SpaceX’s second, unpiloted Starship test flight of the year ended in yet another fiery inferno on November 18. This time, the sudden end arrived roughly 8 minutes into its 90-minute scheduled mission. But although its Super Heavy first stage booster suffered a fatal “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in the Caribbean, the world’s most powerful rocket almost doubled its previous lifespan and passed multiple other crucial milestones.

Starship launched once again from its test site near Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:03am ET on Saturday, with all 39 of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines remaining lit during the mission—a first for the spacecraft intended to eventually deliver humans to Mars. At two minutes and 41 seconds following liftoff, Starship’s hot-staging sequence—in which upper stage engines ignite and separate from the booster—also proceeded successfully, clearing yet another hurdle for SpaceX engineers. The reusable booster then performed its flip maneuver en route towards an intended safe return back to Earth, but exploded only a few seconds later. The booster’s fate wasn’t a huge surprise, however, as SpaceX mission control operators already suspected such a dramatic event could occur due to the immense “load on top of the booster.”

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued to soar for another few minutes to roughly 92 miles above the Earth’s surface—well above the Kármán Line, an internationally recognized demarcation between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space. Moments before its scheduled Second Engine Cut Off, or SECO, the upper stage met its own explosive demise. Space X representatives cited a delay in Starship’s automated flight termination system, but do not yet know the exact cause for its malfunction. If successful, Starship would have circumnavigated Earth before performing a hard landing near Hawaii.

The results of April’s Starship test received considerable criticism from both Boca Chica locals and the Federal Aviation Administration for surrounding environmental damage sustained during launch. Starship’s Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner’s store window shattering. The April 20 test flight blasted a 25-feet deep crater, ejecting clouds of dirt, dust, and debris into the air while smashing a bowling ball-sized fragment into a nearby NASA Spaceflight van. Much of the area near Starship’s launch site includes protected ecosystems, as well as land considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. The FAA soon issued 63 corrective actions needed before SpaceX could legally attempt another Starship test.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Unlike SpaceX’s outing, Starship’s upgraded launch mount reportedly better mitigated the resulting blowback—at least according to Elon Musk’s company assessment. The FAA, meanwhile, wasted no time in issuing its own statement on Saturday’s event.

“A mishap occurred during the [SpaceX] Starship OFT-2 launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, Nov. 18,” the administration posted to X over the weekend. Although no injuries or public property damage was reported this time, the FAA promised to oversee the “SpaceX-led mishap investigation” to ensure the company will comply with “regulatory requirements.”

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Humans have been changing the atmosphere from Earth’s surface for nearly two centuries—but now in the Space Age, we’re altering it from outer space, too. Atmospheric scientists recently found traces of unexpected metals in the stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of the atmosphere where ozone resides and meteors burn up into shooting stars. The researchers determined that this pollution came from spacecraft as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere, in research published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

This study is “the first observational evidence that space activities are a very significant source of particulate pollution to the stratosphere” says Slimane Bekki, an atmospheric scientist at LATMOS not involved in the new work. “More importantly, nobody knows the impacts of these particles on the ozone layer,” he adds, pointing out the importance of this molecule in shielding humans from dangerous UV radiation.

Usually, mission planners’ main concern is to ensure that space debris doesn’t hit the ground, where it could hurt people or structures—but, as this research points out, what evaporates in the stratosphere could still be making an impact, even if it’s not a literal one. That material has to exist somewhere, and it looks like it’s lingering in the stratosphere. “We are finding this human-made material in what we consider a pristine area of the atmosphere. And if something is changing in the stratosphere—this stable region of the atmosphere—that deserves a closer look,” said co-author and Purdue atmospheric scientist Dan Cziczo in a press release. 

[Related on PopSci+: Rocket fuel might be polluting the Earth’s upper atmosphere]

The research team flew through the stratosphere across the continental US in aircraft specially designed to fly at high altitudes, equipped with air-analyzing instruments in their nose cones. These unique planes— NASA’s ER-2 and WB-57—cruise at around 65,000 feet, almost double the altitude of typical passenger jets. Flying as high as 70,000 feet, the research craft can go above 99 percent of the mass of Earth’s atmosphere.

Within the stratosphere, the collecting equipment on these planes recorded traces of the heavy metals niobium and hafnium. These elements aren’t found naturally in the atmosphere, but they are typically used in rockets and spacecraft shells. The team also measured higher-than-expected concentrations of over 20 metals, including copper, lithium, aluminum, and lead. All told, about 10 percent of aerosol particles in the stratosphere contain metals. 

Atmospheric scientists aren’t sure exactly how these changes will affect Earth. The stratosphere contains tiny blobs of sulfuric acid, which are now infused with the metals from old spacecraft. The presence of those metals could change the chemistry of the stratosphere, including how big the sulfuric acid drops grow. Even small tweaks high up could affect the way light bends, the transfer of heat, or how crystals of ice grow. 

The big question is how these changes will affect human life on the surface. Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer to that, but in the past small stratospheric changes have led to big impacts—like adding CFCs that ate away at the ozone layer. Eventually, there may need to be additional environmental precautions for spaceflight to prevent harm to the stratosphere.

[Related: This beautiful map of Earth’s atmosphere shows a world on fire]

“The only way for these particles not to appear in the upper atmosphere is for the satellites not to be launched in the first place,” explains University of Exeter atmospheric scientist Jamie Shutler, who was not part of the research team. “The possible ways forward are to launch less, make the satellites last for longer (so we need to launch less), or encourage industry to make the constituents of satellites public knowledge (so we can guide manufacturers as to the potential harmful effects).” He adds that this new finding “confirms our concern” about stratospheric contamination.

But before we can solve this problem, “the concept that reentry can affect the stratosphere has to be thought about,” says lead author Daniel Murphy, atmospheric scientist at NOAA. He emphasized that this idea is still incredibly new and will require much more research to understand the scale and potential consequences of this pollution.

Potential impacts are expected only to grow as the rate of spacecraft launches and reentries accelerate. In the last five years, space agencies and private companies have launched more than 5,000 satellites, noted Martin Ross, co-author on the work and climate scientist at The Aerospace Corporation, in a press release. “Most of them will come back in the next five, and we need to know how that might further affect stratospheric aerosols,” he said. The team expects that the proportion of particles containing metal could grow from 10 to more than 50 percent in the next few decades, especially thanks to upcoming plans to reduce space debris by hurling it back into the atmosphere.

Those efforts and upcoming launches, though, need to be aware of the possible effects on Earth—and researchers need to do more work to determine the extent of those effects. “Understanding our planet is one of the most urgent research priorities there is,” said Cziczo.

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NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with the Artemis III mission. Before that, the space agency will conduct a vital preliminary mission in November 2024, when the Artemis II mission flies a crew of astronauts in lunar orbit for the first time since the 1970s. But the “important first step” toward those goals, as NASA put it in a recent blog post, is the planned launch of the IM-1 mission carrying the NOVA-C lunar lander in a few weeks. It will attempt to land several NASA science experiments near Malapert A, a crater in the southern lunar polar region. Those studies could help NASA prepare for astronaut operations in the area in 2025. 

Unlike the Artemis missions, though, NOVA-C isn’t a big NASA project. Instead, the truck-sized craft designed to ferry small payloads to the lunar surface was built, and will be operated by, the small Texas-based company Intuitive Machines. 

If it succeeds in landing near the lunar south pole, NOVA-C will be the first US soft landing on the moon since the 1970s, and the first ever commercial landing on the moon that hasn’t crashed or failed. So why is a small spacecraft built by a relatively small company a key part of NASA’s big moon program?

“There is a pattern that we have now seen of NASA trying to move to more commercial solutions and services, rather than do it all on their own,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. It’s much like NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, which contracted with SpaceX to fly astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station aboard its Dragon space capsules. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Now NASA is turning to commercial companies to prepare the way for humanity’s return to the moon. Intuitive Machines was one of the first companies to receive a contract—for $77 million— under NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, back in 2019. NASA designed CLPS to fund private sector companies interested in building small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft to fly experiments and rovers to the moon, allowing NASA to simply purchase room on the spacecraft rather than developing and operating it themselves. 

In the case of NOVA-C, five NASA payloads will ride along with devices from universities including Louisiana State and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. ”The NASA payloads will focus on demonstrating communication, navigation and precision landing technologies, and gathering scientific data about rocket plume and lunar surface interactions, as well as space weather and lunar surface interactions affecting radio astronomy,” the space agency wrote in a blog post about the mission. 

“We don’t still don’t know a lot about the moon,” Whitman Cobb adds. The moon has variable gravity depending on where there are more metallic materials. “Finding out where those places are, how lunar dust is going to kick up when you’re trying to land or take off—all of these things are really key.”

That’s why NASA is sending payloads to ride along with NOVA-C. But the reason NOVA-C is landing where it is, about 300 kilometers from the south pole, has more to do with how the whole world is now thinking about the moon.

NOVA-C was originally destined to land in the Oceanus Procellarum, one of the large, dark areas known as mares, or “seas,” on the lunar surface. But in May, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced the change in plans and the new target near the south pole. 

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

”The decision to move from the original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum was based on a need to learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole,” NASA announced in a blog post at the time. “Landing near Malapert A also will help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data  back to Earth from a location that is low on the lunar horizon.”

The reasons NASA wants to land near the lunar south pole with Artemis, and why the recent and successful Chandrayaan 3 mission of India, and the failed Russian Luna 25 mission, both targeted the lunar south pole are twofold: research and resources, according to Richard Carlson, a lunar geologist who retired from the Carnegie Institute for Science in 2021.  

“Both north and south polar regions have permanently shadowed craters where water has been detected from orbit,” he says. ”The real question is whether that water is a one micron surface coating of water on a few grains, or whether it’s a substantial abundance of water. Water of course being useful for a lot of things, from drinking water to turning it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel.”

The other motivation for going to the south pole is that it’s geologically very different from where the Apollo missions landed, according to Carlson. “They all landed on a pretty small portion of the moon on the Earth facing side of the moon on the nice flat mares, and that’s a rather unusual part of the moon geologically,” he says. ”If you think of studying the Earth this way, the Apollo lunar program would have basically landed on, let’s say, just North America, and that’s it.”

The lunar south polar region is much more geologically varied, with tall mountains and ridges, as well as rocks dug out from deep within the moon and scattered over the region by impact craters billions of years ago, Carlson says. But of course, such a landscape has its downsides for spacecraft coming from Earth. 

“You look at the pictures of the places that they selected [for Artemis III] and I wouldn’t want to land there. I mean, they’re really rough,” he says. “If we land on a rock, the spacecraft is going to fall over.” Sending small, uncrewed craft like NOVA-C to the moon’s south polar ahead of Artemis astronauts will test how difficult landing there really is. 

After all, as Witman Cobb notes, touching down anywhere on the moon is really hard. Before the failed Luna 25 landing on August 21, there were two failed commercial lunar landings. The Israeli company SpaceIL saw its Beresheet lander crash land in 2019, while the Hakuto-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace crashed in April. 

”We haven’t seen a commercial company be successful in landing on the moon yet,” Whitman Cobb says. ”That’s really fascinating when you think about our capability of landing humans on the moon in the 1960s, and 1970s. That today, with all of the technology that we now have, this is still a really, really difficult thing to do.”

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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About 364 miles above Earth, the crew of the Inspiration 4 private mission in 2021 drew each other’s blood and administered ultrasound scans. Yet it’s not clear whether those experiments were subject to the same ethical rules that govern human studies on the ground. And it’s unlikely to be the last time humans in orbit are asked to study each other in this way. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backer of Inspiration 4 plans to conduct more experiments on his Polaris Dawn mission scheduled for sometime in 2024. 

It’s different when the research happens on Earth. If a US citizen chooses to participate in a clinical trial or other biomedical experiment, even those run privately, ethics rules govern the scientists, doctors, and institutions in charge of the study. A physician or a university cannot penalize a person for refusing to participate, for instance, and an ethics board must approve any trials before they start. 

Those ethical rules are part of the territory when receiving federal funding. “If the federal government gives you $1 anywhere in your organization, even having nothing to do with the research, then any human subjects research you do has to follow what’s called the ‘Common Rule,’” says Paul Wolpe, a bioethicist at Emory University and the former chief of bioethics at NASA. 

The 1991 Common Rule, or more formally the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, is codified in multiple federal agencies, including the Health and Human Services Department. Its reach even extends beyond the bounds of Earth to NASA’s research, managing how the agency must treat astronauts on the International Space Station. 

But civilians have begun flying to orbit in the spacecraft of private companies. And those that don’t take federal money are not formally subject to the Common Rule. So what if SpaceX or Axiom Space, say, makes it a condition that anyone flying on private space missions must take a pharmaceutical drug at the behest of a partner company to gauge how it is metabolized in microgravity? 

[Related: Private space missions will bring more countries to the ISS]

That was the topic of a new paper published in Science by Wolpe and his colleagues. They argue that the time to begin asking questions about the ethics of human experimentation on private spacecraft is right now, before it becomes ubiquitous.

”Commercial spaceflight is revving up right now. The temptation to do human subjects experimentation is already starting,” Wolpe says, urging for a quick consensus. “It’s not like we’re saying, ‘10, 15 years from now, we may do this. We’re saying, ‘Next week we may do this.’” 

The paper’s authors argue it’s possible to extend the ethical frameworks already used to govern human scientific research on the ground—and in space for NASA astronauts—by following four principles: social responsibility, scientific excellence, proportionality, and global stewardship. 

Social responsibility recognizes that the past public investments that make spaceflight possible mean that this research should be treated “like a community resource.” It also points out that experimentation in the early years of commercial spaceflight “will be critical for ensuring the safety of future missions,” the authors write.  

Scientific excellence means thinking about how poorly designed or conducted experiments return low quality results, and “bad science is also bad for business,” the authors write. 

Proportionality refers to the importance of ensuring human research in space, like that on Earth, maximizes benefits while reducing the potential for harm as much as possible. And, guided by global stewardship, the fruits of these studies should benefit everyone, the authors argue: “Spaceflight research should therefore engage, and be conducted by, individuals and communities representative of humankind’s diversity.”

Wolpe hopes the principles can serve as a starting point for commercial space companies to think about and implement ethical guidelines, just as private companies do for human research on Earth. This paper doesn’t propose any concrete rules just yet. But coming up with a standard set of them for human experimentation in commercial spaceflight would be in corporations’ interest, too, Wolpe notes. “If everybody agrees on the rules, and we all operate under these rules, then we know what the floor and the ceiling is,” he says. Ideally, these would protect participants—and safeguard companies from lawsuits, if someone is harmed on a mission.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

But before a new ethical framework takes root in the commercial spaceflight industry, more conversations need to happen to characterize research and its participants, according to Sara Langston, a space lawyer and professor of spaceflight operations at the Daytona Beach Florida campus of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. As to whether there is a gap in existing rules and regulations around human experiments in commercial spaceflight that needs to be filled, she adds, “we need to actually define the question more specifically in order to answer it.”

You can, for instance, make a distinction between passive and active research or experimentation, according to Langston. Active experimentation are activities such as drawing blood or consuming drugs. Passive experimentation could include passengers sharing their subjective experiences of the flight, more akin to a survey. ”I don’t know that passive research in itself needs any kind of regulatory or even ethical framework, because passive research has been done all the time for marketing purposes, such as surveys,” Langston says. 

And it will also be important to distinguish private astronauts—flight participants who bought a ticket or were invited onto the mission—and commercial ones, who are the paid employees of a space company. “This is important because the roles, rights, duties, and liabilities are going to be distinct for each of those categories,” Langston says. 

Getting a head start in discussing these issues is the point, according to Wolpe. “These things are beginning to be built into the conversations around commercial spaceflight,” he says. “They weren’t so much before.”

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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At first glance, everything seems solid. Then, a small rip begins to spread across the middle of the structure as its siding expands. The module suddenly bursts apart, spraying debris in every direction as engineers cheer on from the safety of their control room. The sudden destruction—and the fifth such explosion—of a module intended for the International Space Station’s successor may not sound like the desired outcome, but, scientists say, it’s all part of the plan.

In Sierra Space’s September 20 progress update, the Colorado-based company released video of the explosion. The company aims to supply habitat spaces for Orbital Reef, Blue Origin’s NASA-backed space station project. During a recent Ultimate Burst Pressure (UPB) test, the engineering team essentially amped up the pressure within a one-third-scale LIFE module prototype until it popped. Said “pop” is certainly a sight to behold:

Unlike ISS construction materials, the LIFE modules are largely composed of “softgoods” such as Vectran, an incredibly strong and durable synthetic fiber spun from liquid-crystal polymers. When inflated, the LIFE module’s softgood design becomes rigid enough to withstand the low-earth orbit’s extreme environmental stresses. According to Sierra Space, the latest results offered a 33 percent margin over a full-scale LIFE module’s certification standard, nearly 20 percent better than the previous test design.

What makes the most recent UPB test especially impressive is that it was the first module prototype to include a steel “blanking plate” that acted as a cheaper stand-in for essential design features like windows.

[Related: NASA is spending big on commercial space destinations.]

“Inclusion of the blanking plate hard structure was a game-changer because this was the first time that we infused metallics into our softgoods pressure shell technology prior to conducting a UBP test,” Shawn Buckley, Sierra Space’s Senior Director Engineering and Product Evolution, said in the company’s announcement. “With this added component, once again, we successfully demonstrated that LIFE’s current architecture at one-third scale meets the minimum 4x safety factor required for softgoods inflatables structures.”

As Space.com notes, this marks the third UPB test for the module prototypes. Sierra Space has also overseen two “creep tests” in December 2022 and February 2023, during which the LIFE designs were subjected to higher-than-usual pressures for extended periods of time. With the latest success, Sierra Space says it’s now ready to move onto the next development phase—testing on full-scale LIFE module prototypes. If all goes as planned (a big “if,” given such endeavors’ complexities), future LIFE module iterations will be some of Orbital Reef’s central structures. Orbital Reef is currently intended to start construction in 2030.

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On April 20, the most powerful rocket ever flown stood on a launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, its stainless steel skin gleaming in the sun. Moments later, rocket and launch pad would become fiery debris. It was the first, disastrous orbital test launch of the SpaceX Starship.

Within seconds of launching, the rocket’s ferocious thrust shattered the concrete pad at SpaceX’s Texas Starbase facility, sending debris flying as far as Port Isabel, a city six miles away. The rocket caught fire. Less than four minutes after launch, it began to tumble across the sky, and then it exploded.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship, pending an investigation into the explosion, but the rocket may soon fly again. On September 8, the FAA closed its inquiry, citing 63 corrective actions SpaceX would need to take before its second attempt to send Starship to orbit. 

“The FAA has approval authority on all commercial launches, and so they are the ones who grant companies launch licenses,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. “Any time something blows up, they want to know why. Because they want to make sure that it’s safe not only to go up, but that it’s not going to harm anybody on the ground.”

SpaceX will have to demonstrate to the FAA that the company has successfully completed those 63 corrective actions and then apply for a modified launch license. “Once that is granted, they theoretically can go up whenever they want,” Whitman Cobb says. Neither FAA nor SpaceX have publicly said what those fixes are. But the actions presumably address the failures of the April launch.

There’s a lot riding on Starship’s success. It’s key to expanding SpaceX’s launch and Starlink satellite businesses. NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with a modified Starship as the lunar landing vehicle on the Artemis III mission. If SpaceX can fix the problems—and Whitman Cobb and other experts believe that’s likely—the company may put its rocket program and NASA’s moon program back on track. This investigation might also provide insights into launch pad construction that could one day help astronauts traveling to and from the moon. 

Failures to launch

Starship, despite not yet reaching orbit, holds the title for most powerful rocket ever launched—a superlative it took from the Soviet N1 rocket. Meant to power Soviet cosmonauts to the moon, the N1 first stage produced 10.2 million pounds of thrust. Starship has two stages in its “stack;” the first stage alone, the Super Heavy Booster, produces 16.7 million pounds of thrust. 

That record-breaking power is why it was bizarre that SpaceX chose to launch Starship from a concrete launch pad without features such as flame trenches. Those grooves are designed to divert a rocket’s plume away from the pad and the vehicle itself. SpaceX could have also used a water deluge system to flood the pad to help mitigate the rocket engines’ heat and acoustic shockwaves. 

[Related: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launches have been a slow burn—for an interesting reason]

“You would never normally launch a rocket with that much thrust without having a better designed active mitigation of the plume in the launch environment. Because you worry about the heat and the dynamic forces of the plume breaking materials and creating ejecta,” says University of Central Florida physicist Philip Metzger. ”If the ejecta had hit the launch vehicle in a way that caused the rocket to explode while it was still near the tower, it could have destroyed a lot of infrastructure that would have taken a very long time to rebuild.”

As it was, the April launch blew the launch pad apart and dug a crater “about as deep as a house,” he says. 

Lessons for the moon

Metzger has been studying the Starship launch and is currently writing a paper about the results. He wants to understand what went wrong—because the way things failed is important for the design of future rockets and landing pads on the moon or other celestial bodies. 

Most concepts for a lunar landing pad simply use flat concrete. “There’s no flame diverter, no flame trench, no water,” Metzger says. “I decided just because of the pure fun of solving the physics, and also because of what we might learn about lunar landing pads, that I was going to take this seriously.”

What he found was that chunks of concrete from the Boca Chica pad were flung away at more than 200 miles per hour. A cloud of hot water vapor and carbon dioxide, created by Starship’s methane- and liquid oxygen-burning Raptor engines, heaved sand skyward and carried it to Port Isobel. Metgzer realized the process must have been similar to the way pressure builds in a volcano before an eruption. 

“The only explanation we could come up with was that the landing pad cracked and the high pressure of the thrust drove gas through the cracks,” he says. This increased pressure beneath the pad until it erupted. Lunar landing pads must be designed to avoid this problem, he says, by adding vents for gases to escape or by constructing stronger pads that resist fracture. 

[Related: DOJ is suing SpaceX for years of workplace discrimination]

That could be difficult on the moon, where heavy construction will be hindered by a lack of resources, machinery, and an atmosphere. But on Earth, SpaceX may have a solution—a steel plate that is actively cooled with water to keep it from melting during a rocket launch. 

