dress rehearsal, wherein a rocket that's loaded with propellants go through the launch countdown without actually taking off. 

It’s been a busy week for NASA in the days leading up to Halloween. In the spirit of the season, the agency recently released a new image of the Eagle Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope where the Pillars of Creation look like a ghostly hand. By coincidence, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory managed to capture a similarly spooky image of the sun.

On Wednesday, the agency shared a capture of the sun “smiling.” As The Guardian points out, more than a few Twitter users were quick to point out how the star looks like a carved pumpkin in NASA’s image. There’s a bit of interesting science behind the resemblance. “Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space,” according to NASA. The sun is constantly sending out solar winds. At times, these geomagnetic storms have been known to knock power out here on Earth, as was the case in part of Canada in 1989.

This isn’t the first time the Solar Dynamics Observatory has captured an interesting image of the sun. In 2016, NASA released an animation of the sun doing a somersault. The capture was the result of a seven-hour maneuver the SDO completes once a year to take an accurate measure of the star’s edge.

NASA has released another image that the James Webb Space Telescope has captured of the Pillars of Creation. While the picture that the agency offered up last week provided a detailed look at stars forming in the region, the latest one is a spookier and more ethereal image.

Bathed in orange and black, the image that Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) captured is certainly timely, given that Halloween is just a few days away. NASA says the rendering provides a fresh perspective on the Pillars of Creation, with a focus on the region's gas and dust.

Last week's image was captured with Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which was able to look through the columns of dust to observe thousands of new stars in the region in more detail than before. However, many of the stars aren't bright enough to shine through at the wavelengths MIRI focuses on.

NASA says that, with this image, astronomers have mid-infrared light data at higher resolution than has been available in the past. The agency notes that researchers will look at more precise dust movements to form a fuller 3D landscape of the Pillars of Creation. This will help to develop a deeper understanding of how stars form.

The Pillars of Creation is in the Eagle Nebula, some 6,500 light years away. In case you're wondering how vast the whole thing is, take a look at the bright red star that juts out from the right side of the top pillar, around halfway up. NASA says the star and its dusty shroud are bigger than our entire solar system, which may or may not spark an existential crisis or two. Have a wonderful Halloween weekend.

SpaceX is on track to launch the Falcon Heavy for the first time in three years after it successfully put the heavy-lift launch vehicle through a static fire test. The private space corporation has announced the test's successful completion on Twitter, along with a photo of the rocket as it breathes out fire and smoke while perched at NASA Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A. During a static fire test, a rocket's engines are ignited to check their performance while remaining on the ground. 

The company conducted this particular test in preparation for USSF-44, the classified mission SpaceX is flying for the US Space Force. USSF-44 will have two payloads, both satellites, that will be deployed into geostationary orbit. It was originally scheduled for liftoff on October 31st, but SpaceX is currently targeting a November 1st launch. The company hasn't revealed a launch time within the day yet, but according to Space and Next Spaceflight, it will happen around 9:40AM ET.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket first took flight in 2018, carrying a cherry red Tesla Roadster owned by company chief Elon Musk with a dummy dubbed "Starman" in the driver's seat. The last time it flew was in June 2019, and SpaceX described it at the time as one of the "most challenging" launches in its history — landing the center core proved too tricky that it missed the drone ship waiting for it by a few feet. Since then, it has been certified to carry the Space Force's secret spy satellites to orbit, and the first of those missions could occur in a few days' time.