Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky. Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness. … Read more
Until now, NASA has paid Boeing roughly $2.7 billion of the $4.6 billion total potential value of its commercial crew contract, according to Finch. The Starliner contract NASA awarded Boeing in 2014 originally had a maximum value of $4.2 billion, but contract modifications since 2014 have added $400 million to the deal. Most of the … Read more
“I refer to LunaNet as the big umbrella,” Gramling says. “It is an architecture that defines the standards that are going to be used for interoperable communications and position, navigation, and timing services. There’s a large effort underway to define those standards and document those in a LunaNet interoperability specification.” “It’s a very different paradigm … Read more
On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.” Wilmore said he was … Read more
Thanga and his team have sketched a system that would use solar panels and batteries to provide the power to push temperatures inside a lava tube down to the deep freeze needed to create their lunar ark. This is the defining difference between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. Where Thanga’s group would aim to … Read more
At first we studied how my disabilities and prosthesis might affect my ability to meet the requirements in-flight. At a later stage we went into detail, to the point of figuring out, for example, whether I should compulsorily use my prosthesis in space, since legs are hardly used there. In summary, I can say that … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to make astonishing discoveries, this time pointing astronomers’ attention to six planet-sized rogue worlds that blur the line between planets and stars. The rogue worlds, cosmic objects that don’t orbit stars, are all five to 15 times bigger than Jupiter’s mass and were spotted as the JWST peered into a … Read more
Two NASA astronauts who flew to the International Space Station in June aboard Boeing’s faulty Starliner capsule will need to return to earth on a SpaceX vehicle early next year, NASA chief Bill Nelson says, deeming issues with Starliner’s propulsion system too risky to carry its first crew home. The agency’s decision, tapping Boeing’s top … Read more
NASA has announced that astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams will return to Earth next February aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. The announcement at a press conference today caps off months of speculation about the best plan to safely bring the astronauts home after malfunctions with their ride, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, postponed their departure from the … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Vacuum decay, a process that could end the universe as we know it, may happen 10,000 times sooner than expected. Fortunately, it still won’t happen for a very, very long time. When physicists speak of “the vacuum,” the term sounds as though it refers to … Read more