”That’s really a great idea,” Metzger says. “If their engineers did it correctly, it should be a complete solution to the problem.”

As for keeping the next Starship from blowing up in the sky, SpaceX says it found that leaked fuel had ignited inside the Super Heavy Booster. The resulting fires cut the booster off from the computer guiding its flight, which caused the rocket to tumble and then explode, according to an update on its website. The company has “significantly expanded Super Heavy’s pre-existing fire suppression system in order to mitigate against future engine bay fires,” the company says. 

Next moves

While neither the FAA nor SpaceX have said where the two are in the process, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk has suggested that his company has completed the corrective tasks, tweeting on September 5, before the FAA announcement, that ”Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”

If the ball is truly in the FAA’s court and the regulator is simply reviewing the work SpaceX has done, “I don’t think it will take more than a few weeks,” Whitman Cobbs says. “That would be my best guess.” If that’s the case, she notes, then SpaceX and the FAA have moved with exceptional speed to get Starship ready for another launch attempt. Whitman Cobb contrasted SpaceX with its competitor Blue Origin, whose New Shepard rocket remains grounded more than a year after a failed launch on September 12, 2022. Blue Origin is “still in the FAA investigation mode, and have not been able to launch,” she says. “They’ve yet to apply for a modified launch license.”

Rapidly reworking Starship and its launch pad, though, doesn’t guarantee the next launch attempt will go flawlessly. But Whitman Cobb notes that SpaceX has been more willing than NASA or other rocket makers to test new spacecraft, watch them fail, and rapidly make changes. The eighth Starship prototype was destroyed in a fiery belly flop during a high-altitude test in December 2020, for instance, but the company pressed on. 

“Given the ability of SpaceX to succeed and prove its critics wrong in the past few years, I have no evidence to believe they wouldn’t be able to make this work,” she says. 

Metzger also notes that the person in charge of getting Starship ready to fly again is William Gerstenmaier, who, before joining SpaceX in 2020, was the former associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA. “Gerstenmaier is a legend in the space community,” Metzger says. ”It’s in really good hands. I don’t know if there’s anybody better in the world than Bill Gerstenmaier to manage that sort of a project.”

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Rocket ignitions are always impressive, but they’re not the easiest to look at with the naked eye for pretty obvious reasons—you can’t be anywhere near their incinerating temperatures, and their brightness is generally blinding. Thanks to popular YouTubers’ high-speed video capabilities, however, curious minds can take a look at a recent test firing to see the complex, beautiful, and perhaps terrifying ignition in action.

The new footage comes courtesy of The Slow Mo Guys, a team of videographers specializing in… well, you can connect the dots. The YouTubers were given a front row seat at a test ignition for one of Firefly Aerospace’s Reaver engines, but unlike previous excursions, this project required quite a bit of preplanning. First off, The Slow Mo Guys only had one chance to nab the shot, since rockets traditionally use up huge amounts of fuel and resources—a single SpaceX Falcon9 rocket, for example, uses tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen. 

That single attempt also needed to be positioned, rigged, and timed to begin filming at enough of a distance that wouldn’t injure anything, or anyone. According to Slow Mo Guy Gav Free, a special enclosure capable of withstanding the intense heat and vibrations needed to house their slow-motion camera, while also calibrating the equipment to handle the explosion’s brightness. In the end, Free and his companions settled on exposing their film well over 40 percent darker than usual to account for the luminosity.

All that prep work definitely paid off, judging from the footage. At 2,000 frames-per-second (80 times slower than real time), viewers may be surprised to see an initial, bright green flame. This is produced as a rocket fuel mixture called triethylaluminium-triethylborane (TEA-TEB) combusts upon coming into contact with oxygen and air. After the initial green burst comes the yellow and orange flames—but with such a slow framerate, you can actually see those flames responding to the shockwaves generated by the engine thrust. According to Free, a rocket engine can generate upwards of 45,000 lbs of thrust in a vacuum at temperatures as high as 5,500 F.

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Space tourism is already becoming so commonplace that Virgin Galactic’s second private astronaut flight on September 8 went off without much fanfare. And although a brief press announcement only announced the names of its three-man passenger list after the trip, the recap didn’t mention Galactic 03’s historic “first” cargo—fossilized bones from two of humanity’s closest ancestors.

According to Tim Nash’s Virgin Galactic biography, the “entrepreneur, adventurer, conservationist and member of the Hubbard Council of The National Geographic Society,” carried with him the clavicle of a nearly 2-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba, as well as a roughly 250,000-year-old thumb bone from Homo naledi. Both hominid remains were previously discovered within the Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage Site outside Johannesburg, South Africa—sebedi is considered one of the potential candidates that presaged humanity’s Homo genus.

The initiative’s organizers, including researchers at the University of Witwatersrand, Johnnesburg, intended the gesture to represent “humankind’s appreciation of the contribution of all of humanity’s ancestors and our ancient relatives,” said Lee Berger, a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, Carnegie Fellow and Director of the Centre for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey. “Without their invention of technologies such as fire and tools, and their contribution to the evolution of the contemporary human mind, such extraordinary endeavors as spaceflight would not have happened.”

[Related: Virgin Galactic’s second commercial flight sent three tourists to space’s edge.]

Berger’s son, Matthew, discovered the sebida clavicle in 2008 when he was 9 years old during an expedition alongside his father within the Cradle of Humankind heritage site. Matthew Berger traveled last week to Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America in New Mexico to hand deliver the bones to Nash, a conservationist involved with human origins research. Caretakers stored both bone fragments within a carbon fiber container prior to their suborbital excursion.

“These fossils represent individuals who lived and died hundreds of thousands of years ago, yet were individuals who likely gazed up at the stars in wonder, much as we do,” Berger said in a September 8 statement via the University of Witwatersrand.

“The magnitude of being among the first civilians going into space, and carrying these precious fossils, has taken a while to sink in, during all of the preparations for the flight,” Nash said via the University of Witwatersrand statement, “But I am humbled and honored to represent South Africa and all of humankind, as I carry these precious representations of our collective ancestors, on this first journey of our ancient relatives into space.”

Nash, alongside Las Vegas real estate entrepreneur Ken Baxter and British engineer and racecar company founder Adrian Reynald, purchased their Virgin Galactic seats as far back as 2004 from company founder and multibillionaire Richard Branson. Tickets for the few minutes’ worth of suborbital weightlessness alongside views of the Earth’s curvature reportedly cost between $250,000 and $450,000.

“We sincerely hope it brings further awareness of the importance of our country and the African continent to understanding the journey of humankind that has led to this historic moment where commercial spaceflight is possible,” says Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site CEO Matthew Sathekge said via University of Witwatersrand’s announcement.

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The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against SpaceX on Thursday for allegedly refusing to consider hiring asylum seekers and refugees. According to a DOJ statement, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company “routinely discouraged” applicants because of their citizenship status from at least September 2018 to May 2022, thus violating the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The DOJ argues SpaceX, in multiple job postings and public statements, “wrongly claimed” that federal “export control law” regulations forced the company to only hire US citizens and green card holders. The allegedly willful misinterpretation of the law was repeatedly and publicly echoed by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In June 2020, for example, Musk posted to X (formerly Twitter) that “U.S. law requires at least a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are advanced weapons technology.”

But as the DOJ’s announcement notes, the jobs in question weren’t only advanced engineering and tech roles, but a “variety of other positions, including welders, cooks, crane operators, baristas, software engineers, marketing professionals, and more.” According to the DOJ, SpaceX falsely claimed to be legally prohibited from hiring refugees in a total of 14 job postings, public announcements, and other online recruiting communications.

According to the INA, employers cannot discriminate against hiring asylees or refugees unless a specific executive order, government contract, law, or other federal regulation prevents them. “In this instance no [such situation] required or permitted SpaceX to engage in the widespread discrimination,” argues DOJ representatives.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Musk, however, has already doubled down on his and fellow employees’ previous assertions via an August 24 post to X, claiming SpaceX was “told repeatedly” that hiring non-permanent US residents would violate international arms trafficking laws. “This is yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes,” added Musk, who purchased the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in October 2022. Lawyers like Rebecca Bernhard, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney specializing in employment-related issues involving work visas and immigration challenges, doubt the validity of Musk’s defense.

“While it is lawful for an employer to refuse to provide employer-sponsorship to a potential employee (for example, by not sponsoring the individual for an H-1B), it is not lawful to require that the employee be a US citizen,” she explains via email. Bernhard argues that while, “There are other classes of immigrants who have work authorization in the US and do not need employer sponsorship… To require someone be a US citizen would discriminate against these individuals.”

One potential exception, however, are employers subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Bernhard notes that, “it appears the DOJ is claiming SpaceX fraudulently relied on this exception.” 

“While I cannot comment on whether SpaceX is subject to ITAR or EAR, I can state that the DOJ takes the anti-discrimination provisions of the INA very seriously, aggressively enforces them, and interprets the ITAR and EAR exceptions very narrowly,” adds Bernhard.

The DOJ filing seeks fair consideration and back pay for those affected by the alleged discriminatory practices.

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On December 6, 1968, Time magazine published an issue with a metaphor illustrated on the cover: a Soviet cosmonaut and an American astronaut were in a sprint to the moon. The actual space race had kicked off a decade earlier, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. It ended less than a year after Time published its cover, when US Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. The excitement wore off quickly—the last humans to step foot on the moon, the crew of Apollo 17, did so in 1972. So far, no one has gone back. 

But that’s changing. NASA is committed to landing astronauts on the moon again in 2025 as part of the space agency’s Artemis Program. China has plans to land humans on the moon by 2030. In the meantime, robotic missions to the moon are increasing: Russia’s endeavor to return to the moon for the first time in 47 years, the robotic Luna-25 mission, crashed this week, and India hopes to make its first soft landing there on August 23 with its Chandrayaan-3 lander. 

With so many nations headed for the moon, including an increasingly aggressive if diminished Russia, is the world at the cusp of a second space race? 

The temptation to reach for the historical space race as a model is understandable, but as long as we’re mapping history onto current events, it may not be the best guide, according to Cathleen Lewis, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museums curator of international space programs. “In my opinion, this isn’t a new race,” she says. “If you want to use historical events, this is more of a gold rush.” 

Or, more precisely, an ice rush. In 2018, scientists discovered water ice preserved in the deep, permanent shadows of polar craters. The US, China, Russia, and India are targeting portions of the lunar South Pole where that frozen resource should be. Water can be used to create rocket fuel or in lunar manufacturing. But it is heavy, and therefore expensive, to launch from Earth.  

Space agencies “haven’t quite worked out” how they are going to use this ice, or for “what technology to what end,” Lewis says. “But everyone wants to get there because we now know there is water ice to be found.” 

[Related on PopSci+: A DIY-rocket club’s risky dream of launching a human to the edge of space]

But it’s not just about the ice. The technological basis for all of this activity is entirely different than in the mid-20th century, Lewis points out. Back then, the US and the Soviet Union were developing the technology to go to the moon for the very first time. 

President Kennedy backed the lunar program because his advisors convinced him the race was technologically winnable, she says. While this competition had a destination, it also referred to the way “the USSR was racing to the maximum capacity of their technological limits.”

The Soviets had difficulty developing vehicles powerful enough to launch a crewed mission to the moon. The US created the Saturn V rocket, a singularly capable technology that was the most powerful ever launched until the first flight of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in late 2022. 

Today, multiple nations and even private companies have the technological capability to send spacecraft to the moon. Space itself is now more crowded, too, host to satellites tied into terrestrial economies: carrying communications, providing guidance signals, and observing agricultural water and other resources on the ground. 

The goal is no longer to achieve technological superiority. Instead, nations are rushing to acquire existing technologies that are becoming a prerequisite for economic independence and affluence. “This is part of being in a world in a mature space age, that these are no longer optional programs, they’re no longer pickup games, jockeying to see who’s first,” Lewis says. “These are essential, existential programs for 21st century existence.”

[Related: China’s astronauts embark on a direct trip to their brand new space station]

In this sense, the current wave of moon programs are different from those in the past because they are more internally focused on economies, rather than serving as a non-military proxy contest between two superpowers. China, Lewis notes, has scaled its exploration of space to match its economic development over the past 30 years.

However, that’s not to say it will remain that way. The historical Gold Rush, after all, led to conflict over that valuable resource. Once enough players are regularly operating on the moon with regularity, the opportunities for disputes will increase. 

“Who gets to choose what we do with the moon?” Lewis asks. “We haven’t sorted out issues about who has mining and drilling rights.” 

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids nations from making territorial claims on celestial bodies, but permits using resources there. Whether that use includes mining materials to sell for a profit on Earth is less clear. “We haven’t had to deal with that profit in space,” Lewis says. ”I’m glad I’m not an attorney who specializes in these sorts of things because it’s a part of it that makes my head ache.”

But there may be plenty of time for space lawyers and diplomats to figure that out. Because, when it comes to the moon, even gold rushes move slowly. “We’ve seen missions fail,” Lewis says, such as India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission that crashed on the moon in 2019. “The moon is a lot easier than it was 60 years ago, but it’s still difficult to get there.”

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Virgin Galactic’s second commercial spaceflight successfully launched today at 11:23 from the company’s Spaceport America site in New Mexico. The spaceflight reached an altitude of around 290,000 feet at about two and a half minutes post-takeoff.

Aboard the Galactic-02 mission’s reusable VSS Unity spaceplane were the first mother-daughter visitors to space, Keisha and Anastatia Mayers, along with former Olympian and Brit Jon Goodwin. At 18-years-old, University of Aberdeen physics and philosophy student Anastatia Mayers is now the youngest person to embark on such a journey.

Similar to rival private space ventures like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity technically only reaches a suborbital altitude, which technically is not “outer space,” per se. A fair amount of back-and-forth between experts still exists on the actual atmospheric boundary, space itself is considered to begin roughly 62 miles (327,360 feet) above the Earth’s surface—a demarcation known as the Kármán line. This height still allows for several minutes of weightlessness along with a view of Earth’s curvature beneath the inky blackness of space. Unlike Blue Origin or SpaceX vehicles, however, travelers first ascend while attached to a carrier plane, VMS Eve, before Unity detaches and ignites its rockets to reach its suborbital destination.

[Related: Virgin Galactic will fly you to space for the price of a house.]

The Galactic-02 crew also includes commander C.J. Sturckow, pilot Kelly Latimer, and Virgin Galactic’s astronaut instructor, Beth Moses. As Antiguans, the Mayers are the first female astronauts from the Caribbean. The Mayers won their seats via a drawing that raised funds for Space for Humanity, a non-profit aimed at providing sponsored trips for emerging world leaders to experience the Overview Effect.

“I cannot wait to go above the earth’s atmosphere and experience the different energy from here on Earth,” Keisha Mayers said in her Virgin Galactic astronaut biography. “To represent my island, Antigua, is truly an honor. I hope my journey will inspire others to reach for their dreams as well.”

Goodwin is also the second person diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease to ever travel to space, following astronaut Rich Clifford. Goodwin is an “early Virgin Galactic ticket holder,” according to the Virgin Galactic press statement.

Virgin Galactic’s first successful commercial flight took place on June 29, and served as a research mission for the Italian Air Force.

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It’s an exhilarating and sobering thought: All the planets, galaxies, starlight, and other objects that we can see and measure in the universe make up just 5 percent of existence. The other 95 percent are eaten up by two enigmas, dark matter and dark energy, known to scientists by their apparent gravitational effects on the surrounding universe, but not directly detectible.

On July 1, however, a new European Space Agency mission could help scientists get a little closer to solving the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. The Euclid space telescope will take flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA will live stream the launch beginning at 10:30 a.m.

Following blastoff, Euclid will take about 30 days to reach its operational orbit around Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an area a million miles toward the outer solar system where Euclid can maintain a constant position relative to Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope also orbits L2.

[Related: A super pressure balloon built by students is cruising Earth’s skies to find dark matter]

Once on location and operational, Euclid will begin what is expected to be a six-year mission where it will survey around a third of the sky, carefully measuring the shapes of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away to catch a glimpse at the ways dark matter and dark energy shape our cosmos. To do that, the roughly 4,600-pound space telescope will use its four-foot-wide primary mirror to collect and focus visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light on two instruments: the VISible instrument camera and Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, which helps determine the distance to far off galaxies.

“The awesomeness of how many galaxies Euclid will be able to measure and at what amazing precision—it’s just an amazing feat of human engineering,” says Lindley Winslow, a professor of physics at MIT who designs experiments to detect dark matter, but is not directly involved with this mission. “The fact that we can do precision cosmology is awesome.”

Cosmologists, who study the formation, evolution, and structure of the universe, have a model called Lambda-CDM that might explain why everything is the way it is. Lambda is the cosmological constant, the force that appears to be causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate and which scientists believe is related to or manifests in mysterious dark energy. CDM stands for “cold dark matter,” which interacts with normal matter gravitationally.

”Those are the two ingredients that have sculpted the universe that we know,” Winslow says. Dark energy drives universal expansion, while “in the early universe, it was this cold dark matter that pulled visible matter that we see now into potential wells, that then allowed it to contract and form galaxies and stars.”

Lambda-CDM helps us construe a lot of the large-scale universe, according to Winslow, but it doesn’t tell us how it fits together with the theory that explains how the small scale universe works: the Standard Model of particle physics. Euclid is one of several attempts to learn more about how the universe expands and revise Lambda-CDM.

“What we’re really interested in is, can we get more data? Winslow says. “And can we find something that Lambda-CDM doesn’t explain?”

To hunt for that evidence, Euclid will use a technique known as weak gravitational lensing. This is similar to the strong gravitational lensing technique employed by JWST, where the mass of a foreground object, such as a galaxy cluster, is used to magnify a more distant background object. With weak gravitational lensing, scientists are more interested in the way the mass of the foreground objects, including dark matter, creates subtle distortions in the shape of background galaxies.

“We’re using the background galaxies to learn about the matter distribution in the foreground,” says Rachel Mandelbaum, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University who is a member of the US portion of the Euclid Consortium, a group of thousands of scientists and engineers. “We’re trying to measure the effects of all of the matter between the distinct galaxy shape and us.”

[Related: Astronomers used dead stars to detect a new form of ripple in space-time]

This method will also help them measure the effects of dark energy, Mandelbaum adds. Since dark matter helps all other forms of matter clump together, and dark energy counteracts the gravitational effects of dark matter, by measuring how clumpy matter is over a range of distance from Earth, “we can measure how cosmic structure is growing and use that to infer the effects of dark energy on the matter distribution.”

Euclid will not be the first large sky survey using weak gravitational lensing to search for signs of dark matter and dark energy, but it will be the first survey of its kind in orbit. Previous studies, such as the Dark Energy Survey, have all been conducted by ground-based telescopes, according to Mandelbaum. Being up in space offers a different advantage.

“Ground-based telescopes see blurrier images than space-based telescopes because of the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on the light of distant stars and galaxies,” Mandelbaum says. Euclid’s view from L2 will be helpful when “we’re trying to measure these very subtle distortions in the shapes of galaxies.” 

But dark matter and dark energy are tough enigmas to crack, and scientists can use all the data they can collect, from as many angles as possible. The Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to open in 2025, will host the ground-based Legacy Survey of Space and Time and scan the entire southern sky for similar phenomena. Efforts like these will help ensure the reproducibility of findings by Euclid, and vice versa, according to Mandelbaum.

”Euclid is a really exciting experiment within a broader landscape of surveys that are trying to get at the same science, but with very different datasets that have different assumptions,” she says. “They’re going to be doing somewhat different things that give us a different approach to answering these really fundamental questions about the universe.”

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Update (June 29, 2023): Virgin Galactic completed its first commercial space flight, landing at the New Mexico spaceport minutes before noon Eastern. As the flight reached its highest point, crew from the Italian Air Force waved the country’s tri-color flag.

This summer, Virgin Galactic will finally start flying paying customers to the edge of space in the company’s rocket-powered plane, SpaceShipTwo. The first flight, a mission named Galactic 01, will launch as soon as June 27. 

If Galactic 01 soars to space’s edge as anticipated, it will have been a long time coming—nearly 20 years. Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder Richard Branson first announced his entry into the space tourism industry in 2004, with a goal of flying customers in 2007. Delays and a fatal in-flight accident stalled progress. Although Branson flew aboard SpaceShip Two in July 2021, Virgin Galactic hasn’t yet had a commercial flight. 

This summer’s flights are poised to change that. The company is finally prepared to open the cordon in front of its line of more than 800 waiting customers, who paid between $250,000 and $450,000 a piece. But it may be too little too late to make Virgin Galactic a sustainable player of the space tourism game.

[Related: Virgin Galactic finally made it to space. Here’s what that means.]

“I do not have high hopes for Virgin Galactic’s long-term stability due to their excruciatingly slow pace to become operational, their high company expenses, and their mixed safety track record,” says Laura Forczyk, a space industry analyst and founder of the consultancy company Astralytical. “I don’t think that their revenues are going to be able to catch up with their expenses unless there is a significant change in operations.”

Virgin Galactic was founded in a ray of optimism cast by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites. Rutan and Scaled Composites designed and built a sub-orbital spaceplane dubbed SpaceShipOne that successfully flew to space twice within two weeks in 2004, winning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. Later that year, Branson joined forces with Rutan to develop SpaceShip Two, and Virgin Galactic was born. 

Like SpaceShipOne, the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two is a rocket-propelled space plane. Carried aloft by a larger aircraft dubbed WhiteKnightTwo, the space plane detaches at 49,000 feet altitude, the rocket ignites and powers the space plane to just more than 50 miles altitude, considered the threshold of outer space by the US government. SpaceShip Two then glides back to Earth, using an innovative “feathering” system that rotates the space plane’s twin tail wings upward and toward the plane’s front, using aerodynamic drag to slow the craft during reentry.

But by banking on that innovative technology as the key to unlocking the space tourism market, Virgin Galactic may have put itself at a major disadvantage. “They had way more technological problems with this less mature technology than they anticipated, and they had significant safety concerns” Forczyk says. “Traditional rockets have a long history of launching uncrewed as well as crewed spaceflight. Space planes do not have that history.”

