The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June have welcomed their new ride home with the arrival of a SpaceX capsule. SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return in 2025. WATCH … Read more
US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old. However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part … Read more
During the Age of Sail, ships circled the globe on voyages of discovery and trade. That era ended in the 1800s, when coal-fired steam engines began to replace wind power. Now we may be entering a new age of sail—but this time in space. Reversing history, engines and fuel could be replaced by sails on … Read more
A white spacecraft, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of singed metal, fell out of the night sky early on Sunday morning and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico not all that far from Key West. The darkened waters there were carefully chosen from among dozens of potential landing spots near Florida. This … Read more
Now two mathematicians have proved Hawking and his colleagues wrong. The new work—contained in a pair of recent papers by Christoph Kehle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ryan Unger of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley—demonstrates that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole. Their mathematical proof … Read more
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS and considered “the comet of the century,” will appear in all its splendor in our sky during September and October 2024. Due to its characteristics, astronomers believe it will be exceptionally bright, similar to Halley’s … Read more
A tech billionaire has performed the first private spacewalk hundreds of kilometres above Earth, a high-risk endeavour reserved for professional astronauts – until now. Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring spacewalk on Thursday also included SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out … Read more
One of the most ambitious space tourism missions in history has launched, with the all-commercial crew set to hit a number of milestones during its five days in space, including the first-ever privately funded human space walk. The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, … Read more
You could say that this is exactly what Isaac Newton’s picture of gravity does—giving a relation between an object’s mass and the gravitational force it exerts. And you would be right. But the concept of space-time curvature gives rise to a much richer range of phenomena than a simple force. It allows a kind of … Read more
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has undocked from the International Space Station, leaving behind its first crew of US astronauts to return to Earth empty and finish a drawn-out test mission fraught with technical issues. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first two to fly Starliner in June, remained on the ISS with … Read more