Those safety concerns became front and center in a tragic fashion on October 31, 2014, when a SpaceShipTwo space plane dubbed VSS Enterprise broke up in-flight over the Mojave desert, killing one of the two test pilots aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that one of the pilots had deployed the feathering system too early during the test flight, causing the plane to crash. 

[Related: Virgin Galactic will fly you to space for the price of a house]

Unlike traditional rockets, space planes cannot be tested without a human crew on board, Forczyk points out, increasing the risk during development. That may have slowed Virgin Galactic down compared to competitors such as Blue Origin, which uses traditional rockets and space capsules for tourism. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos reached space atop his company’s New Shephard rocket in 2021—the same month as Branson’s space plane flight—and has since gone on to fly dozens of paying customers. 

“They absolutely had competitors that took advantage of the fact that they were not online when they said they would be,” Forcyzk says. 

Having stumbled out of the starting blocks, is it possible for Virgin Galactic to catch up in the space tourism race? Its tasks are twofold. The company needs to raise capital, “and they need to prove their safety and prove their operations in order to raise that capital,” Forczyk says. “So I don’t know what this summer will bring, but I do believe that we should expect more delays. Hopefully, we will see more flights.”

It also needs to prove that those flights are safe. “Their entire business case relies on public perception of these people who are willing to fly on their vehicle, either for the fun of it or for research,” Forcyzk says. “They don’t have another business place to fall back on, unlike their competitors.”

Virgin Galactic is in many ways a space company built for 2004—the pre-iPhone era—not 2023. It can fly space tourists and researchers, but can’t carry cargo offworld. Unlike Blue Origin, which is also building a lunar lander for NASA, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which launches satellites and astronauts for NASA and the Department of Defense, Virgin Galactic’s hopes rest only on its one craft and the tourists who are willing to ride it.

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On Friday, NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract to provide a lunar lander for the Artemis V moon mission scheduled for 2029—two years after they lost a bid to build similar vehicles for the Artemis III and IV missions.

Blue Origin will lead a consortium that also includes Lockheed Martin and Boeing to design and build the lander, with NASA contributing $3.4 billion in funding. According to The New York Times, Blue Origin’s VP for lunar transportation also confirmed their company would also add “well north” of that number for the project.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

“We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Friday. “Together, we are making an investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first astronauts on Mars.”

Now comes the hard part: Blue Origin will soon begin designing, building, and testing a new lander that meets NASA’s mission requirements, such as the ability to dock with Gateway, a planned space station that will transfer crew into lunar orbit. The contract encompasses both an uncrewed moon landing demo, as well as the crewed Artemis V mission on track for 2029.

In 2021, Blue Origin and another company lost out to SpaceX on a contract to supply vehicles for Artemis III and IV, which both aim to put humans back on the moon’s surface for the first time in over half a century. SpaceX turned in a proposal estimated to cost $2.9 billion, while Blue Origin’s was tallied at $6 billion.

[Related: Watch SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket explode.]

Blue Origin then attempted to sue NASA in federal court over the bidding process, claiming their proposal had been unfairly evaluated. A 76-page report subsequently issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) laid out all the reasons NASA had every legal right to choose a contract with SpaceX, which cost around half as much as Blue Origin’s $6 billion proposal. NASA’s other concerns included the fact that Blue Origin’s proposal vehicle did not reportedly include proper safeguards for landing in the dark. As Business Insider noted at the time, “The GAO contended that NASA was not required to lay out all minute details, and Blue Origin should take into account the conditions on the moon or space itself—which is dark.”

Jeff Bezos’ company eventually lost the legal fight. “Not the decision we wanted,” Bezos tweeted afterwards, adding that he would respect the court’s judgment while wishing “full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.” Two years later, however, it appears Blue Origin has properly revised its proposal process—hopefully including plans for landing in the dark.

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This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first human hopping aboard a hot air balloon. But Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier only hovered about 85 feet above the ground, so it’s safe to say he would be stunned at what his country’s modern denizens are planning. As CNN reported on Thursday, a French company called Zephalto aims to begin “edge of space” hot air balloon tourist sojourns as early as next year—for $130,000 a seat.

After ponying up the hefty price tag, passengers will board Zephalto’s pressurized capsule, Celeste, which is attached to a massive, helium-filled stratospheric balloon. Over the course of roughly ninety minutes, the balloon will ascend at 4 meters per second to an altitude of 25 kilometers (about 15.5 miles). Once at the edge of space, tourists will enjoy a fancy meal during their three-hour hover time in front of 7-square-meter window views of the Earth’s curvature before descending back down to terra firma.

[Related: How will NASA keep up with space tourism?]

Other high-profile space tourism ventures such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic travel much higher than the capabilities of even a high-end hot air balloon such as Zephalto’s. In July 2021, Virgin Galactic’s founder, Richard Branson, soared 86 km above Earth. Just one week later, Blue Origin took its co-founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos above the Karman Line, the internationally recognized (if somewhat disputed) boundary for outer space.

Unlike those high-profile space tourism ventures, however, Zephalto bills itself as being a much more eco-friendly alternative. According to its official description page, only 26.6 kg of CO2 are purportedly needed for a single journey—the lowest amount required for a space flight, says the company, or akin to “as little as the production of a pair of denim trousers.” By comparison, a single suborbital rocket launch can put out as much as 300 tons of CO2 into the upper atmosphere during its journey.

[Related: Blue Origin brought the first official tourists to space.]

As reservations quickly fill for the trips—Zephalto told CNN it’s already booked out until mid-2025. The company’s founder recently explained they were working closely with France’s space agency, CNES, alongside partners at Airbus to ensure all safety and logistical regulations are met. Once in full swing, Zephalto aims to launch as many as 60 flights per year, each with six passengers alongside two pilots.

And if the six-hour-total journey and fancy meal aren’t enough to sell you on a $130,000 ticket, Zephalto says it’s throwing in complementary psychological counseling ahead of the outing to help deal with what’s known as the “overview effect,” the existential weight that reportedly comes from viewing the entirety of Earth from high above its surface.

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A commercial lunar rover, developed by the private Japanese company ispace in partnership with the United Arab Emirates, appears to have failed to achieve a soft lunar landing, and is presumed to have crashed on the moon’s surface. The mission’s apparent conclusion comes after four-month, 239,000 mile sojourn, and if successful, could have signaled a new era of lunar exploration.

“We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during the company’s livestream.

Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on December 11, ispace’s Hakuto-R lander attempted to make a soft landing (i.e. not crash) inside the Atlas Crater located on the southeastern edge of the moon’s Mare Frigoris, or the “Sea of Cold” just before 1pm EST. The ispace team failed to subsequently establish communication with the lander, and as of writing, remains unable to do so.

“Recognizing the possibility of an anomaly during the mission, the results will be weighed and evaluated against the criteria and incorporated into future missions already in development between now and 2025,” the company said in an announcement shortly following its December 11 launch aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9.

Had it been a success, the UAE’s 22-pound Rashid rover would have deployed for a 14-day lunar daytime survey of the area. According to the European Space Agency—which aided in designing the rover’s wheels, and will provide lander communications for ispace—the rover would have documented its trip via two high resolution cameras alongside both a microscopic and thermal imaging camera. Rashid also boasted a “Langmuir probe” intended to “sample the plasma environment prevailing just above the lunar surface,” per the ESA.

[Related: ispace’s private lander might be the first to touch down on the moon.]

As CNN notes, only the US, China, and the former Soviet Union have ever successfully pulled off a controlled moon landing. America still remains the only nation to place humans on the moon’s surface. In 2019, the Israeli private space company SpaceIL attempted what would have been the first commercial moon soft landing with its Beresheet robotic lander. Beresheet’s engine failed during its descent approximately four miles above the lunar surface.

The hoped-for success of ispace’s Hakuto-R could have presented literal and figurative uncharted territory for both Earthbound nations and their moon. Alongside NASA astronauts’ impending return via the Artemis program ahead of hopes for a permanent lunar base, many space law experts are rushing to establish a new set of regulations to protect the lunar environment, as well as historic spaces like the Apollo 11 landing site.

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Last week’s much-hyped test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed, ended in a fiery explosion minutes after launch, falling far short of the SpaceX team’s optimistic goal of a watery landing near Hawaii. The truncated conclusion was not entirely surprising, however—SpaceX CEO Elon Musk himself estimated a 50 percent chance of failure while speaking at a conference last month. Regardless of how one views the launch postmortem, one thing is for certain—Starship made its presence known to locals last week, and left an absolute mess in its wake.

[Related: Watch SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket explode.]

Hailed as a success by many SpaceX fans and a dud by some of its critics, Friday’s historic Starship launch was nothing if not “truly terrifying” for those living near the Boca Chica, Texas, launchsite. According to a report from The New York Times, “virtually everywhere” in the neighboring town of Port Isabel was covered in a layer of thick dust and sand grain. The force from Starship’s 33 Raptor engines also generated enough power to resemble a “mini earthquake,” residents told the The NY Times, and resulted in at least one store owner’s window shattering. Starship’s takeoff blasted a 25-feet deep crater into the launch site, sending up plumes of dust and dirt, alongside bowling ball-sized debris that smashed into at least one empty parked NASA Spaceflight van nearby. This isn’t the first instance of SpaceX-induced damage, either—in 2021, a SpaceX disintegrating Falcon 9 rocket stage’s pressure vessel landed on a Washington State farm, leaving a four-inch dent in the ground.

As Space.com explained over the weekend, locals have also voiced concerns over future Starship launches’ effects on local flora and fauna. SpaceX’s Starbase facilities are located near wildlife refuge areas—while such rocketry complexes are often built in similar remote areas, safety steps and safe-distance requirements generally minimize harm and disruption. On April 19, one day before Starship’s rescheduled launch, 27 environmental, community, and indigenous organizations signed an open letter expressing concerns over the massive rocket’s effects on both locals and the environment. This includes sacred land for local indigenous peoples.

“We, the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, oppose SpaceX operations destroying our sacred lands,” Tribal Chairman, Juan B. Mancias, said in the co-signed statement, adding “The Tribe was never consulted by any of these companies or electeds about rockets… who never responded to our request for a meeting.”

“SpaceX routine operations and testing are already destroying wildlife refuges and sacred lands of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and are threatening Rio Grande Valley communities with explosion risks,” reads a portion of the letter. “SpaceX [cut] off access to the beach from local families, preventing the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe from accessing sacred lands for ceremonies, destroying more than 60 acres of wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species, and threatening public safety with rocket shrapnel blown into fishing spots and the community.”

Last June, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded SpaceX’s upcoming orbital launch plans would result in “no significant impact” to the nearby region, pending 75 action steps to mitigate environmental concerns. Musk claims his private spacefaring company will have another Starship ready to launch from the same facility in “1 to 2 months.”

Update 4/25/23:  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed to CNBC on Monday afternoon that it has grounded the company’s Starship Super Heavy launch program pending results of the “mishap investigation” which was “triggered by debris entering adjacent properties.”

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SpaceX’s mega-rocket Starship exploded earlier today. Using a Super Heavy booster for the first time below Starship itself, the entire vehicle assembly failed minutes after rising from the launch pad in southern Texas. 

A radiating light and brown smoke at the base of the rocket, followed by cheers, marked the beginning of the launch. All appeared to go according to plan as fiery exhaust propelled the double-deck rocket assembly higher into the atmosphere. Crowds and commenters waited to see the silvery rocket and white booster separate as planned—and then kept waiting as the rocket eventually started flipping and spinning. Then, the rocket, which was uncrewed, exploded. 

SpaceX was aiming to send the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built on a trip around the world. If all had gone according to plan, the Starship upper stage would have terminated its flight in the water near Hawaii. That didn’t happen.

This launch was originally scheduled for Monday, but a stuck booster valve delayed the project.

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

The launch included two stages: one using the Starship rocket, which has blasted off before. Starship finally landed in 2021 without blowing up after multiple failures and explosions. And the second, a Super Heavy booster, is a new addition designed to propel the rocket farther. This was the first launch with those two sections together.

The plan was to launch from the southern tip of Texas, drop the booster in the Gulf of Mexico, and have Starship cross over the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans before going for a swim into the Pacific near Hawaii. 

Crowds had gathered a few miles away from SpaceX’s launch site, Boca Chica Beach in Texas, to watch the launch. The ultimate goal of the rocket is to shuttle humans and cargo to the Moon and eventually Mars, but that goal might be farther away than the places it hopes to reach. 

“I’m not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won’t be boring,” Musk said at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. He estimated it might have a 50 percent chance of reaching orbit.

Though Starship and it’s booster failed to separate, SpaceX still sees this as a success. “It does appear to be spinning, but I do want to remind everyone that everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake,” one SpaceX announcer said during the event; the vehicle exploded while she made the comment, leading to cheers. She added that it was “an exciting end to the Starship inaugural integrated test flight.” 

The Starship’s Super Heavy booster has 33 methane-fueled engines, and the ship itself could theoretically accommodate 250 tons and 100 people. Before sending any passengers to new destinations, Musk wants to use the unmanned rocket to launch satellites, such as his own Starlinks, into Earth’s orbit. 

Watch all the fiery drama, below:

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Virgin Orbit, the private satellite launch company founded in 2017 by multibillionaire Richard Branson, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The news follows the spacefaring venture’s announcement last Friday that it was terminating 675 employees, or roughly 85 percent of its total workforce.

The bankruptcy filing arrives nearly four months after the company’s disastrous, highly publicized orbital launch attempt from Spaceport Cornwall in southwest England. Meant to be the first of many similar missions from within the UK, Virgin Orbit’s unique satellite delivery system ultimately encountered a “devastating launch failure,” losing its entire nine satellite payload.

[Related: A historic first satellite launch in the UK has failed.]

Unlike would-be competitors at SpaceX and Blue Origin, Branson’s Virgin Orbit eschewed more traditional vertical rocketry in favor of a single rocket attached to the underside of a modified Boeing 747 jet. Once the plane’s human crew flew to a sufficient altitude, said rocket would detach, ignite its own engines, and cruise into low-Earth orbit to deliver its cargo as the 747 landed. While January’s “Start Me Up” mission rocket failed in its objectives, the human crew returned safely to Earth.

It’s unclear what will ultimately become of the branch within Branson’s Virgin Galactic enterprise, which listed $243 million in assets and $153 million in debts for its bankruptcy filing. As The New York Times notes, Virgin Orbit’s unique, relatively low-cost, and flexible launch system technology could still appeal to governments, including the US.

[Related: Why the Virgin Galactic spaceship didn’t reach orbit last weekend.]

Despite the setbacks, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said in a statement on Tuesday that “the team at Virgin Orbit has developed and brought into operation a new and innovative method of launching satellites into orbit, introducing new technology and managing great challenges and great risks along.” He added that the company had launched 33 satellites into “precise orbit” since first staring operations. Until January, four of the company’s five previous mission launches from the Mojave Desert in California were deemed successes.

Although Virgin Orbit officials vowed to push forward with future scheduled plans, industry analysts warned that the company’s future looked bleak. According to Virgin Orbit’s website, its most recent public press announcement came in February in the form of an update regarding its “UK mission anomaly.”

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GROWING UP in a small Danish town, Carsten Olsen didn’t have much access to information about space. Until the internet came along. Once connected, Olsen started frequenting discussion forums, where real rocket scientists and even astronauts came to chat. He ordered rocketry books on Amazon and became obsessed with reaching toward that great beyond.

He didn’t grow up to become a rocket scientist himself—not professionally. He works at a public school in Copenhagen. But he did join an untamed, dangerous, and optimistic space endeavor: a hobbyist group hoping to build rockets that could, someday, send a volunteer astronaut to the edge of space. They call themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals, or CopSub, and work out of an old shipyard in Denmark’s capital city.

Olsen first heard about CopSub, an amateur human spaceflight endeavor, on the local news. “Something about some crazy guys,” he says. “Space cowboys.”

At the time, he was training for marathons, and he ran by the shipyard on a training route. “I noticed there were a lot of people there gathering together around something,” he says. That something was a rocket engine—firing in place. It looked like a white tube about 18 feet long, lying on its side, bolted to concrete pillars. Other CopSub tests have included a tiny passenger capsule with a crash dummy inside. “I stepped up and said, ‘I need to be part of this,’” Olsen recalls. 

Eventually, the group welcomed him into its ranks, even though he didn’t have any technical skills to speak of. Today, he’s one of CopSub’s approximately 70 volunteers, some of whom work in the space industry professionally and have rocketry or other technical expertise, and some of whom are more like Olsen. While other private spaceflight programs—from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to commercial-space-station company Axiom Space—are sending amateurs and tourists beyond the bounds of the atmosphere, CopSub’s hobbyists aren’t just the club’s potential future astronauts; they’re also the ones responsible for every machine, schematic, and protocol getting the rocket off the ground, a proposition that comes with significant risk. 

Given that, “space cowboys” is a pretty accurate term for what CopSub is doing and for what the law allows it to do. But the label also applies to the cushy spaceflight capsules supplied by billionaire-backed companies. Policies do exist to protect people on the ground—by requiring that rockets operate as advertised, that they lift off from places where an accident wouldn’t harm nearby civilians, and that their crews be trained in emergency procedures. But, unlike with government-funded missions, there are practically no guidelines, national or international, regarding the safety of humans who strap themselves aboard private rockets. 

That could change around October of this year, when a US moratorium on such rule-making expires, and Americans, at least, are finally able to regulate the safety of space tourists. Policy experts say it may be time to lay down some laws, making a trip to space safer not just for astronauts flying under the flag of a nation but also for those flying under the logo of a company—or the banner of a club.

“We’ve got more international actors. We’ve got different types of space applications. And then you’ve seen those wonderful space-tourism efforts that launched,” says Uma Bruegman, head of the Space Safety Institute at The Aerospace Corporation. “It’s great. But it does bring into the equation space safety.” 

While the world figures out what to do about these private astronauts, and which risks and regulations should be accepted, CopSub is creeping forward. The group is currently working on and testing the design of a homemade rocket that might take a human more than 62 miles above Earth’s surface in another decade. Whether that cosmic cowpoke will come home or take a one-way trip, though, is an open question—one to which few rules apply.

NO MATTER WHO’S in charge, there’s always risk involved in shooting humans into space. It requires sitting on top of what is essentially a missile—and that hasn’t always gone well, even in the highly regulated parts of the industry. In 1967, a NASA suborbital spacecraft called the X-15—which, like CopSub’s contraption, was meant to fly to the edge of space, but not circle Earth—broke apart after launch and killed its pilot. Then came the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003, respectively, which infamously caused 14 astronaut casualties in total. More recently, in 2014, Virgin Galactic’s suborbital test vehicle SpaceShipTwo disintegrated, resulting in the death of one pilot. In the 62 years since the first human went to space, the overall odds of an astronaut being in a fatal accident on a US craft has been 1 in 100. Compare that to a traveler on one of today’s passenger jets in the US and Europe—with their entirely different flight systems—for whom the odds are around 1 in 30 million.

“If we want to reap the full benefits of human spaceflight in the future, whether it be for exploration, scientific research, business, or tourism, we will need to find ways to improve the safety of those operations,” reads a 2020 paper titled “Human Spaceflight Safety: Regulatory Issues and Mitigating Concepts,” written by Josef Koller, systems director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation, and George Nield, president of the company Commercial Space Technologies.

One of those ways is through setting rules. But at this moment, at least in the private sector, there isn’t legal oversight of the safety of crew members. “There is no particular regulation with regards to putting people on board rockets and blasting them off into space,” says Jacob Larsen, who works in the satellite industry by day and for CopSub in his spare time. 

That’s as true of a for-profit company as it is of a volunteer-led organization like CopSub. “The only difference is, they’re not making any money,” says Scott Steele, a lawyer specializing in space issues. 

But is hobbyist spaceflight like CopSub’s too risky, even with a code of conduct? And if so, should a person be permitted to do it anyway, just like someone who is allowed to plop a raft into whitewater, dig a crampon into a glacier, or ride a mountain bike along a cliff’s edge? Does DIY human spaceflight lie beyond the border of any other extreme sport or hobby?

At the moment, no governing body—in Denmark, Europe more broadly, or even more space-centric countries like the US—is setting those rules. CopSub’s communications director, Mads Wilson, who works as a data scientist, doesn’t seem distressed by that fact. “There’s no laws against being stupid,” he says. “People have killed themselves in stupid ways.”

That’s certainly true of our species’s long and fraught fascination with flying. But when—and if—CopSub’s rocket gets its first joyrider, that person’s life will depend on the quality of work done in a group of tinkerers’ spare time, with homemade rocket parts, cobbled together into a combustible machine that no outside body is charged with inspecting. And that’s not an easy proposition to swallow.

WHEN COPSUB STARTED started in 2008, the team consisted of just two volunteers, the co-founders Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, and a single thought. “They wanted to try to build a rocket that could put a human in space,” says Wilson. “And that was basically it.”

Von Bengtson had previously been on contract with NASA, working on human-centered spacecraft design, and Madsen was an entrepreneur who, later, would be convicted of the murder of journalist Kim Wall. Three years before the murder took place, CopSub and Madsen parted ways, and the space organization cut all ties with its co-founder.

At the start of the endeavor, though, the pair holed up in an artists’ collective in Copenhagen Harbor. Soon, their group—and creative space—grew. “Most of the guys that I know say that they just showed up one day at the workshop and asked, ‘Hey, can I do something?’” says Wilson, who became one of those “guys” in 2013, a couple of years after CopSub started building rockets and launching them a mile or more into the air. It used a floating platform, which members built themselves, off the Danish coast in international waters. In the early days, the company was finishing and testing a new rocket every year or so, with the builds taking a year or two each.

CopSub’s first attempt—with a 30-something-foot-tall, 3,587-pound rocket in 2010—was a failure. In 2011, a ship with that same design (which resembled that of a ballpoint pen) went up, flopped sideways, and came down too fast. The booster slammed into the water, disintegrated, and sank. The prototype of the capsule meant for passengers separated from the rocket and floated across the Baltic Sea, but was also damaged. In 2012, the group shot up a rocket intended to test communications and GPS equipment for future crewed CopSub missions. Around two seconds after liftoff, the nose cone, which housed all those electronics, separated from the rocket. The vehicle completed its trip, which was designed to take it more than 12 miles up, as planned, but the flight didn’t yield any useful data. That year, CopSub tested a capsule with passenger safety features like an escape system, springs to protect a rider from a hard landing, and air bags that could flip the capsule right-side up should it splash facedown. It tumbled through the air and slammed hard into the water. CopSub was not able to send the command to flip the capsule upright because of the high-impact landing.

The next year, CopSub sent up a much smaller rocket—447 pounds and nearly 28 feet high—to try out navigation and directional systems. That one worked pretty well, surpassing the speed of sound and shooting more than 5 miles up, arriving at the top of its trajectory just 600 feet off from the engineers’ expectations. Still, the technology was a far cry from something that could transport an actual person to space. “It started out really crude,” says Wilson. “But that was also kind of the idea—it doesn’t need to be more than good enough.” (What Wilson means is that it doesn’t need to be more than good enough to fulfill its purpose.)

In fact, the amateur space program’s safety status banks on its rockets’ simplicity: Much of it is based on technology similar to what NASA used in the 1950s and 1960s. Just as a smart fridge has more points of failure than one made of mere coils and refrigerant, CopSub contends that a less complex space system has fewer breakable parts than one ruled by robotics and computers. If done right, it could leave fewer ways for a human passenger to get hurt. But if done sloppily or without adequate checks, it still could put the team’s future astronaut in fatal danger.

The group has made some improvements. To make their rockets easier to control, it had to rethink its original hybrid-propellant engines, which contained both solid and liquid rocket fuel. When it was go time, the two mixed together and combusted. “That turned out to be, to put it politely, unfeasible,” says Wilson. After building its Sapphire rocket in 2013, CopSub pivoted toward liquid-only engines—which are more complex but also more predictable. 

Madsen’s departure also brought much-needed change to the collective. In those early days, Madsen wasn’t getting along with von Bengtson, or, really, anyone. In February 2014, von Bengtson finally left. A few months later, CopSub and Madsen parted ways permanently. Madsen murdered Kim Wall in 2017 and was sentenced to life in prison in 2018. 

After the founders’ departure, the project didn’t dissolve. “This is too fantastic to just let everything drop on the floor,” says Wilson. Plus, much of the technical know-how came from the newer volunteers. The quest continued with the personnel who remained.

But the technical problems continued as well. In late 2014 an experiment, recorded on a GoPro, went awry. It was a static rocket-engine test using liquid fuel, in which the rocket was supposed to stay strapped to the ground. Just after ignition, flames broke out and engulfed both the craft and its stand. As the initial burst died down, the wrecked machine made moaning noises, like the cries of a lonely, whale-like alien. Wilson was standing in a bunker about 300 feet away. Even there, everything smelled like alcohol. No one was hurt, but the rocket was unsalvageable—two years of work burnt to the ground. What would they do now? 

“We’ve gotta build another one!” Olsen recalls thinking at the time.

Group members decided to emphasize working piecemeal, building smaller rockets and using them to test subsystems like computers, communications, and parachutes, a mission they’ve been working on after the fire. “Then, once that is done, we can scale [up] and build something bigger,” says Wilson. The ultimate goal is to create Spica, a rocket big enough to reach the Earth-space boundary and send a capsule splashing back down into the ocean—with a human inside. “We’ve meticulously chipped away at it,” says Larsen, since the last big test launch of a smaller rocket in 2018. Several sections sit in the workshop as the engineers tinker with the engine technology, which they’ll try out in a shipping container they transformed into a test stand. Once completed, the capsule will be just big enough for a person to sit inside, with only enough wiggle room that they don’t lose circulation. No astronaut suit or ability to control the flight, just a Top Gun–ish fighter-pilot get-up and a pressurized cabin. 

The collective’s biggest success so far came in 2018, when its liquid-fueled Nexø II rocket did everything it was supposed to do. It flew in the correct trajectory 4 miles up. The nose cone separated at the top of the flight, the parachute floated the rocket back down to the sea, and teams recovered both parts. The splashdown speed was slow enough that a human would have survived the force of impact.

Larsen was watching from a rigid inflatable boat nearby. As the craft ended its countdown and began its journey, time slowed down. “It just kept going and going and going,” he says. “I’m never, ever gonna forget this wonderous thundering sound under a clear sky…on a flat, warm sea, with nothing but blue and blue around us.” 

The capsule drifted down about eight minutes after the flight began—“Ever gently,” says Larsen. Only 58 miles left to go for the spaceflight to count as suborbital.

AS COPSUB INCHES CLOSER to its “moonshot,” private spaceflight is taking off an ocean away.

Only American companies have sent tourists to space. Still, Congress explicitly forbids the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from making rules to protect private astronauts. Under a 2004 law, “The FAA is prohibited from regulating the safety of individuals on board,” says the agency’s own website. This legal moratorium, the thinking goes, allows commercial space companies to get enough experience to understand what safety principles should exist—and keeps them from being stifled by inspections and red tape in the meantime. According to Koller, who works with Bruegman and co-wrote the “Human Spaceflight Safety” paper, the idea is that companies should be allowed to innovate, try hard things, and perhaps even fail before regulations come into play.

The moratorium is currently set to expire in October 2023, though it has been extended before (first to 2015, and then again for eight more years). Anticipating the coming rules, Koller and his co-author suggested ways the FAA and other governing bodies across the world could prepare. The broadest of these is by “establishing a collaborative framework to create safety guidance and best practices,” their report says. That could take the form of what it calls a “Space Safety Institute,” an independent group that provides expertise and support to government and industry but doesn’t set or enforce regulations itself. 

It didn’t take long for the authors’ vision to come to life. Last year, The Aerospace Corporation, headquartered in El Segundo, California, launched an institute to “enhance the safety of space and space-related activities for government, commercial, and international customers,” as described on its website. But one of the new group’s significant challenges will be coming up with recommendations for private space vehicles that vary wildly. Virgin Galactic, for example, wants to drop a rocket-powered spaceship from a double-hulled airplane, while Blue Origin is planning a much larger rocket powered by liquefied natural gas. CopSub, in comparison, still has its vintage ethanol-based rocket. There are even balloon companies that hope to heft humans to the edge of space in the future. 

Despite the fact that space vehicles rely on different technologies, they do share one thing. “The common element really, at the core, is people,” says Koller. “People are the ones that make mistakes. But people also need to feel safe enough to speak up when you see an unsafe situation or unsafe environment.” Perhaps the most important way to keep space tourists safe, Koller posits, is by creating a “safety culture,” one where engineers and technicians aren’t afraid to point out something that seems dangerous or sloppy. 

Bruegman’s institute also suggests voluntary safety audits, as well as collecting system and safety data in a centralized and accessible place, ideally so that companies can predict and prevent accidents based on others’ experience. (Meanwhile, a standard way companies manage their liabilities is by having passengers on private space vehicles sign an informed consent document stating that they know that what they are about to do has its risks. Passengers also sign waivers of claims stating that they will not sue the company in case of injury and that their families will not sue in case of the passengers’ injury or death.)

Self-starters in and outside the US can look to experienced agencies like NASA for more inspiration. In 2014, the FAA produced a document for private companies, detailing “Recommended Practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety.” It doesn’t get into much technical detail because, again, every organization’s system is so different, but rather prescribes high-level guidance about what safety really means. 

A spacecraft, for instance, shouldn’t accelerate or vibrate so fast or hard that the motions hurt occupants, and it should make sure they “are protected from serious injuries and safety-critical operations can be performed successfully.” Every system inside the ship that’s critical to crew safety should demonstrate that it can work as planned in maximally extreme conditions. Similarly, all those plopped into passenger seats should be evaluated to make sure they can withstand those conditions. Each crew member should have a pressurized suit and a personal air supply, and the cabin should have an abort or escape system. CopSub has plans only for the personal air supply at the moment. 

The technology aboard modern spaceships is complex in part so it can diagnose problems and introduce redundancy; that allows the craft to fail in numerous ways—without killing the crew. That complexity is one NASA requirement that CopSub won’t meet, but, Larsen points out, their craft only needs to be safe and dependable for a 4-minute flight, rather than days or weeks. The space agency also only certifies a private space company for its commercial crew program if the overall chance of “loss of crew” is less than 1 in 270 over a 210-day mission. That could be true of CopSub’s future Spica, but as things stand right now, no one is doing the math.

CopSub is currently testing its rocket subsystems to make sure they work both independently and together, but it won’t have the full results until Spica is completed years from now. At this point no outside agency will make the group conduct a full-scale test before putting a human aboard, or to ensure that that human passes extensive medical and high-G evaluations, as professional astronauts typically would. CopSub says it will do its own testing before it straps a person into its rocket, but for now, the Danish government and European Space Agency are just as hands-off as American authorities. 

It’s possible that the future will have enforceable rules, to which the team will have to adjust if its efforts are to go forward. Because space endeavors are often international and involve a borderless frontier, no single country—whether that be Denmark or the US—can think about rules in isolation. “There is more international coordination necessary,” says Koller. It could be something like the Safety of Life at Sea Treaty, an agreement first put in place after the Titanic disaster to specify safety requirements for merchant ships, including a minimum number of lifeboats. The International Space Station is another example of how nations at odds—Russia and the US—have played nice with each other.  

All this talk about rules and limits can get the more hands-off-my-rockets side of the industry riled up. But Bruegman, Koller, and Steele don’t want to hold any rocket scientists, even the hobbyist ones, down. On the contrary, they want to make private spaceflight secure and predictable precisely so it can blossom, Bruegman says. “We feel like it’s like ‘good fences make good neighbors.’”

AT COPSUB, the volunteers are proud of their own safety record so far: zero accidents resulting in injury or death. They claim they adhere to NASA’s protocols for handling rocket fuel and safety at the launch site. They also point out that they chose ethanol for fuel because it’s more environmentally friendly than methane and hydrocarbon-based rocket fuel and evaporates quickly if something goes wrong. Wilson and Larsen say the members do speak up when something feels iffy to them, promoting the kind of safety culture Koller referred to. 

But one part of CopSub’s light-touch approach might work in its favor, at least when it comes to developing rocket hardware. “I think both NASA and the European Space Agency have felt the pressure to be perfect,” says Larsen. “And I was so relieved when a certain American made it popular to start blowing things up in succession.”

He is referring to Elon Musk and SpaceX, a company with a blooper reel full of its rockets tipping, tumbling, and exploding. Despite those wipeouts, SpaceX has never had a launch accident that harmed humans, and it is the only company certified to NASA’s safety standards. 

Ethics don’t stop and start at the launchpad, however. In the fall of 2022, OSHA fined SpaceX after an employee was seriously injured while working on a rocket engine. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has had six successful human spaceflights with zero injuries or deaths. Still, in 2021, a group of 21 current and former employees penned an open letter saying that taxing working conditions and intimidation were hampering the company’s safety culture. (SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment, and Blue Origin declined to comment.)

Working for a corporation full of professionals doesn’t, then, seem to guarantee a totally safe environment on the ground or in the skies. But CopSub’s organizational structure, which you wouldn’t see at a business that has to comply with labor laws and the demands of investors, may make accountability difficult: There is no top-down bureaucracy—no project managers, not even an inventory management system—which means checks and balances don’t automatically exist. Accountability is as voluntary as the gig itself.

The CopSub website puts the risk of Spica’s flight quite frankly. “We work meticulously to make the flight as safe as possible, as we’re courageous, not reckless,” it says. “But it will obviously be dangerous, so our astronaut must be mentally prepared and at ease with the risk.” 

While it’s clear that CopSub’s technology is decades behind the sophistication of modern companies like SpaceX and government agencies like NASA, its goals are simpler. But being the best, first, or fastest is not usually the point of hobbies; the point is to do something you like, with people you like, because you like it and them, and to feel empowered because you have done it on your own. The difference between constructing a rocket ship and knitting a sweater or building a homemade radio, though, is that sweaters and radios have little potential to kill the people who use them.

Of course, Olsen, Larsen, Wilson, and their fellow DIYers are aiming for survival. And they’re only hopeful, not certain, that they can even get to the point where they strap someone into Spica’s capsule. Still, optimism reigns. Olsen offers a quote from Pippi Longstocking, a famous figure in Scandinavia. “I have never tried that before,” she says, “so I think I should definitely be able to do that.” Will anyone make sure that this attitude doesn’t doom the first passenger in a DIY space mission? That’s up in the air.

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Correction 4/10/23: A previous version of the article stated that with a possible expiration of a US moratorium, Americans would be able to “legislate” the safety of space tourists, instead of “regulate.” PopSci regrets the error.

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Third time was unfortunately not the charm for Relativity Space. After two scrubbed attempts, Terran—the aerospace startup’s 110-foot rocket largely composed of 3D-printed materials—completed its first stage liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, it failed to reach its intended 125-mile-high orbit. Instead, the unmanned vehicle’s second stage briefly ignited, before shutting off entirely and subsequently plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean. Still, there’s much to celebrate for the upstart rocket company.

Supporters hope Relativity’s Terran rocket, which is made from 85-percent 3D-printed metal materials, will prove a major step forward for the company as it attempts to compete within the private spacefaring industry alongside the heavy hitters of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. During its second launch attempt earlier this month, Terran came within less than a second of takeoff before aborting the flight after its first stage rockets malfunctioned.

[Related: What to expect from space exploration in 2023.]

Formed in 2015, Relativity Space aims to create a line of entirely 3D-printed, reusable rockets for a variety of potential projects, including a goal to transport the first commercial mission to Mars. According to its official website rundown, the company’s line of hopeful spacefaring vehicles in Long Beach, California, are built using a combination of massive 3D printers, artificial intelligence aids, and autonomous robotics. In doing so, Relativity claims production requires 100 times fewer parts, and can be finished in less than 60 days.

The commitment to 3D-printed material even extends as far as Relativity’s line of Aeon rocket engines, with reduced part counts within the igniters, turbopumps, combustion chambers, thrusters, and pressurization systems. Each engine uses a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas as propellants.

[Related: How loud is a rocket launch?]

Success, in this case, is… well, relative. As TechCrunch notes, very few space launch platforms ever achieve orbit during the first flight. Additionally, Terran withstood its “Max Q” threshold, a term referring to when the vehicle encounters the most atmospheric stress and resistance, as well as successfully cut off main engines and separated from the first stage as planned. In this sense, Relativity proved that 3D-printed rockets can hold up during some of the most intense moments involved in an orbital launch, which is certainly reason enough to celebrate.

“Maiden launches are always exciting and today’s flight was no exception,” said Relativity Space launch commentator Arwa Tizani Kelly following Wednesday’s launch attempt.

Representatives for Relativity did not respond for comment at the time of writing. It is unknown if Wednesday’s results will affect future rocket launch timelines, including plans to test the company’s larger Terran R spacecraft in 2024.

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It costs a lot of money to get a satellite into orbit onboard a rocket—around $50 million minimum, to be more specific. While this massively restricts who can access the space industry, it’s not all bad.  According to NASA, there are approximately 27,000 hunks of space junk orbiting high above humans’ heads at the moment, with an average of 25 years before they fall from orbit and burn away upon atmospheric reentry.

Still, lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable. As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues.

[Related: How harpoons, magnets, and ion blasts could help us clean up space junk.]

Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost of $10,000, with a dramatically shortened lifespan estimated at just five years. What’s more, much of the microsat was constructed using accessible, off-the-shelf components, such as a popular $20 microprocessor powered by 48 AA batteries. In total, SBUDNIC—a play on Sputnik as well as an acronym of the students’ names—is likely the first of its kind to be made almost entirely from materials not specifically designed for space travel.

Additionally, the group attached a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton film that unfurled once the cubesat reached orbit roughly 520 kilometers above Earth. Since tracking began in late May 2022, the students’ satellite has already lowered down to 470 kilometers—well below its fellow rocketmates aboard the Falcon 9, which remain around 500 kilometers high.

[Related: These 3D printed engines can power space-bound rockets—or hypersonic weapons.]

“The theory and physics of how this works has been pretty well accepted,” explained Rick Fleeter, an adjunct associate professor of engineering at Brown, in a statement. “What this mission showed was more about how you realize it—how you build a mechanism that does that, and how you do it so it’s lightweight, small and affordable.”

With SBUDNIC’s resounding success, researchers hope implementing similar drag-sail designs at scale for future satellites could help drastically reduce their lifespans, thus reducing space clutter to ensure a safer environment for fellow orbiters, both human and artificial. And if $10,000 is still a bit out of your price range—give the team some time. “Here, we’re opening up that possibility to more people…We’re not breaking down all the barriers, but you have to start somewhere,” said Fleeter.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

ON THE COLORADO PLAINS just below the Rocky Mountains, near the quaint town of Berthoud, lies the headquarters of a space company called Ursa Major. There, just about an hour’s drive north of Denver, the company regularly test-fires rocket engines straight out the back of an onsite bunker. 

These engines, which are mostly 3D printed, aren’t just for launching satellites into space: They’re also of interest to the US military for propelling hypersonic vehicles. And their dual-use nature is a modern manifestation of the two faces that rocket technology has always had, which is that it is simultaneously useful for defensive and offensive purposes, and for cosmic exploration.

With this technology in hand, the company hopes to get both civilian and military projects off the ground.

3… 2…1… liftoff

Joe Laurienti, who founded Ursa Major in 2015, grew up not too far from Berthoud. His father worked for Ball Aerospace—the cosmic arm of the company that makes a whole lot of aluminum cans, and the former owner of Ursa Major’s current 90-acre site. “He was always working on satellites,” says Laurienti. But when Laurienti went to see one of his father’s payloads launch, he thought, “The thing my dad worked on is really important. It’s on top of this rocket. But the fire coming out the bottom is way more exciting.”

Laurienti has been chasing that fire ever since, his life consumed by propulsion: the technology that makes rockets go up fast enough to counteract gravity and reach orbit. As an adult, he joined SpaceX’s propulsion team, then slipped over to Blue Origin—hitting two of the trifecta of space-launch companies owned by famous billionaires. (The third is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.)

Soon, Laurienti saw others in the industry trying to start commercial rocket companies. He, perhaps biased, didn’t think that was a good idea: The heavy hitters that were founded first would obviously win, and the others would just be also-rans.

Nevertheless, he thought he had a startup to contribute to the mix: one that wouldn’t make entire rockets but just engines, to sell to rocket companies—much like General Electric makes engines that propel aircraft from Boeing or Airbus. “I spent my career on the engines, and that was always kind of a pain point” for the industry, says Laurienti.

Rocket engines, of course, are pretty important for heaving the space-bound vehicle upward. “A little over 50 percent of launch failures in the last 10 years are propulsion-related,” explains Bill Murray, Ursa’s vice president of engineering, who’s known Laurienti since they were both undergrads at the University of Southern California. You can take that to mean that half the complexity of a rocket exists inside the engines. Take that out of some rocket maker’s equation for them? Their job theoretically gets a lot easier.

“That’s the next wave of aerospace,” thought Laurienti. “It’s specialization.” 

With that idea, he sold his SpaceX stock in preparation for his new venture. “Instead of buying a house and starting a family, I bought a 3D printer, started the company, and made my mom cry,” he says.

3D printing engines—and entire rockets

The 3D printer was key to Laurienti’s vision. Today, 80 percent of a given Ursa engine is 3D printed with a metal alloy—and printed as a unit, rather than as separate spat-out elements welded together later. Most space companies use additive manufacturing (another way to refer to 3D printing) to some degree, but in general, they aren’t 3D printing the majority of their hardware. And they also aren’t, in general, designing their space toys to take advantage of 3D printing’s special traits, like making a complicated piece of hardware as one single part rather than hundreds.

That kind of mindset is also important at another company, Relativity Space, which has 3D printed basically an entire rocket—including the engines. Its Terran 1 rocket is the largest 3D printed object on Earth. The team attempted to launch the rocket on March 8 and 11, but it ultimately scrubbed the shots both times due to issues with ground equipment, fuel pressure, and automation systems.

Like Laurienti, Relativity founder Tim Ellis noticed a reluctance to fully embrace 3D printing tech at traditional space companies. At Blue Origin, his former employer, Ellis was the first person to do metal 3D printing; he was an intern desperate to finish creating a turbo pump assembly before his apprenticeship was over. Later, as a full employee, Ellis would go on to start and lead a metal 3D printing division at the company. 

But the way traditional space companies like Blue Origin usually do 3D printing didn’t work for him, because he felt that it didn’t always include designing parts to take advantage of additive manufacturing’s unique capabilities. “Every 3D printed part that Relativity has made would not be possible to build with traditional manufacturing,” says Ellis. The result of that approach has been “structures that ended up looking highly integrated, [because] so many parts of our rocket engine, for example, are built in single pieces.” Those one-part pieces would, in traditional manufacturing, have been made of up to thousands of individual pieces.

He thought more people would have come over to this side by now. “It’s been a lot slower than I’ve expected, honestly, to adopt 3D printing,” he says. “And I think it’s because it’s been slower for people to realize this is not just a manufacturing technology. It’s a new way to develop products.”

Five times the speed of sound

Initially, Ursa Major’s business model focused on space launch: getting things to orbit, a process powered by the company’s first engine, called Hadley. The design, currently still in production, slurps liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s about the same as the engines on Rocket Lab’s small Electron vehicle, or VirginOrbit’s LauncherOne spaceplane. 

But then an early customer—whose name Laurienti did not share—approached the company about a different application: hypersonics. These vehicles are designed to fly within Earth’s atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound. Usually, when people discuss hypersonics, they’re talking about fast-moving, maneuverable weapons. 

“Hey, we were buying rocket engines from someone else, but they’re not really tailored for hypersonics,” Laurienti recalls this customer saying. “You’re [in] early development. Can you make some changes?” 

They could, although it wouldn’t be as easy as flipping a switch. Hypersonic vehicles often launch from the air—from the bottom of planes—whereas rockets typically shoot from the ground on their way to space. Hypersonics also remain within the atmosphere. That latter part is surprisingly hard, in the context of high speeds.  

Just like rubbing your hand on fabric warms both up, rubbing a hypersonic vehicle against the air raises the temperature of both. “The atmosphere around you is glowing red, trying to eat your vehicle,” says Laurienti. That heat, which creates a plasma around the craft, also makes it hard to send communications signals through. Sustaining high speeds and a working machine in that harsh environment remains a challenge.

But the company seems to have figured out how to make Hadley, which is now in its fourth iteration, work in the contexts of both launching a rocket to space and propelling a hypersonic vehicle that stays within Earth’s atmosphere. As part of one of Ursa Major’s contracts, the military wanted the engine to power an aircraft called the X-60A, a program run by the Air Force Research Lab. The X-60A was built as a system on which hypersonic technologies could fly, to test their mettle and give engineers a way to clock the weapons’ behavior.

Hypersonic weapons—fast, earthbound missiles—aren’t actually faster than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which carry nuclear warheads and arc up into space and then back down to their targets. But they’re of interest and concern to military types because they don’t have to follow trajectories as predictable as ICBMs do, meaning they’re harder to track and shoot down. Russia, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, both Koreas, and Iran all have hypersonic weapon research programs.

To intercept these fast-moving weapons, a country might need its own hypersonics, so there’s a defensive element and an offensive one. That’s partly why the Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in hypersonics research, in addition to its desire to keep up with other countries’ technological abilities. That, of course, often makes other countries want to keep pace or get ahead, which can lead to everyone investing more money in the research.

A long-standing duality

Rocket technology, often touted as a way for humans to explore and dream grandly, has always had a military connection—not implicitly, but in a burning-bright obvious way. “[Nazi Germany’s] V-2 rocket was the progenitor to the intercontinental ballistic missiles,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, an assistant professor of history at Caltech, who focuses on space technologies and their afterlives.

Space-destined rockets were, at least at first, basically ballistic missiles. After all, a powerful stick of fire is a powerful stick of fire, no matter where it is intended to go. And that was true from the Space Age’s very beginning. “The R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik was one of the first operational ICBMs,” says Rand. The first American astronauts, she continues, shot to space on the tip of a modified Redstone ballistic missile. Then came Atlas rockets and Titan rockets, which even share the same names as the US missiles that were souped up to make them.

Rockets and flying weapons also share a kind of philosophical lineage, in terms of the subconscious meaning they impart on those who experience their fire. “They really shrunk the world, in a lot of ways, in time and space,” says Rand. “Accessing another part of the world, whether you were launching a weapon or a satellite, really made the world smaller.”

Today, in general, the development of missile technology has been decoupled from space-launch technology, as the rockets intended for orbit have been built specifically for that purpose. But it’s important not to forget where they came from. “They still all descend from the V-2 and from these military rockets,” says Rand. “And also most of them still launch DOD payloads.”

In a lot of ways, a 3D printed rocket engine that can both power a hypersonic vehicle and launch a satellite into orbit is the 21st-century manifestation of the duality that’s been there from the beginning. “Maybe it’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” says Rand. “What’s happening here—that was always kind of the case. But now we’re just making it very clear that, ‘Yeah, this has got to be used for both. We are building a company and this is our market and, yes, rockets are used for two main things: satellites and launching weapons.’”

‘A shock hitting your chest’ 

It’s no surprise that hypersonic capabilities have gotten their share of American hype—not all of it totally deserved. As defense researchers pointed out in Scientific American recently, the US has for decades put ballistic missiles on steerable maneuvering reentry vehicles, or MaRVs. Although they can only shift around toward the end of their flight, they can nonetheless change their path. Similarly, the scientists continued, while a lower-flying hypersonic might evade radar until it approaches, the US doesn’t totally rely on radar for missile defense: It also has infrared-seeking satellites that could expose a burning rocket engine like Hadley.

Still, the Air Force has been interested in what Ursa Major might be able to contribute to its hypersonic research, having funded seven programs with the company, according to the website USA Spending, which tracks federal contracts and awards. In fact, the Air Force is Ursa’s only listed government customer, having invested a few million in both the hypersonic and space-launch sides of the business. It’s also responsible for two of four of Relativity’s federal awards. 

Also of national security interest, of late, is decreasing the country’s reliance on Russian rocket engines for space launch. To that end, Ursa Major has a new engine, called Arroway, in development, which boasts 200,000 pounds of thrust. “Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch companies,” the company said last June. It is also developing a third, in-between engine called Ripley, a scaled-up version of Hadley. 

Today, Ursa Major tests their 3D printed engines up to three times daily. On any given day, visitors in Berthoud might unknowingly be near six or nine high-powered experiments. When the static rocket engine begins its test, huge vapor clouds from the cryogenics can envelop an engineer. 

“When it lights, it’s just a shock hitting your chest,” says Laurienti. A cone of flames shoots from the back of the engine, toward a pile of sand in the field behind the bunker. Onlookers face the fire head-on, their backs to the mountains and their eyes on the prize.

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The suit was designed and built by Houston-based company Axiom Space, using some heritage NASA technology, plus a large glass fishbowl helmet and black outer cover with orange and blue highlights. During the livestream, an Axiom engineer walked out on the stage in the redesigned suit and demonstrated the enhanced mobility offered by new joints in the legs, arms, and gloves compared to the Apollo- and Space Shuttle-era suits, twisting, turning, and kneeling down with relative ease. The suits are also designed with modular components in a range of sizes to better fit astronauts of different body shapes and weights.

“We’re developing a spacesuit for a new generation, the Artemis generation, the generation that is going to take us back to the moon and onto Mars,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said at the reveal. “When that first woman steps down on the surface of the moon on Artemis III, she’s going to be wearing an Axiom spacesuit.”

NASA had spent years developing its own next generation of spacesuits through its Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (eXMU) program, but in June 2022, the space agency awarded contracts to both Axiom and Collins Aerospace to develop spacesuits for future missions. Unlike the getups still in use on the International Space Station, NASA will only lease the suits, according to Lara Kearney, manager for NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program.

“Historically, NASA has owned spacesuits,” Kearney said at the event. The spacesuit contract with Axiom is more like the arrangement NASA makes with SpaceX for flying crew and cargo to the space station aboard Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft; the company owns and operates the equipment, and the agency simply pays for services.

Financial arrangements aside, the new spacesuits include an array of improvements and advancements, many derived from NASA research and others unique to Axiom. The suit consists of an inner bladder layer that holds pressurized air in, covered by a restraint layer that holds the shape of the bladder layer, according to Axiom deputy program manager for Extravehicular Activity, Russel Ralston. An outer flight insulation layer provides “cut resistance, puncture resistance, thermal insulation, and a variety of other other other features,” he explained at the event, and consists of multiple layers of material, including aluminized mylar.

The more mobile joints, which will allow astronauts to better handle tools and maneuver around the rocky, heavily shadowed lunar South Pole, were developed at Axiom, Ralston said. Other features, such as the rigid upper torso of the suit—useful for attaching the life support system and tools—and a visor placed further back on the helmet to allow for more visibility, were initially conceived by NASA.

The design also features an entirely new cooling system compared to older suits, will carry a high-definition camera mounted on the helmet, and allows astronauts to enter and exit the suit through a hatch on the back rather than coming as separate lower and upper body segments, as with the current spacesuits.

Importantly, given NASA’s commitment to seeing a female astronaut lead the way back to the moon, the new suits are designed to fit a wide range of body sizes for across sexes, according to Ralston. “We have different sizes of elements that we can swap out—a medium, large and small if you will—for different components,” he said at the press conference. “Then within each of those sizes, we also have an adjustability to where we can really tailor the suit to someone: the length of their leg or the length of their arm.”

Axiom is continuing to build on the spacesuit ahead of the Artemis III mission, including an outer insulation layer that will include pockets and other attachments for tools, and which will be made in white to reflect the harsh sunlight on the moon. The the black, orange and blue cover seen today is just a temporary protective cover to prevent damage to the suit’s inner layers while testing, and, per an Axiom press release, hides “proprietary design” elements.

Despite all the technological advances compared to the Apollo spacesuits of the 1960s and ‘70s, some core technologies are immune to improvement. Asked about whether Axiom found a better way for astronauts to use the restroom while wearing the new shells for up to eight hours on the lunar surface, Ralson didn’t sugarcoat it.

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The next private mission to the International Space Station will carry a private paying customer and three trained astronauts, with two members of Saudi Arabia’s nascent space program coming along for the ride.

Expected to launch sometime in the spring from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the Axiom Mission 2 will carry four crew members: Former NASA’s astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the mission, civilian John Shoffner of Knoxville, Tennessee, will be the pilot, and Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni from Saudi Arabia will serve as mission specialists for a day-long stay on the ISS.  

[Related: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

Ax-2 will mark the first time in the still relatively new world of commercial space missions where government and private astronauts fly together. It’s also the first time a woman is commanding a private mission. Axiom Mission 1, which launched to the ISS in April 2022, carried Israeli and Canadian men, but as paying private customers of Axiom Space, not representatives of either nation’s space programs.

“Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station cements our mission of expanding access to space worldwide,” Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini said in a prepared statement.

That may be more than a corporate platitude about democratizing outer space: Axiom could find there is a ready market of countries hoping to make their mark with astronauts of their own. “To date, fewer than a quarter of the countries of the world have sent even one representative to space,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analytical firm Astralytical. “Most cannot afford the expense and infrastructure to train and launch government astronauts on their own soil.”

While Axiom didn’t reveal the price paid by Shoffner to fly on the upcoming mission, each of the three Axiom-1 astronauts paid around $55 million for their time on the ISS. It’s a lot of money for most people, but not that much for a nation, and almost a bargain compared to building a space program from scratch.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, began training astronauts in September 2022 as part of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategic plan to diversify its economy and move away from dependence on oil production. A February 12 release by the Saudi Press Agency noted the kingdom hopes its astronauts participating in the Axiom-2 mission will “​​empower national capabilities in human spaceflight geared towards serving humanity and benefiting from the promising opportunities offered by the space industry.” Barnawi and Alqarni, a cancer researcher and fighter pilot, respectively, will become the second and third Saudi astronauts to fly in space following the flight of Sultan bin Salman Al Saud aboard the US Space Shuttle in 1985.

The decades-long gap shows that flights on existing government space programs can be hard to come by. Forcyzk notes that even among European Space Agency member states, very few ESA astronauts are selected to fly, with crewed launch vehicle seats via NASA even more precious since ESA ceased working with Roscosmos for launch services in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NASA is also “limited by the agreements that the US government has in place in terms of which countries to partner with in space and in what ways,” she says, detailed in bilateral agreements such as the Artemis Accords. “Commercial companies are not so limited.”

[Related: Ukraine was about to revive its space program. Then Russia invaded.]

That could work out well for Axiom Space, as the company is interested in more than just being an orbital outfitter and could use the expertise of trained astronauts on missions. Axiom is developing the first private station module to be added to the ISS with the intention to eventually expand that structure so it can one day be cut loose as a free flying space station. The company is one of the participants in NASA’s Commercial Destinations in Low-Earth Orbit program, in which the agency is encouraging private companies to develop private space stations that NASA can rent for certain periods of time after the planned retirement of the ISS in 2030.

In a future with multiple private space stations where NASA is just one of many tenants, there could be more opportunities for private and government trained astronauts from nations that haven’t yet had much chance to board a rocket in nearly 70 years of spaceflight. “Commercial human spaceflight has the potential to open up the doors to space globally in a way that government space agencies cannot do,” Forczyk says.

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In 2016, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined a plan to send human colonists to Mars. As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero. (The rover population, meanwhile, has climbed to three.)

Can you do whatever you want in space?

Who’s in charge once there’s a human population on Mars?

Although Musk’s hypothetical colony wouldn’t legally be an American colony, it would still be subject to American laws. That’s because even if the Mars mission launches from Kazakhstan or French Guiana, SpaceX is an American company and the colonists would be traveling on an American ship.

Maritime laws provide a good example of the type of legal system we could expect on the Red Planet. Like international waters, nobody can own Mars, so instead each ship needs to follow the rules of the country whose flag it flies under. And, just like sailors, Mars explorers are still expected to abide by those rules even when they’re off the ship.

[Related: Inside NASA’s plan to use Martian dirt to build houses on Mars]

Things get a little more complicated once you start adding other countries and companies into the Martian mix. On the International Space Station, for example, if an American astronaut were to hit a Russian astronaut over the head, first the US would have the right to determine whether a criminal act was committed. If the US doesn’t take action, then he could be tried under Russian jurisdiction.

In addition, any sizable, long-term colony on Mars is also going to need a local governing system. What form of government might or should take shape there? We’ll leave that discussion up to the political scientists.

Does Musk need permission to colonize Mars?

Currently, if you want to launch a rocket into space, you have to ask the government for permission. Then, depending on your activities in space, you have to apply for a second license to do specific things. For example, if you’re launching a telecom satellite, you’ll want to talk to the Federal Communications Commission.

However, as of yet “there is no license specifically for dealing with the legal implications of space colonization,” says von der Dunk. In fact, it’s not even clear which office would be in charge of giving out those licenses. NASA? The Federal Aviation Administration? A whole new branch of the government?

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

As the number of companies wanting to carry tourists into space increases, the government is going to need to figure out a licensing procedure soon.

Why bother enforcing Earth laws on another planet?

We’re supposed to avoid contaminating the celestial bodies that we explore, according to the Outer Space Treaty. Not only does that mean “don’t spread trash all over the solar system,” but it’s generally interpreted to mean “keep your microbes to yourself,” too.

If Earth microbes take root on Mars or Europa, we may never have the chance to find out if those worlds ever hosted alien life. So the major space agencies have a sort of “gentleman’s agreement,” says von der Dunk, to decontaminate their spacecraft as much as possible before sending them to other worlds. But human bodies are much harder to decontaminate, since our health depends on our microbes.

There a few sites on Mars that are considered deserving of heavier protection than others—areas where liquid water is thought to exist, for instance. Only the most thoroughly decontaminated vessels are supposed to enter those areas.

Will Elon Musk and his followers be expected to follow those same planetary protection “gentleman’s agreements”? The licensing process, mentioned above, could determine whether potential colonizers will be legally bound to avoid spreading their germs all over Mars.

“The US licensing process should make sure that the activities of Elon Musk and others do not violate key principles of planetary protection,” says von der Dunk. “The US has the power to make those binding of Elon Musk and whoever flies under his flag.”

[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]

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On Sunday, January 15, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off to orbit with a payload for just the fifth time since the company began flying the 70-ton capacity vehicle in 2018.

Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 p.m. EST, the partially reusable rocket carried USSF-67, a classified US Space Force mission consisting of two main payloads. The first held a military communications satellite destined for geosynchronous orbit, the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, or CBAS-2, according to a Space Force media release.

The second payload, the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA, or LDPE-3A, is a craft the Space Force uses for deploying multiple smaller payloads into low Earth orbit. In this case, the LDPE-3A carried five payloads, including a prototype of a secure space-to-ground communications device and another prototype designed for “enhanced situational awareness,” as per the Space Force announcement.

The most recent prior Falcon Heavy launch was also a Space Force mission, USSF-44, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 1. That was the first flight for the 229-foot-tall rocket since June 2019, a surprising slow pace given the sleeker Falcon 9 rocket launched a record-setting 48 times in 2022 alone.

What’s next for Falcon Heavy?

That the January 15 launch was only the fifth for the Falcon had nothing to do with Falcon Heavy itself, says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical. Instead, it was a result of delays in payloads for both NASA and the US military, including the USSF-44 mission launched in November, that kept the pace of launches low.

“It’s actually very common for payloads to be delayed,” Forcyzk notes. Meanwhile, the majority of SpaceX’s clientele don’t need a rocket as powerful as the Falcon Heavy, and so can fly on the more affordable Falcon 9, which the company uses to launch its own Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 launch costs $67 million, according to SpaceX pricing, while a Falcon Heavy launch rings up to $97 million.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful launch vehicle SpaceX currently operates and consists of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters strapped together side-by-side. The combined 27 Merlin engines provide 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, and when combined with an upper stage atop the middle booster, can lift up to 141,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

That makes the Falcon Heavy “SpaceX’s current solution for launching medium- and large-sized payloads to orbit or beyond,” Forczyk says, but it’s not necessarily a long-term option. SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster are still under development; as they become operational, there will be less and less need for Falcon Heavy launches. The company claims the more powerful Starship will generate 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and be capable of hauling more than 220,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

[Related: SpaceX’s new Starshield program will supply satellite networks to the military]

But Starship has yet to fly in orbit, and in the meantime, Falcon Heavy launches are ramping up, with at least five scheduled so far in 2023. Those launches consist of another Space Force mission and two commercial satellite launches in the spring. NASA’s Psyche mission to an asteroid of the same name is also scheduled to launch sometime in October. That means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the Falcon Heavy before it fades away.

“The very fact that Falcon Heavy still exists and is still getting customers means there is a demand for it,” Forcyzk says. “They’re going to be launching more customer payloads, which is going to bring in more revenue for the company. They will absolutely need that as they are ramping up development of Starship.”

What’s next for SpaceX?

SpaceX is working steadily on developing the Starship vehicle, which when paired with the reusable Super Heavy Booster, will make it the largest rocket ever flown. Work had been delayed by years due to a prolonged Programmatic Environmental Review between SpaceX and the FAA necessary for the regulator to issue SpaceX a license for orbital Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The process was finally completed in June 2022 with the FAA requiring some safety changes for the company’s site and protocols. 

The next major milestone for Starship would be an uncrewed orbital test flight, but it’s unclear when that may take place, according to Forczyk. “A year ago, in January 2022, I gave a prediction that SpaceX would have its first orbital launch of Starship in 2022. And I was wrong,” she says. “So I want to say that they’re gonna have their first successful orbital Starship mission in 2023, but I don’t want to be wrong again.”

[Related: Dark matter, Jupiter’s moons, and more: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

The company will need to get a move on, however. Not only is SpaceX contracted to fly a group of private citizens around the moon in the 2024, but NASA has contracted the company to create a lunar lander variant of Starship for use by NASA astronauts during the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2025.

In the meantime, SpaceX will continue launching everything from satellites to Crew Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station atop its Falcon 9 rockets. In August, its CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the company was aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Less than a month in, it’s already successfully completed four Falcon 9 flights.    

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According to Virgin Orbit, yesterday’s historic orbital launch attempt from its Cornwall Spaceport— a first within the UK—made “numerous significant first-time achievements” and represented an “important step forward” for the small satellite launch service. 

Many viewers of the private company’s launch livestream beg to differ, however, noting the LauncherOne rocket system’s wholesale failure to reach its low Earth orbital goal to deliver its nine payloads.

In fact, Ars Technica described Virgin Orbit’s mishap as not only wholesale communications and logistical failures, but a “devastating launch failure” setback. Some financial analysts even argue that the event could portend the beginning of the end for the financially struggling subset of billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic enterprise.

[Related: Why the Virgin Galactic spaceship didn’t reach orbit last weekend.]

According to multiple outlets, Monday’s event began smoothly off the coast of southwest Ireland. Shortly after taking off, a customized Boeing 747 jet named Cosmic Girl released Virgin Orbit’s 70-foot-long LauncherOne above a designated drop zone in what’s known as a horizontal launch, at which point the first stage rocket system successfully ignited. Following the completed burn, its upper stage rocket also burned as planned for roughly five minutes before LauncherOne entered a long coast.

From there, unfortunately, things got a bit murky. Despite the webcast’s telemetry readings showing a sudden, significant altitude drop, the livestream host chalked up the issue to potentially erratic readings. Soon after, Virgin Orbit’s official Twitter account tweeted that its rocket and nine payloads successfully reached orbit. Around 35 minutes after the initial launch, Virgin Orbit then tweeted, “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information,” while scrubbing its earlier announcement of success. As Ars Technica notes, the live stream continued for another half an hour without further explanation or clarification regarding the failures. The Boeing 747 crew meanwhile returned safely back to Earth.

It is still unclear what exactly went wrong for the long-touted “Start Me Up” mission, named after the 1981 song from The Rolling Stones. The UK launch was supposed to be a major milestone for the country, with tickets for viewing the takeoff reportedly selling out faster than the nation’s annual major music festival, Glastonbury. An estimated 2,500 people attended, alongside UK government officials. Virgin Orbit’s previous four launches, while all successful, occurred stateside for the US-based company. Monday’s Cornwall Spaceport mission was meant to be the first in an expanding line of UK-based projects.

[Related: The wind on Mars may be a viable power source after all.]

“As a country, we build more satellites than anywhere else outside of the US. So it helps to develop an end-to-end capability so that we can do everything, ” Ian Annett, deputy CEO of the UK Space Agency, said in a pre-launch press briefing on Sunday.

“Though the mission did not achieve its final orbit, by reaching space and achieving numerous significant first-time achievements, it represents an important step forward,” reads Virgin Orbit’s official press release following the failure. Two other similar Virgin Orbit spaceports in Scotland are nearing final preparations for their own respective micro-launches later this year, although it remains to be seen how this week’s disaster affects those plans. As of writing, the company’s stock price was down almost 17 percent. 

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis]

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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ON A FOGGY midsummer morning 54 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California, SpaceX engineers hustled through a ritual they’d been through before. They loaded a Falcon 9 rocket with tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen, a propellant combo that brought the craft’s nine Merlin engines roaring to life with 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Soon after, the machine shot through the stratosphere, ready to dispatch 46 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. But the rocket made another delivery too: a trail of sooty particles that lingered over the Pacific hours after blastoff.

The launch was the company’s 32nd of 2022, maintaining its current pace of firing off close to one rocket per week. With a record number of rides shuttling equipment, astronauts, and über-rich tourists to and from Earth, the high skies have never been busier. Between government programs like China’s Long March and private shots like SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, the world tallied some 130 successful launches in 2021 and is on pace to finish 2022 with even more. Many trips, however, spew tiny bits of matter into the stratosphere, an area that hasn’t seen much pollution firsthand yet.

Climate scientists are still working to fully understand how rocket residue affects the planet’s UV shield. But even if they find warning signs, some organization or authority figure would have to step up to establish emission standards for the industry. In the meantime, a few aerospace companies are exploring sustainable alternatives, like biofuels, to power their far-flying systems.

The increasing frequency of launches has researchers like Martin N. Ross, an atmospheric physicist and project engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research center in California, worried about the future of the stratosphere—and the world. Predictions for rocket traffic in the coming decades point dramatically up, like a Falcon 9 on a pad. Should the sun heat up enough of the particles from the fuel trails, as some computer models suggest it will, space travel could become a significant driver of climate change. “This is not a theoretical concern,” Ross says.

Unless you are reading this while floating aboard the International Space Station, you are breathing air from the troposphere—the bottommost band of the Earth’s atmosphere, which extends upward for several miles. The layer just above that, the stratosphere, sits anywhere from 6 to 31 miles above sea level and is deathly dull by comparison: There are barely any clouds there, so it doesn’t rain. The air is thin and freezing and contains ozone, an oxygen-based gas that protects all life from solar radiation but is toxic to the lungs.

Most greenhouse gases, including the 900 million tons of carbon dioxide produced by the aviation industry each year, trap heat in the troposphere. But rockets rip their vapors at higher altitudes, making them the single direct source of emissions in the upper stratosphere.

Acid in the sky

The stratosphere was people-free until 1931, when Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his aide floated nearly 10 miles up, and back down, with a 500,000-cubic-foot hydrogen balloon. They were the first of many. By the 1960s, the US and Soviet space programs were regularly shooting rockets to the edge of the sky.

As astronaut and cosmonaut programs evolved during the Cold War, so did climate change research—especially studies of carbon dioxide pollution and atmospheric degradation. In the 1970s, NASA’s space shuttle program piqued the interest of atmospheric chemists like Ralph Cicerone and Richard Stolarski, who then attempted some of the first investigations into stratospheric rocket exhaust. The shuttle’s solid engines used a crystalline compound called ammonium perchlorate, which releases hydrochloric acid as a byproduct. Chlorine is highly destructive to ozone—the Environmental Protection Agency estimates a lone atom can break down tens of thousands of molecules of the atmospheric gas.

In a June 1973 report to NASA, Cicerone, Stolarski, and their colleagues calculated that 100 shuttle launches a year would produce “quite small” amounts of chlorine-containing compounds. But they warned that these chemicals could build up over time. Cicerone and Stolarski ultimately focused their attention on volcanic eruptions, because those belches represented larger and more dramatic releases of chlorine.

In the 1980s, British meteorologists revealed that the ozone layer in the Antarctic stratosphere was thinning. They identified the culprit as chlorine from aerosol spray cans and to O3-munching chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons from other human-made sources. That hole began to heal only after the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the first international agreement ever ratified by every member state of the United Nations. It phased out the use of CFCs, setting the atmosphere on a decades-long path to recovery.

In the wake of that treaty, “Anything that emitted chlorine was under suspicion,” Ross says. But it remained unclear whether rocket emissions too could alter the ozone layer.

For the following two decades, the US Air Force enlisted the Aerospace Corporation and atmospheric scientists like Darin Toohey, now a University of Colorado Boulder professor, to study the chemical composition of rocket exhaust. Using NASA’s WB-57 aircraft, a jet bomber able to fly 11 miles high and retrofitted for scientific observations, teams directly sampled emissions from American launch vehicles including Titan, Athena, and Delta into the early 2000s.

Freshly collected material from the plumes gave the researchers a firmer grasp on the ways solid propellant interacted with air. For instance, they examined the particles that were expelled when shuttle boosters burned aluminum powder as fuel—and how those bits reacted to ozone. The effect wasn’t as severe as they had feared, Ross says. Though the plumes depleted nearby ozone within the first hour after a launch, the layer was quickly restored after the emissions diffused.

Meanwhile, at the turn of the 21st century, blastoffs were decreasing in the US and Russia. After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, killing its seven-person crew, NASA suspended other flights in the program for two years. Missions using the WB-57 aircraft to observe exhaust came to an end in 2005. Six years later, NASA officially retired the shuttle system.

New rockets, more soot

When SpaceX sent its first liquid-fueled rocket into orbit in 2008, it set the stage for more privately developed spaceflights. But the chemical it pumped into its marquee machines wasn’t anything new. A refined version of kerosene, Rocket Propellant-1 or RP-1, has powered generations of rockets, including the first-stage engines of the spaceships that ferried Apollo astronauts to the moon. It was well known and relatively cheap.

Sensing an aerospace trend, Ross, Toohey, and their colleague Michael Mills calculated what emissions would be produced by a fleet of similarly hydrocarbon-powered rockets anywhere between the Earth’s surface and 90 miles aloft. Their predictions, which they published in 2010 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, turned up something unexpected: an emissions signature full of black carbon, the same contaminant belched by poorly tuned diesel engines on the ground. “It seemed to have a disproportionate impact on the upper atmosphere,” Toohey says.

Those dark particles are “very, very good at absorbing the sun’s radiation,” adds Eloise Marais, an atmospheric chemist at University College London. Think of how you heat up faster on a hot summer day while wearing a black shirt rather than a white one, and you get the idea.

Near the ground, rain or other precipitation will flush dark carbon out of the air. But in the stratosphere, above rain clouds, soot sticks around. “As soon as we start to put things in that layer of the atmosphere, their impact is much greater, because it’s considerably cleaner up there than it is down here,” Marais says. In other words, the pristineness of the stratosphere makes it more vulnerable to the sun’s searing rays.

Black carbon particles can persist for about two years in the stratosphere before gravity drags them back down to the ground. They also heat up as they wait: In a study published this June in the journal Earth’s Future, Marais and her colleagues calculated that soot from rockets is about 500 times more efficient at warming the air than that from planes or emitters on the surface.

Another recent model run by Ross and Christopher Maloney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, came to a similar conclusion about the dark stuff’s impact on climate change. Should space traffic increase tenfold within the next two decades, the stratosphere will warm by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, they predict.

That uptick is enough that “stratospheric dynamics [will] begin to shift,” Maloney says. Currents carry naturally produced ozone from hotter tropical regions toward cooler poles. If rockets scorch a pool of air above the Northern Hemisphere, where most launches take place, that warm-to-cold path could be disturbed—disrupting the circulation that ferries fresh O3 northward. The upshot: a thinner ozone layer at the higher latitudes and a toastier stratosphere overall.

Sizing up old launches can help clear up some of the gray areas in this process. In a paper published this July in the journal Physics of Fluids, a pair of researchers at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus simulated the plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from 2016. According to their model, in the first 2.75 minutes of flight, the craft generated 116 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from about 70 cars.

Toohey sees these projections as validation of the black carbon concerns he raised more than a decade ago—but thinks they’re not as compelling as direct observations would be. There has been “basically no progress, except additional model studies, telling us the original hypothesis was correct,” he says. What’s needed, he adds, is detection in the style of the earlier WB-57 missions. For example, spectrometers planted on the sides of spaceships could measure black carbon.

Policy is another limiting factor. The International Air Transport Association, an influential trade organization, has set carbon-neutral goals for airlines for 2050, but there is no comparable target for space—in part because there is no equivalent leader in the industry or regulatory body like the Federal Aviation Administration. “We don’t have an agreed-upon way to measure what rocket engines are doing to the environment,” Ross says.

While there are newer fuels out there, there’s no good way to determine how green they are. Even the one that burns cleanest, hydrogen, requires extra energy to be refined to its pure molecular form from methane or water. “The picture is very complex, as all propellants have environmental impact,” says Stephen Heister, who studies aerospace propulsion at Purdue University.

Atmospheric scientists say solutions to preserve the stratosphere must be developed collaboratively, as with the unified front that made the Montreal Protocol a juggernaut. “The way to deal with it is to start getting people with common interests together,” Toohey says, to find a sustainable path to space before lasting damage is done.

Photo credits for lead image: Left to right, top to bottom: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Zheng Bin/Xinhua/Getty Images; Yang Guanyu/Xinhua/Getty Images; Cai Yang/Xinhua/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Korea Aerospace Research Institute/Getty Images; SOPA Images Ltd./Alamy (2); Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post/Getty Images; GeoPix/NASA/Joel Kowsky/Alamy; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Zheng Bin/Xinhua/Getty Images

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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It’s been half a century since humans last orbited the moon, but SpaceX plans to return next year. The first private, all-civilian lunar loop was first announced in 2018 by Elon Musk and Japanese multibillionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who reportedly bought every seat on an upcoming flight aboard SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship shuttle. Maezawa subsequently put out an open call last year for potential travel mates from around the world, and has just released his official flight roster.

As announced, the eight passengers (who all have multi-role bios on the dearMoon Crew site) will include rapper Choi Seung Hyun, aka T.O.P from the South Korean boy band BIGBANG, DJ Steve Aoki, photographer and host of the popular space-themed YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd. Two Earth-minded filmmakers, Brendan Hall and Karim Iliya, artist Rhiannon Adam, actor Dev D. Joshi, and designer and non-profit founder Yemi A.D. round out the final eight guests. The voyage’s two alternates are Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington and the dancer Miyu.

[Related: Meet SpaceX’s first moon tourist, Yusaku Maezawa.]

Maezawa’s project, dubbed dearMoon, is billed as a six-day circumlunar sojourn meant to inspire its passengers’ respective artwork and careers to create art in their respective fields. Maezawa claims his open application received over 1 million entries from “249 countries and regions.”

While a first on many fronts, this actually won’t be Maezawa’s introduction to space. Last year, he rocketed up to the ISS for a 12-day visit, which he documented in a series of YouTube videos. And it’s not the only time an all-citizen team has taken to space, as a four-man all-civilian crew orbited Earth in another SpaceX mission last year.

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon.]

The SpaceX/dearMoon trip is tentatively scheduled to launch sometime next year aboard the private spacefaring company’s massive, 165-foot-tall Starship rocket, which Musk intends to one day utilize for his overarching goal of reaching Mars. Although Starship has not flown since May 2021, SpaceX hopes to conduct a test later this month ahead of next year’s slated dearMoon excursion. NASA is also relying on Starship for its own lunar plans, and intends to use it to reach the moon’s south pole as part of its ongoing Artemis project sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Of course, take all those dates with a grain of moon dust. Musk’s timelines are well-known for their optimism.

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Starlink announced earlier this week the debut of Starshield. This new venture will ostensibly serve as the company’s defense industry counterpoint with the US military as its first customer. First launched in 2019 through Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, Starlink aims to provide high-speed, reliable satellite internet service virtually anywhere on Earth within the next few years via a satellite constellation numbering in the tens of thousands. Over 3,000 small Starlink satellites are already in low Earth orbit to offer internet connectivity within 40 countries so far, according to the company’s count.

As CNBC reported earlier this week, details are currently vague regarding Starshield’s full scope, although the venture’s official website explains it “leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts.” The site also lists three areas of “initial focus,” including imagery, communications, and hosted payloads that will allow government contracts to ostensibly hitch a ride on Starshield rockets for separate projects.

[Related: SpaceX says it can no longer fund Ukraine’s Starlink access.]

Starshield will also offer “inter-satellite laser communications” links that can be joined with partner satellites “so as to connect other companies’ government systems ‘into the Starshield network,’” explains CNBC.

Starshield will likely deepen SpaceX’s ties with the Department of Defense, which has long been the umbrella company’s most lucrative and largest customer. The US military previously made it clear that it is determined to expand its next-generation satellite capabilities—earlier this year, the Pentagon announced $1.8 billion in contracts for companies including Northrop Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. Starshield’s debut shows SpaceX is aiming to cement its place among the largest and most influential defense contractors, and is leaning into its security features to do so. Its website boasts “additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.”

[Related: A solar storm blasted 40 SpaceX satellites out of orbit.]

Although Starshield’s debut represents a major new market for Elon Musk’s company, Starlink itself is already being used for military operations in Ukraine as national forces work to repel Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country. Earlier this fall, Musk threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine, citing mounting costs, although later backtracked on the statement.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is not restricting its upcoming partnerships to purely military organizations. In October, the company began discussions with longtime customers at NASA about ways to potentially “bump” the Hubble Telescope into a higher orbit. If successful, it could extend the iconic project’s lifespan by another few years.

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The International Space Station is generally a pretty busy place, and this week sounds like no exception. Arriving this week aboard SpaceX’s 26th commercial resupply mission (CRM) is a host of supplies for upcoming experiments, including microbes capable of devouring plastic, developing shelf stable yogurt-like concoctions, and a crop of space tomatoes.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

First up is Pseudomonas putida, the plastic-craving microorganism. Organized by SeedLabs in a collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, the upcoming experiments will test out the microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on Earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Martian explorations. As Fast Company explained earlier today, Pseudomonas putida is not only capable of breaking down PET, an extremely common plastic often used in bottling and packaging, but also turning those broken down compounds into β-ketoadipic acid, “a nylon monomer that can be made into fabric or used in existing manufacturing processes.”

Researchers are hopeful that the microbes’ development in a zero-gravity, high UV radiation-environment might actually strengthen the organisms, which would be a boon both for future space missions as well as humans’ attempts to rein in pollution here on Earth. “Studying how the bacteria fare in space also generally helps glean more information about the microbes’ biological makeup, and if they could withstand changing environmental conditions on Earth,” Fast Company adds.

Pseudomonas putida isn’t the only microscopic arrivals aboard the ISS this week. As Tech Crunch notes, astronauts are receiving additional microbes as part of “the second phase of an attempt to create a shelf-stable pre-yogurt mix that, when hydrated, results in the bacteria naturally producing a target nutrient” like glucose and other complex molecules for medications. Gaining a better understanding of how these processes develop in space could also help future explorations’ achieve greater self-sufficiency in producing meals and necessary drugs.

[Related: NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions.]

Speaking of meals: ISS denizens have a batch of cosmic tomatoes to enjoy. These “Red Dwarf” miniature tomatoes are part ongoing experiments aimed at growing healthy food in micro- and zero-gravity environments using only artificial lighting. While recent work focused on leafy greens like spinach, the Veg-05 project is concerned with larger products like the red fruit—yes, fruit, remember? After a 104-day growth period from seed to finished food, astronauts will reportedly get a chance to conduct their own taste test. No word on whether space-bound bacon and lettuce will be available on the ISS by then, unfortunately.

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After more than three years orbiting the planet, the LightSail 2 has made its descent back into Earth’s atmosphere, burning up in a fiery finale at some point yesterday.

“LightSail 2 is gone after more than three glorious years in the sky, blazing a trail of lift with light, and proving that we could defy gravity by tacking a sail in space,” Bill Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society said in a press release. “The mission was funded by tens of thousands of Planetary Society members, who want to advance space technology.”

The fascinating piece of technology, launched into orbit via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in June 2019, used a four-section solar sail of around 244 square feet to project it around the planet a total of 18,000 times in its run. That’s about five million miles for the tiny spacecraft made up of a 31-inch-tall satellite. Its orbit began around 450 miles above the planet, where the atmosphere is still thick enough to eventually create drag on the craft and pull it back down.

[Related: LightSail 2′s success could pave the way for more sun-powered spacecrafts.]

The LightSail used photons from the sun’s rays, which create momentum after they bounce off of the solar cell made from Mylar, a super shiny reflective polyester film. Using weightless energy from the sun alone, the craft managed to sail at around 16,765 mph back in 2019, but could theoretically keep speeding up under constant sunlight. According to The Pllanetary Society, in just a month of sunlight, the craft’s speed could increase over 300 miles per hour. 

Despite the demise of the actual LightSail, images from the mission can still be viewed online. The Earth-bound team behind the craft can continue to analyze data and publish their findings from the years LightSail spent circling the globe. 

The goal of LightSail was to bring about an affordable era of space research using solar sailing technology, which will live on in future missions, such as the NEA Scout and ACS3 which both utilize solar sails. 

“We have braved the harbor of Earth and found that a small craft can sail and steer,” Bruce Betts, LightSail program manager and chief scientist for The Planetary Society, said in a release. “Best wishes to those who sail similar craft into the vast ocean of space—we look forward to an exciting future of exploration, proud that we have played a role. Sail on!”

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SpaceX just broke Falcon Heavy‘s 40-month hiatus earlier this morning, once again launching the world’s most powerful rocket into orbit at 9:42 a.m. ET. The three-pronged assembly took off with five million pounds of thrust before soon shedding its booster rockets as it entered the upper atmosphere. Two of the boosters made their successful synchronized landing on the nearby Florida coast, while the third was purposefully left to plummet into the ocean due to fuel constraints, per the US Space Force rundown.

Although SpaceX has previously attempted to safely land all three of Falcon Heavy’s modified Falcon 9 boosters for future reuse, it has never been able to pull off the impressive feat. That said, mission planners have come incredibly close to doing so in the past. Watch a recording of the launch below.

[Related: SpaceX and NASA want to bump Hubble into higher orbit.]

Very little is known about the military’s highly classified mission, dubbed USSF-44, although the government’s official release notes that the Falcon Heavy has already delivered “multiple” top secret satellites for the US Space System Command’s Innovation and Prototyping Delta program. Per the program’s website, the project concerns “rapid prototyping development, prototype space operations, worldwide deployable telemetry, tracking, and control, prototyping capability maturation, and executing the Department of Defense Space Test Program.”

[Related: NASA’s new investigation seeks to explain unusual phenomena in the sky.]

Last seen in action back in April 2019, SpaceX had two other previous Falcon Heavy missions delayed due to issues regarding payload readiness. While Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful rocket available, two other designs from both SpaceX and NASA are dramatically surpass its abilities. SpaceX’s own Starship is in its final stages of development, and when launched is projected to give off 17 million pounds of thrust via its Super Heavy Booster alone. Meanwhile, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) generates 8.8 million pounds of thrust, and is scheduled to finally launch next month as part of the unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the moon.

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NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann made history last week, becoming not only the first Native American woman in space, but also the first woman to command a Crew Dragon capsule. SpaceX’s Dragon Endurance spacecraft dropped off Mann and the crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission. Mann is the mission commander, with NASA’s Josh Cassada serving as the pilot. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina will serve as mission specialists for their expedition.

Mann is enrolled in Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in northern California and is a colonel in the US Marine Corps. She served as a test pilot in the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet and was deployed twice aboard aircraft carriers in support of combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Related: Meet the next generation of American spaceflight]

In June 2013, she was selected as one of eight members of the 21st NASA astronaut class. To prepare for her time in space, Mann completed intensive instruction in International Space Station systems, spacewalks, Russian language training, robotics, physiological training, T-38 flight training, and water and wilderness survival training, according to NASA. Mann’s training was complete in July 2015 and she has since served as the T-38 safety and training officer and as the assistant to the chief astronaut for exploration. She led the astronaut corps in the development of the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System, and Exploration Ground Systems for missions to the Moon.

In an interview with Indian Country Today in August, Mann said, “it’s very exciting,” referring to being the first Native woman in space. “I think it’s important that we communicate this to our community, so that other Native kids, if they thought maybe that this was not a possibility or to realize that some of those barriers that used to be there are really starting to get broken down.”

[Related: SpaceX and NASA are studying how to bump Hubble into higher orbit]

Crew-5 will be aboard the ISS conducting more than 200 science experiments aimed to help prepare for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, such as cardiovascular health, bioprinting, and fluid behavior in microgravity. “One of the ones that I’m looking most forward to is called the biofabrication facility. And it is literally 3D printing human cells, which to me sounds so futuristic, right?” she enthusiastically told ICT.

The six month mission is the latest stage in commercial and public space exploration.

“Missions like Crew-5 are proof we are living through a golden era of commercial space exploration. It’s a new era powered by the spirit of partnership, fueled by scientific ingenuity, and inspired by the quest for new discoveries,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, in a press release.

John Herrington is the only other Indigenous American to have entered orbit. Herrington (Chickasaw) flew on a 2002 space shuttle mission and logged over 330 hours in space and has flown 30 different spacecraft before retiring from NASA in 2005.

“I feel very proud,” Mann told Reuters before lift-off. “It’s important that we celebrate our diversity and really communicate that specifically to the younger generation.” When referring to the excitement that her trip has generated among some Native American communities, she said, “that’s really, I think, an audience that we don’t get an opportunity to reach out to very often.”

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The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back dazzling images and critical data back to Earth for 32 years, but nothing lasts forever, even space telescopes. In an effort to give the telescope a longer lifespan, NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement. They will be studying the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to use SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to boost the Hubble into a higher orbit at no cost to the government.

The study is designed to help NASA understand the commercial possibilities of missions like this, but there currently aren’t any plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission to the telescope or commercially compete in this space, according to NASA.

In partnership with the Polaris Program (a planned human space flight company), SpaceX proposed this study as a way to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions in space. The Polaris Program is funded by billionaire Jason Isaacman, who bought three flights to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft earlier this year. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk with the goal of reducing the costs of space exploration and one day colonize Mars. In 2020, Dragon became the first private spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

This study is non-exclusive, so other space exploration companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model. It’s expected to take six months, and will look at technical data from both the Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to determine whether it is possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.

“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in a press release. “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

The Hubble and Dragon will be the test models in this study, but portions of the mission concept may be applicable to other spacecraft. It could be particularly applicable to those in near-Earth orbit like the Hubble, according to NASA. Hubble operates about 335 miles (539 kilometers) above the Earth in an orbit that is slowly decaying over time. Orbital decay like this leads to the gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies. Hubble has now brushed against the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere and is now about 18 miles (30 kilometers) closer to Earth than it was in 2009. Re-boosting Hubble into a higher, and more stable orbit could add multiple years of operations to its life.

“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging, complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX, in a press release. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”

NASA plans to safely de-orbit or dispose of Hubble at the end of its lifetime.

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From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read the series and explore all our 150th anniversary coverage here.

Lately, all eyes are turned towards the moon. NASA has another launch attempt tentatively scheduled next week for the highly-anticipated Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to orbit Earth’s satellite, one of the first steps to set up an outpost on the lunar surface. But humans—and science fiction writers—have long imagined a moon base, one that would be a fixture of future deep space exploration. About five years before Sputnik and 17 years before the Apollo missions, the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur C. Clarke, penned a story for the 1952 April issue of Popular Science describing what he thought a settlement on the moon could look like. Clarke, who would go on to write 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, envisioned novel off-Earth systems, including spacesuits that would “resemble suits of armor,” glass-domed hydroponic farms, water mining and oxygen extraction for fuel, igloo-shaped huts, and even railways. 

“The human race is remarkably fortunate in having so near at hand a full-sized world with which to experiment,” Clarke wrote. “Before we aim at the planets, we will have had a chance of perfecting our techniques on our satellite.” 

Since Clarke’s detailed moon base musings, PopSci has frequently covered the latest prospects in lunar stations, yet the last time anyone even set foot on the moon was December 1972. Despite past false starts, like the Constellation Program in the early 2000s, NASA’s Artemis program aims to change moon base calculus. This time, experts say that the air—and attitude—surrounding NASA’s latest bid for the moon is charged with a different kind of determination. 

“You can talk to anyone in the [space] community,” says Adrienne Dove, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida. “You can talk to the folks who have been around for 50 years, or the new folks, but it just feels real this time.” Dove’s optimism doesn’t just come from the Artemis 1 rocket poised for liftoff at Kennedy Space Center. She sees myriad differentiating factors this time, including the collaboration between private companies and NASA, the growing international support for the space governance framework, the Artemis Accords, and the competition from rival nations like China and Russia to stake out a lunar presence. Perhaps one of the biggest arguments from moon base supporters is the need for a stepping stone to send humans even deeper into space. “We want to learn how to live on the moon so we can go to Mars,” Dove says.  

[Related: How Tiangong station will make China a force in the space race]

Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut who returned to Earth in March 2022 after spending a US record-breaking 355 consecutive days on the International Space Station (ISS), underscores the opportunity. “We’ve got this planetary object, the moon, not too far away. And we can buy down the huge risk of going to Mars by learning how to live for long durations on another planetary object that’s relatively close.”

Ever since Sputnik made its debut as the first artificial satellite in 1957, the Soviet Union deployed several short-lived space stations; NASA’s Apollo Missions enabled humans to walk on the moon; NASA’s space shuttle fleet (now retired) flew 135 missions; the ISS has been orbiting the Earth for more than two decades; more than 4,500 artificial satellites now sweep through the sky; and a series of private companies, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, have begun launching rockets and delivering payloads into space. 

But no moon base. 

That’s because exploring the moon is not like exploring the Earth. Besides being 240,000 miles away on a trajectory that requires slicing through dense atmosphere while escaping our planet’s gravitational grip, and then traversing the vacuum of space, once on the moon, daily temperatures range between 250°F during the day and -208°F at night. Although there may be water in the form of ice, it will have to be mined and extracted to be useful. The oxygen deprived atmosphere is so thin it can’t shield human inhabitants from meteor impacts of all sizes or solar radiation. There’s no source of food. Plus, lunar soil, or regolith, is so fine, sharp, and electrostatically charged, it not only clogs machinery and lungs but can also cut through clothes and flesh. 

“It’s a very hostile environment,” says Dove, whose specialty is lunar dust. She’s currently working on multiple lunar missions, like Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS, which will deploy robotic landers to explore the moon in advance of humans arriving on the future crewed Artemis missions. While Dove acknowledges the habitability challenges, she’s quick to cite a range of solutions, starting with the initial tent-pitching location: the moon’s south pole. “That region seems to be rich with resources in terms of ice, which can be used as water or as fuel,” Dove says. Plus, there’s abundant sunlight on mountain peaks, where solar panels could be stationed. She adds that “there might be some rare earth elements that can be really useful.” Rare earth elements—there are 17 metals in that category—are, well, rare on Earth, yet they’re essential to electronics manufacturing. Finding them on the moon would be a boon.

A PopSci story in July 1985 detailed elaborate plans proposed by various space visionaries to colonize the moon and make use of its resources. Among the potential technologies were laboratory and habitat modules, a factory to extract water and oxygen for subsistence and fuel, and mining operations for raw moon minerals—a precious resource that could come in handy and provide income for settlers. While NASA may provide the needed boost to get a moon base going, it’s the promise of an off-world gold rush for these rare, potentially precious elements that could solidify and expand it. 

“My hope is that this is just the beginning of a commercial venture on the Moon,” Vande Hei says. He’s looking forward to seeing how businesses will find ways to be profitable by making use of resources on the moon. “At some point, we’ve got to be able to travel and not rely on the logistics chain starting from Earth,” Vande Hei adds, taking the long view. “We’ve got to be able to travel places and use the resources.”

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

And space is lucrative. In 2020, the global space industry generated roughly $370 billion in revenues, a figure based mostly on building rockets and satellites, along with the supporting hardware and software. Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimates that the industry could generate $1 trillion in revenue in less than two decades, a growth rate predicted to be driven in no small part by the US military’s new Space Command branch. But those rising numbers mostly reflect economic activity in Earth’s orbit and what it might take to get set up on the moon—but they do not reflect the potential to begin converting the moon into an economic powerhouse. What happens next is anyone’s guess. The big dollar signs are one reason, no doubt, that the tech moguls behind private ventures like SpaceX and Blue Origin are investing heavily in space now.

The progress towards deeper space travel—and potential long-term human colonization on the moon or beyond—begs for larger ethical and moral conversations. “It’s a little bit Wild West-y,” says Dove. Although the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the more recent Artemis Accords strive “to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy,” according to NASA’s website, there are no rules or regulations, for instance, to govern activities like mining or extracting from the moon valuable rare earth elements for private profit. “There’s a number of people looking at the policy implications and figuring out how we start putting in place policies and ethics rules before all of this happens,” Dove adds. But, if the moon does not cough up its own version of unobtanium—the priceless element mined in the film Avatar—or if regulations are too draconian, it will be difficult for a nascent moon-economy to sustain itself before larger and more promising planetary outposts, like Mars, come to fruition and utilize its resources. After all, the building and sustainability costs and effort have been leading obstacles of establishing a moon base ever since the Apollo program spurred interest in more concrete plans.

Dove’s not really worried that private companies will pull out of the space sector—there’s little doubt they will find a way to profit. Rather, she views politics as the moon base program’s chief vulnerability. “Politics always concerns me with any of these big endeavors,” she adds. Not only domestic politics but international politics will be at play. “We see that with the ISS.”

As a retired military officer who was living on the ISS with Russian cosmonauts when Russia invaded Ukraine, Vande Hei also worries about international conflicts derailing space programs. “If we have a world war in Europe, if we’re just struggling to exist [on Earth], exploring space is not going to be at the top of the priority list.” But he also sees a bright side. He views international competition—or a moon base race—as a healthy way to create a sense of urgency. Vande Hei estimates that “a moon base is something we could do within [this] generation.”

Dove also sees the opportunities that laboratory facilities on the moon could open up for future space research—including her own. “The moon is very interesting in terms of understanding the history of Earth,” she says. “I would love to go do science on the moon.”

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Space—the final frontier—is getting more crowded. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are now almost 5,500 satellites orbiting Earth, and that number is only going to increase over the next few years. In particular, private enterprises are planning to launch communications satellites at an unprecedented rate. That’s why Iridium, OneWeb, and SpaceX, three of the biggest players, have jointly launched a guide to orbital safety best practices. So, if you’ve plans to deploy your own satellite or are merely curious as to what’s required to do so safely, read on. 

The guidelines were created by the three companies and were “facilitated by” the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, SpaceX is the largest operator of satellites—by far. It has a whopping 2,219 satellites in orbit as part of its Starlink constellation, which dwarves everyone else, including NASA (73), the US Air Force (95), and the Russian military (73). OneWeb, another satellite internet operator, is a distant second with 427 satellites in orbit. Iridium, a satellite communications operator, is able to cover the planet with just 75 satellites, though its voice and text call services have far lower bandwidth requirements than full-blown internet connections. 

In the introduction to the best practices guidelines, the three companies explain their reasoning: They want to get ahead of regulations that would limit them too much. “Given the rapid innovation occurring in the space sector, governments have a responsibility to put appropriate regulatory structures in place that keep pace with and promote this innovation,” the report explains. “To be effective, these regulations must strike the appropriate balance of maintaining sustainable operations in space without stifling innovation or preventing new applications that bring tangible benefits to the public and governments.” (In other words, they would like to keep doing what they’re doing.)

The proposed best practices are divided into four stages: Design Time (A), Pre-Launch and Early Orbit (B), On Orbit (C), and Satellite Disposal (D). Each stage has a number of key practices that satellite operators should ideally abide by. 

At Design Time, the guidelines are concerned with prepping the satellite for a safe launch and time in orbit. They suggest three key practices: “Consider collision avoidance (CA) implications” when selecting an orbit; make sure the spacecraft’s hardware is up to the job; and make sure the software running on the craft and controlling it from the ground is capable, too.  

For Pre-Launch and Early Orbit, the guidelines are mostly concerned with making sure other space operators know what you’re doing, and not accidentally crashing into another orbiting satellite—or worse, a manned spacecraft. The three suggested practices are: Tell other space operators and the global community your launch strategy well in advance, make sure you don’t go anywhere near “crewed assets,” and work with a “cataloguing” organization to track your launch and early orbit. 

Once the satellite is in space, the “On Orbit” guidelines are concerned with keeping things that way. And once again, doing it without crashing into things. The recommended practices are: Keep everyone up-to-date with what you are doing with your satellite; continuously perform collision avoidance risk assessments; and when there’s a high-risk of collision, do something about it. 

Finally, once the satellite’s mission is complete, the Satellite Disposal guidelines are about making sure that it can be decommissioned safely. There is a limited amount of space in orbit, so dead satellites shouldn’t be left up there. To that end, there is just one best practice: Actively and expeditiously manage the de-orbit of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that are reaching the end of their useful mission life.

Of course, having a set of guidelines is very different from having a set of laws that everyone is required to follow. SpaceX in particular has been criticized for the sheer volume of satellites it’s planning to launch (and has launched). Whether this attempt at self-regulation is enough to stave off individual countries creating what the report calls “an unmanageable patchwork of incongruous rules” remains to be seen. 

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It’s been well over 30 years since humanity last sent a satellite into the Venusian atmosphere, but a private spacefaring startup hopes to end that lull by launching its own probe towards the planet in 2023 in search of alien life. Earlier this week, a team from Rocket Lab published its mission architecture paper outlining the company’s imminent plans to explore the clouds above Venus using a small Electron rocket strapped with a 1 kg autofluorescing nephelometer, or “an instrument to detect suspended particles in the clouds,” according to Ars Technica.

“In September 2020, scientists at MIT and Cardiff University announced they had observed what may be signs of life in the clouds of our planetary neighbor, Venus. Their observations indicated the potential presence of phosphine, a gas typically produced by living organisms. In 2023, Rocket Lab is sending the first private mission to Venus to help gather further evidence,” the company vows on its website.

Evidence indicates that Venus once resembled Earth in a number of ways, with temperatures ranging between 68-122 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to the existence of multiple, shallow oceans. Around 700 million years’ ago, a massive “resurfacing event” released copious amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that soon turned the planet into a violently inhospitable environment. Today, Venus regularly experiences crushing surface pressures with temperatures regularly reaching 900-degrees Fahrenheit, making it the hottest planet in our solar system. However, the living conditions begin to resemble Earth’s roughly 30 miles above the planet’s surface, which is exactly where Rocket Lab hopes its small probe will reach.

If successful, the satellite will spend about five minutes passing through the window of Venusian atmosphere, during which time it will transmit its readings back to Earth for scientists to study. It’s in their hopes that these readings will potentially contain new evidence pointing towards the existence of microbial life high above Venus. “Even with the mass and data rate constraints and the limited time in the Venus atmosphere, breakthrough science is possible,” Rocket Labs’ scientists argue in their recent mission paper.

Rocket Lab is one of the lesser know private spaceflight companies at the moment, but that will likely change extremely quickly if they can pull off the ambitious project.

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When Axiom Space sent the first private crew to the International Space Station earlier this year, an overly aggressive itinerary caused some ripples in the professional astronauts’ work performance. Though it’s unclear if the trip interfered with the ISS crew’s science goals, the atmosphere aboard the station was strained—a classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen. Operations were impacted enough that the ISS and Axiom astronauts’ collective experiences motivated NASA to release new rules that commercial space companies will have to adhere to if they continue to join in on spaceflight activities going forward. What those changes could look like, however, will depend on how supportive and accepting NASA is to the still-emerging industry. 

Notably, the agency could require a former NASA astronaut to act as mission commander for private spaceflights, a move that would essentially make the agency a permanent liaison between public and US-based private space commerce. (The Axiom flight did already have a former NASA astronaut on board, Michael Lopez-Alegría, along with three first-time passengers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate). 

“We got up there and, boy, we were overwhelmed,” López-Alegría said during a post-mission press conference. “Getting used to zero gravity is not an overnight thing.”

To avoid packed itineraries in flight, space tourism companies might also be required to provide documentation of the private astronauts’ work schedules. Additionally, because research activities weren’t originally envisioned as something space tourists would take part in, private companies will now submit research requests to the International Space Station National Laboratory no later than a year before expected launch. This is a huge hurdle for companies with similar objectives to Axiom, whose business model offers space tourists the opportunity to engage in activities like STEM outreach, experiments, photography and filmmaking once aboard the ISS. Members of the Axiom-1 crew helped conduct tests on self-assembling technology for future space habitats, cancer stem cells, and even air purification research. But by now NASA understands that successfully privatizing space will be harder than originally thought. 

The main reason why the ISS has had a difficult time integrating private space travel into its repertoire is because tourism has never been part of NASA’s charter, says Madhu Thangavelu, a lecturer at the University of Southern California and an expert on space tourism and architecture. “NASA is more interested in exploration, human factors, and in human physiology studies on the station, which is what they excel at,” he says. 

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Axiom isn’t the agency’s first brush with the tourism industry—and previous attempts have been met with much more resistance. In 2001, Dennis Tito, an engineer and US millionaire, became the world’s first space tourist when he planned to visit Russia’s space station Mir. But his flight was diverted to the ISS when the Russian station was later deorbited. Tito stayed on the station for a little less than eight days, compared to the Axiom crew’s 10-day mission, but NASA later reported that his trip caused too many disruptions. 

“They were not at all welcoming to people roaming around the station when the agency is busy doing other things,” Thangavelu, who is also on the board of directors for the National Space Society, says. 

Such instances raise important moral and legal questions as private space tourism expands: Who makes the rules for astronaut behavior, misconduct, or accidents, and who should enforce them? Currently, these space travelers are free from international agency’s scrutiny that professional astronauts are subject to, which means that any misfortune aboard the station would open up a brand new can of worms for companies to deal with.  

Bigger and broader changes need to happen across the industry if space is to become easily and financially accessible to the general public. For example, instead of relying on private commercial companies to pave the way to public access, Thangavelu says that if NASA is serious about enabling commercial space activities, the agency should focus on creating a dedicated office for space tourism. 

“It’s my belief that if we give the station access to the private sector, we will get very creative in how to better manage the facility,” he says. Taking space adventurers on tours of the ISS or involving them in lab research, he says, could also drastically lower the costs of typical missions and lend structure to the preparation and resources needed to ensure both a private and professional astronaut’s continued safety.

[Related: Selling tickets to the space station is actually decades overdue]

Other experts share Thangavelu’s views. Rachel Fu, director of the University of Florida’s Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute, says that compared to typical Earth-bound leisure activities, space tourism is a much more complicated endeavor that impacts our society on a global level. The industry needs to be constantly supervised, and having at least one government entity in the new global space race take that helm would benefit all involved parties, Fu says. Beyond tourism, private companies could further open up independent research and experiments in space. Fu also notes that the more people who are able to contribute to the next generation of knowledge, the better. 

There are currently no public plans by either NASA or the ISS to create a department solely for facilitating private spaceflights. At the moment, “NASA sees private astronaut missions as an important part of stimulating demand for commercial customers and astronauts to live and work in low-Earth orbit,“ Angela Hart, program manager of NASA’s Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Development, told Popular Science in a statement over email. She also said that it offers astronauts an opportunity to interact with crews of different training levels and goals. 

Even now, as space tourism continues its meteoric rise, being able to navigate the subtler social nuances of space travel is important as humans start to expand outwards towards the stars. And when deciding who gets to soar above Earth next, industry experts are likely to prioritize them. 

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As private spacefaring expeditions become increasingly the norm, NASA is doing its best to make sure everyone gets along 277 miles above the planet. A new special notice released from the agency earlier this week announced a number of new stipulations for future private sojourners docking aboard the International Space Station, including the potential requirement that each trip’s mission commander be a retired US astronaut.

“A former NASA astronaut provides experienced guidance for the private astronauts during pre-flight preparation through mission execution,” the agency explained in its statement on Monday. “Based on their past on-orbit and NASA experience, the [private astronaut mission] commander provides a link between the resident ISS expedition crew and the private astronauts and reduces risk to ISS operations and PAM/ISS safety.”

The new resumé qualification comes via “lessons learned” from April’s first all-private crew stay in the ISS courtesy of Axiom Space, during which time things got a bit tense. “In essence, the arrival of the Axiom personnel seemed to have a larger-than-expected impact on the daily workload on the professional International Space Station crew,” Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut and current Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel member, said in May.

While both NASA and Axiom members have made sure to also praise each others’ cooperation and time aboard the ISS, it’s easy to see how inherent frictions may develop in these spaces. Despite an overall size comparable to the length of a football field, the ISS itself is only designed to support six people at a time. Even if visitors are staying aboard their docked vehicles, it still makes for cramped conditions with frequent additional sightseers and researchers.

Private space travel is here to stay, and its general goals—and wealthy patrons—will often conflict with publicly funded projects. 

It’s worth noting that while Axiom’s first crew aboard the ISS included a former NASA astronaut, Michael López-Alegría, as team leader. That said, the company had since hinted at future trips sans professional astronauts as a way to add another $55 million seat aboard their rides. It’s in NASA’s best interest to get ahead of the inevitable and establish some baseline requirements for partnerships between other companies’ civilian travelers.

But as Engadget also notes, it may be difficult for these private companies to find ready and willing NASA astronaut veterans. According to the agency’s directory, there are currently only about 300 living retired astronauts out there at the moment, many of whom aren’t up to the task anymore. The current US astronaut count is even more scarce, with 44 active personnel at the moment. Still, there’s a lot of money in private spacefaring, so that may convince a few former NASA crew members to suit up at least one more time.

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When a Falcon 9 rocket launches on Thursday, if all goes well, SpaceX will have sent 32 vehicles to space in 2022–breaking the previous yearly record of 31 launches it set in 2021. And SpaceX has many more blast-offs planned: The California-based commercial spaceflight company is on track to launch 50 rockets this year, almost one a week. 

On July 17, SpaceX completed a launch of 53 Starlink broadband satellites via one of its Falcon 9 rockets. This marked the 31st successful mission this year and the 13th launch using the same Falcon 9 rocket stage. SpaceX has also sent the most boosters to space this year. SpaceX’s US-based competitor United Launch Alliance has completed about one launch every 64 days. 

SpaceX is also launching more often than national space agencies. China planned to be the leader in rocket launches with an ambitious goal of 60 flights in 2020. It has since made efforts to reach that goal but, to date, has completed only 24; the country says it has more than 50 launches scheduled in 2022. NASA, meanwhile, has planned eight more missions, among other projects, through the end of the year. 

SpaceX is living up to its promise of recycling rockets. Reusing rocket parts has made it cost-efficient and faster for the company to prepare launches. The Falcon 9 rocket will use boosters that were refurbished for weeks and months before the next mission.

The road to 50 launches by the end of the year has been bumpy, though. On July 11, SpaceX’s Starship booster engines blew up in a fiery explosion during testing, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted was “not good.” 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

Thursday’s mission, to deliver more Starlink broadband satellites to space, will take place at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. While sending the most rockets and boosters to space is a feat in itself, Musk has a larger vision in mind. His goal is for humans to reach the moon and Mars aboard a Starship rocket—making humans an interplanetary species. If everything goes to plan, according to SpaceX, a crewed mission to the Red Planet could happen as early as 2029. 

But on the way to our solar system neighbor, SpaceX may face some competition from two new companies, Relativity Space and Impulse Space. We may be at the start of a brand-new space race: The two upstarts claim they will reach Mars faster than SpaceX. 

For now, you can watch the record-breaking launch of Falcon 9 in a YouTube livestream Thursday starting at 1:13 p.m. Eastern, beginning 10 minutes before the launch.

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Update (June 13, 2022): Today the Federal Aviation Administration announced that to move forward with the Starship launch, SpaceX will have to make more than 75 changes to its proposed plan to further reduce environmental disruptions in Boca Chica, Texas. Some of those requirements involve closer collaboration with biologists and other experts from federal agencies. Approval of the launch license is contingent on these changes, though on Twitter, SpaceX hinted that it was still on schedule for the first launch test.

After years of development, the SpaceX Starship is rumbling to life for its first big launch. But before the 164-foot-tall rocket can lift off into space, the company, headed by Elon Musk, has to make it through some final regulatory hurdles.

The launch is set to take place at Boca Chica, located at the southernmost tip of Texas and surrounded by state parks and wildlife refuge. The nature of its operations has raised concerns about potential harm to wildlife species, especially to threatened shorebirds, in the region. SpaceX has also bought out dozens of people’s homes to make them relocate, and caused other residents to evacuate during tests.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently completing a final environmental assessment of the site and was expected to reach a decision on May 31. However, the agency pushed back the deadline for a sixth time and is now expected to finalize the review on June 13. It said SpaceX had made multiple changes to its application that required additional FAA analysis.

Last month, the FAA released 17,000 comments, some of which raise concerns about the SpaceX project’s impact on endangered species and the nearby Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The company filed permits to develop an additional 17.6 acres of wetlands next to its existing Starbase facility—the size of the entire affected area will likely be much larger. Boca Chica is one of the most important shorebird sites along the entire Gulf Coast, says David Newstead, director of the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program’s (CBBEP) Coastal Bird Program in South Texas. It also serves as a critical site on the Central Flyway, connecting migratory birds between North and South America.

“There’s been repeated explosions [at the testing site], many of which have spread debris into the surrounding wildlife refuge and state park habitat,” Newstead says. “And the SpaceX properties are immediately adjacent to occupied, heavily used, important shorebird habitat.”

[Related: Project Icarus is creating a living map of Earth’s animals]

The CBBEP’s monitoring efforts show that in Boca Chica, piping plovers—a federally threatened shorebird species—declined from an estimated population of 327 in 2018 to 214 in 2020. But the population recorded a slight uptick to 276 in 2021. These changes correlate with the start and stop of launch testing at the site, Newstead says. SpaceX first started manufacturing and locally testing its Starship rocket systems in 2018.

“There was a small increase [in piping plovers] this past winter, but not recovered to the extent that they were previously,” Newstead adds. “Notably, from August 2021 until April 2022, there’s been no more launch testing.”

Besides tracking piping plover populations, the CBBEP also monitors nesting snowy plovers and Wilson’s plovers at Boca Chica. These birds have mostly disappeared from the area and seem to avoid nesting in sites close to the launch site, Newstead says. 

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has also determined that SpaceX’s continued activity in Boca Chica will impact animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Among those of the greatest concern are red knot shorebirds and the jaguarundi and ocelot wild cats. Marine life is also in danger, including the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, which nests on the beaches of Boca Chica and is the world’s most critically endangered sea turtle.

The SpaceX launch site could threaten wildlife populations by causing direct injury or death through explosions and tests. USFWS and other entities have also noted that heat, pressure, and debris from launch testing that began in 2018 could harm species or drive them away from critical habitat. But the judgment on SpaceX’s environmental impact is ultimately in the hands of the FAA. 

“I am optimistic that we will get approval [from the FAA],” Musk said this February, as reported by Spaceflight News. “Objectively, I think this is not something that will be harmful to the environment. We’ve obviously flown the [Starship spacecraft] several times … We’ve fired the engines a lot. I think the reality is that it would not have a significant impact.”

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

SpaceX is shooting for a 2023 launch of its Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon and Mars. If the FAA decides to require a new environmental impact statement from the company, it would cause a setback of six to eight months, Musk said earlier this year. In that case, SpaceX plans to shift its Starship launch operation to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the company has already received the environmental approval it needs.

Newstead says although it is not uncommon for regulatory agencies to delay their decisions, the number of FAA postponements around the SpaceX project does stand out.

“I would assume that the extent of the delays is a testimony to the number of stumbling blocks the agency is facing in authorizing this type of activity,” he says. “If it was benign, [SpaceX] would have had their permit a long time ago.”

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NASA is putting $278.5 million into supporting the development of new ways to connect with devices operating in near-Earth space. In a Wednesday statement, NASA shared the six commercial satellite communications (SATCOM) providers it selected to establish “high-rate and high-capacity two-way communications” as part of its Communications Services Project.

The government agency currently uses its own fleet of near-Earth satellites to communicate with ground facilities and orbiting spacecrafts, but, according to Engadget, many were launched in the 80s and 90s, and NASA is now in a long-term process of decommissioning them. Working with commercial businesses to fill this void will allow NASA to dedicate time to other projects, the agency’s statement explains, such as deep space exploration. 

NASA spent more than a year evaluating the potential of various commercial SATCOM networks before selecting six companies to support. SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper lead the pack in funding, awarded $69.95 million and $67 million respectively, followed by Viasat Incorporated ($53.3 million), Telesat US Services ($30.65 million), SES Government Solutions ($28.96 million), and Inmarsat Government Inc. ($28.6 million). The companies are expected to match (“or exceed”) those contributions as they work to develop new technologies. 

[Related: Alexa will tag along on an uncrewed mission to the moon]

Each company has its own technical approach to facilitate near-Earth communications, which NASA says must also “lower costs, increase flexibility, and improve performance for a broad range of missions.” SpaceX, for example, already has a network of nearly 2,000 satellites in orbit and is proposing an “optical low-Earth orbiting relay network” to support SATCOM services for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The six companies have until 2025 to make these plans a reality and offer in-space demonstrations of their work in action. NASA hopes to then enter service contracts by 2030 as the next phase of stepping away from their own satellite system. 

In recent years, NASA has been eager to collaborate with private companies in a growing number of space ventures. In December, NASA announced funding for the private development of space stations in low-Earth orbit that will be available for government and commercial use. Eli Naffah, who leads the Communications Services Project, told Reuters in relation to this latest news that NASA also hopes such deals will spur more commercial activity in this space, which could drive down their own costs. 

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Updated (April 25, 2022): Last night, the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station after waiting nearly a week past the expected departure date due to adverse weather conditions at the seven possible landing sites back home. At 9:10 PM Eastern Sunday, the capsule closed its hatch and began to move towards low Earth orbit, where it remained for almost 17 hours. It splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean around 1:06 PM Eastern today, and the four Ax-1 crew members disembarked for post-flight health checks. Watch here for more updates.

Update (April 9, 2022): The Ax-1 crew successfully docked at the International Space Station today at 8:29 a.m. EST, about 45 minutes after the intended time, due to a video routing error. It will take several more hours of testing and calibration before the hatch opens to let the SpaceX passengers to embark.

NASA’s first crew of astronauts touched the stars in 1961 with Project Mercury. The Kennedy Space Center’s latest flight, however, had a different sort of crew: paying passengers.

SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavor rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 11:17 a.m. EST on Friday, and is currently en route to the International Space Station. The crew is set to spend eight days in orbit and land back on Earth on April 18. Instead of a typical team of astronaut corps members, the four passengers include Michael Lopez-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut now working for Axiom (a management and consulting company) as well as three first-time space travelers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate. While some have referred to the SpaceX crew members as “space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría disagrees with that description. 

“This mission is very different from what you may have heard of in some of the recent—especially suborbital—missions. We are not space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría told reporters earlier this month. “I think there’s an important role for space tourism, but it is not what Axiom is about.”

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need]

Before takeoff, the passengers underwent hundreds of hours of training at NASA and SpaceX facilities. In addition, each passenger will be assisting in research onboard the ISS, including collaborations with the Mayo and Cleveland Clinic, a partnership with Canadian hospitals, and several conservation-awareness projects.

For Lopez-Alegría, who was inspired by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions as a child, going back to space as part of a historic crew is a dream come true.

“It was such an inspiration to me, and to be able to participate in what I think is opening the next chapter is truly an honor,”  López-Alegría said at a news conference on April 1. “I can say with zero hesitation that we are ready to fly.”

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Friday’s launch is just the first in a string of planned SpaceX and NASA flights. This new era of space exploration largely began with former President Donald Trump’s Space Policy Directive 1. Signed in December 2017, the policy called for a return to the moon, eventual exploration of Mars, and a synthesis of governmental, private, and international efforts. In 2019, NASA announced a change in policy allowing for the usage of government resources for commercial activities on the ISS, commercial destinations in low-Earth orbits, and opportunities for private astronaut expeditions.

 Axiom is currently offering three seats on its next mission, set to take place in 2023, to any interested space enthusiasts. All you need is a spare $55 million.

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This story originally featured on The Drive.

In February of 2018, Elon Musk launched his personal Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Usually, when Musk does something like this, the justification is because Musk simply is who he is, however this time, it was also done for a useful purpose. The rocket needed a test payload, and with the American billionaire having no shortage of new Teslas at his disposal, his old Roadster, the first vehicle the company sold, was a solid candidate. 

Four years have now passed since the Tesla entered a heliocentric orbit and the video feed focused on “Starman,” the space suit-adorned mannequin in the driver’s seat, went dead. That’s a long time spent in the near-complete vacuum of outer space, and as such, we were curious what’s happened to it since that fateful launch in February. To try to get an idea of what might’ve happened to the car and its unforthcoming passenger, we spoke to Dr. Anthony Waas, professor extraordinaire and chair of the aerospace engineering program at the University of Michigan. He had… well, he had a few concerns about how it’s doing.

“There are four main hazards in space,” Dr. Waas sold us. “There is temperature… the effects of gravity and no gravity… there is radiation, and then there is pressure,” he said, also throwing in solar winds for good measure. All of these things will have different effects on the materials the car is made from, and it of course depends on how the Tesla Roadster was constructed, too. What Dr. Waas seemed most concerned about was thermal cycling, and how the Roadster, which is made from a slew of different materials, might react to it. “You get huge temperature variations in space. You can have anything from -101 [degrees] to 219 [degrees] Celsius,” he explained. These changes in temperature make the car’s parts expand and contract much more than they would on earth, as automobiles are not usually subject to temperature variations of 320 degrees Celsius (576 degrees Fahrenheit). “Depending on how they were attached,” he continued, “the joints can come loose.” 

The Tesla Roadster uses a modified Lotus Elise chassis, which is mostly aluminum although it has a carbon fiber body. It’s unclear how the body is fixed to the chassis, however it very likely uses fasteners as opposed to an adhesive. These fasteners might very well come loose after an extended period of time or break under any repeated stress they’re put under. Keep in mind, these fluctuations are constant in outer space, and even something like the resin that binds the carbon fiber together will expand and contract at a different rate than the fiber itself. Dr. Waas was also careful to note that not all carbon fiber is the same. There are different ways to arrange the fiber, different resins, and different methods of combining the two. “The polymer in the [Boeing] 787… is different than the polymer in the Airbus A350, which is also carbon fiber airplane,” he explained. “So it will be different.”

There seemed to be a lot of factors contributing to how pressure—or the complete lack thereof—might affect the various parts of the car. However we then focused on a few specific components that might be affected by the massive temperature fluctuations, and the effect of solar radiation. One of them is paint.

While noting that automotive paint technology is very advanced, Dr. Waas made the informed assumption that automotive paint is not tested to the aforementioned range of temperatures seen in the vacuum of space. As a result, the fluctuations of hot and cold over time may have led to the paint cracking or peeling off entirely. “That could lead to certainly cracking of the paint, and certainly peeling off,” he told me. Interestingly, if this has happened, the tiny flakes of paint are likely just floating around the car in a debris field, as opposed to flying off into space. “If it peels off, it will just fly with the vehicle, because there’s no separation forces as such.”

It’s unclear if the car’s battery pack is still fixed to the vehicle, although seeing as it was launched into space a payload test, we think it’s possible. If it is out there with the car, it may be in a variety of conditions depending on which side is exposed to the sun’s temperature, Dr. Waas says. It’s essentially an unknown, but what is more clear is that much of the rubber on the car like the tires, weatherstripping, etc is probably dry rotted, and perhaps floating around in the same debris field as the paint. “[Rubber] can withstand pretty high temperatures,” Dr. Waas said, but over time it will likely crack and disintegrate. “It’s also thermally cycled… rubber may actually crack. It may dry up, become brittle, and it may tend to crack away.” He also indicated the car’s leather interior would likely be in for similar treatment.

As far as our silent friend Starman goes, he’s probably fine. Dr. Waas notes that he is, after all, in a spacesuit. It might be gradually deteriorating over time from the radiation, however it’s designed to withstand extreme changes in temperature and resist other detrimental forces in space.

Any serious damage to the car, Dr. Wass concluded, would be done by meteorites. As unlikely as it might sound, any part of the car that gets disturbed by an impact of varying force might sustain serious damage in such a taxing environment. How many times the car has been hit by meteorites or indeed if it has been hit at all is speculative, though. It could be nicked up, it could be Swiss cheese, or it could be perfectly fine.

The Roadster has only been out there for four years. After 10 or 20 years? It’s a question that hasn’t been widely pondered, believe it or not. “Well nobody has really thought about this,” the professor told me, clearly amused. “But now that you have asked me this question, his car could be a fantastic asset to test.” If the car or even just part of it could be retrieved and brought back to earth, Waas explained, it could be a valuable resource in exploring how these materials can withstand the conditions in outer space. Everything from the rubber tires to the battery might be valuable to examine. 

This is not impossible as Musk’s Tesla is in a known orbit around the sun between the Earth and Mars, sometimes rather close to the Earth. It would logistically be very difficult, of course, but as is typical with activities in outer space, it’s all very simple on paper. In reality, it’s likely not worth attempting to retrieve it, although saving Starman is a nice thought. Maybe bring him down and give him a friend. Send them back up there after a little party. Just an idea.

Ultimately, the extent of the damage is unknown, however it definitely seems like a fair amount is possible. The rubber, particularly the tires are likely in bad shape. The paint could be worse for wear, too. Is the Roadster totally unrecognizable? I would say that’s unlikely based on what the professor told me, but that being said, parts that have been thermally cycled may be damaged, loose, or floating around the car. Starman is probably faring better though. Always a silver lining.

As Dr. Waas indicates, it would indeed be interesting to attempt to retrieve the vehicle to really find out. That, or figure out a way to get the onboard cameras powered up again, and switched back on. Neither are very likely, but boy do we want to see the car now. Should’ve added some solar panels to keep the livestream going.

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Those with an astronomical amount of money in the bank who are itching for an out-of-this-world vacation have a new option: Virgin Galactic announced on Tuesday that it’s opening up spaceflight ticket reservations to the general public on February 16. That means you have a matter of hours left to scrape together the $150,000 deposit needed to reserve your place to get a ticket to space. The total ticket price is $450,000, with the rest due before takeoff. 

Virgin Galactic is promising some unique experiences in exchange for that hefty fee. Ticketed passengers will spend several days preparing for their flight in New Mexico, staying at custom accommodations with “world-class amenities” as they get in astronaut shape. The actual journey itself will be 90 minutes, including a “signature air launch and Mach-3 boost to space” that will propel passengers into “several minutes” of suborbital weightlessness and a chance to gaze down at Earth from the 17 windows lining the spaceship. 

The reservation will also provide access to Virgin’s Future Astronaut membership community, which the company says will come with its own lineup of activities and perks. While the press release didn’t offer any specifics when it comes to actual flight dates, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said they are looking to have their first 1,000 customers on board “later this year.” If that all sounds exciting, you can start an application process ahead of the ticket sales on Virgin Galactic’s website. 

Virgin Galactic launched its first fully-crewed civilian-carrying suborbital flight last July, which counted the company’s founder, billionaire Richard Branson, as one of its passengers. The mission was touted as a successful step towards space tourism, despite a path detour that sparked a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigation and temporarily halted future flights. The FAA has since closed that inquiry, allowing the company to resume launches. 

[Related: Blue Origin brought the first official tourists to space]

And while Virgin has been planning to get paying participants onboard for more than a decade, with a waitlist rumored to include celebrities, Blue Origin beat it to that milestone, bringing the first paid customer to space also in July of 2021 (as well as its own billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos). Blue Origin has since sent multiple other space tourists into flight, including “Good Morning America” host Michael Strahan. The company has remained tight-lipped about its pricing, though The New York Times said in October it was nearing $100 million in spaceflight ticket sales. 

Though both Virgin and Blue Origin are focused on suborbital flights, the tech they use to get there is notably different. Virgin’s spacecraft is attached to a large aircraft that takes off in the traditional way, then drops it at a high altitude. After a brief freefall, the spacecraft fires off its rocket motor, which propels it to the edge of space. Its winged design then allows it to maneuver back down. Blue Origins uses a more traditional method of launching a capsule on a rocket booster, which later separates, sending the capsule into a sustained freefall. The capsule employs parachutes to make its way back down safely.

The third entry in the billionaire space race is SpaceX, which focuses on orbital flights, sending passengers deeper into space for longer durations using a rocket and capsule model like Blue Origin. SpaceX made its own historic foray into space last year, launching four civilians into orbit in September. The trio of companies have earned both praise and criticism for these trips, with some acknowledging their scientific potential while others point to their adverse climate impacts. 

Despite that criticism, the companies are showing no signs of slowing down—just ahead of Virgin’s ticket release, The New York Times reported that SpaceX is planning a trip that would include the first ​​non-government astronaut spacewalk. While the flight would carry one billionaire passenger, Jared Isaacman, SpaceX’s resident billionaire and founder, Elon Musk, has yet to make the cosmic journey himself—though, according to The Wall Street Journal, he previously booked a ticket with Virgin Galactic. 

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SpaceX launched 49 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit last week, with plans to eventually bring them up to higher altitudes. But due to a geomagnetic storm on Friday, up to 40 of the 49 satellites are falling out of their intended orbit. 

On Friday, the sun’s surface erupted with outbursts of charged particles called “coronal mass ejections.” Those particles made it harder for the satellites, which were planned to provide internet access, to maintain their orbits. In a statement on Tuesday, SpaceX said “the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.”

The geomagnetic storm itself “was by no means a big event”—it happened at “just the wrong time,” Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center told Space.com. “That is a drag,” he added. 

By design the satellites will burn up as they return to Earth, posing no risk to people or other satellites.  “Up to 40 of the satellites will re-enter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere,” SpaceX said in a statement on Tuesday. 

[Related: NASA images show the sun has had a rough week]

Friday’s solar storm is a sign of what is to come in the next few years. The sun operates on 11-year cycles, going between periods of calm and periods of intense storms. We’re currently in a milder phase of the sun’s activity, but events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections will ramp up, likely peaking around 2025. During “solar maximum,” storms like this recent one will occur hundreds of times over just a few years. 

NOAA measures geomagnetic storms on a severity scale of G1 to G5. The agency issued a warning for a “likely” geomagnetic storm of G1 to G2 the day before SpaceX launched its 49 satellites. Given this warning, and the fact that the potential impacts of storms on orbits are pretty well known, some experts find it peculiar that SpaceX would not have accounted for this possibility in its launch plans. 

“It’s a bit of a surprise,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, told The New York Times. “They should have been ready for this, one would have thought.” 

Solar storms of this magnitude are fairly common, but to have so many satellites succumb at once is unusual. “To lose most of the batch is unheard of,” McDowell told CNBC. “This is huge compared to anything that’s happened before.”

There are currently 1,915 Starlink satellites in orbit, and SpaceX plans to launch thousands more in the coming years—the company’s goal is to create an internet service accessible from nearly anyplace on Earth. A loss of 40 doesn’t seem so big against that grand scheme. But each of these satellites is estimated to cost $500,000—the loss of about 40 satellites will cost SpaceX around $20 million.

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Update (February 14, 2022): A correction was released that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will not crash into the moon—but another craft, China’s Chang’e 5-T1 booster, is instead bound for the lunar collision. On Saturday, February 12, Bill Gray, creator of near-Earth object tracker Project Pluto, posted the correction on his website. The error was initially spotted by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, Jon Giorgini, who prompted Gray to take another look at earlier space missions and the spacecrafts’ trajectories.

Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be crashing into the moon in March—an unintended lunar collision that is likely the first of its kind. 

The piece is a booster from a Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX launched in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The rocket carried NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite on what was supposed to be SpaceX’s first deep space mission. While DSCOVR made it to its target—a point thousands of miles from Earth that provides a stable orbit for the observatory—Falcon 9 faltered at its second stage. 

After releasing its satellite, Falcon 9 was originally supposed to return to Earth. But the rocket had gone too high and lacked the energy to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It is now space junk, and has been circling Earth in a chaotic orbit since then. 

Now, the rocket is on route for “certain impact” with the moon on March 4, writes Bill Gray, the creator of the Project Pluto software, which is used by both professional and amateur astronomers worldwide to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets. When the second stage crashes, it will be “the first unintentional case” of space junk impacting the moon that he is aware of, Gray writes in a blog posted last week. Based on his analyses, he believes the rocket, traveling at about 5,770 miles per hour, will slam into the far side of the moon near its equator.

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

While this may sound frightening, astronomers assure that this is nothing to worry about. Asteroids and comets have pummeled the moon for as long as there has been a moon, which is the reason for its cratered surface. There have also been previous, deliberate crashes into the moon, like the LCROSS collision of 2009, which helped lead to the discovery of lunar subsurface water.

“For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It’s interesting, but not a big deal,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. When asked what happens if the rocket punctures the moon, he later tweeted a reply: “Just another hole in the green cheese.”

It is unlikely the collision will be observable from Earth, since it will occur on the far side of the moon, and just days after the new moon. Satellites and other spacecraft in the area are also poorly positioned and will also probably miss the event. But the aftermath of the collision could yield potentially interesting findings, like what lunar subsurface material gets ejected upon impact. Gray, who writes that he is “rooting for a lunar impact,” is hoping for something to hit the moon in an area that would be visible from Earth, but “we’d have to get very lucky for that.” 

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Amazon and Verizon are attempting to get affordable broadband access to rural and remote locations around the globe by looking beyond the Earth’s borders. The companies announced their “strategic collaboration” in a press release Tuesday, which will pair the mobile provider’s existing infrastructure with that of Project Kuiper, Amazon’s proposed constellation of 3,236 low Earth orbit satellites intended to deliver satellite-based broadband across the US. 

Together, teams from both companies will “develop connectivity solutions for unserved and underserved communities.” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement that “there are billions of people without reliable broadband access, and no single company will close the digital divide on its own.”

[Related: The FCC wants to know if you’re paying too much for internet access]

For starters, this will expand Verizon’s data networks by utilizing Project Kuiper’s antennas and other signal transmitting technology. At the end of 2020, Project Kuiper unveiled a new antenna prototype that is “three times smaller and proportionately lighter” than average but delivers speeds of up to 400 Mbps. By significantly reducing the size of the antenna, developers said they could lower production costs, ultimately making them more affordable for the customers they hope to reach.

While Amazon hailed this new antenna tech as a “breakthrough,” it still has a long way to go before Project Kuiper and Verizon’s more ambitious goals become a reality—they first need to get those satellites in orbit. Despite receiving approval for its plans from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last year, Project Kuiper has yet to send up a single satellite. 

That said, the initiative has taken some notable steps in recent months, including bringing on hundreds of employees and securing multiple rockets for deploying the satellites when the time comes. And there’s plenty of funding to keep it going, with Amazon pledging to funnel more than $10 billion into the effort. 

According to TechCrunch, the company is looking to have half of its satellites in orbit in 2026, with the rest launched by July 2029. This timeline leaves Project Kuiper trailing behind multiple competitors including SpaceX, whose Starlink network has been deploying satellites by the dozens for years. There are now 1,740 Starlink satellites in orbit, and a public beta test of their broadband capabilities is underway. CNBC reported in September that more than 100,000 users in 14 countries are currently hooked up to the internet courtesy of Starlink.

[Related: Elon Musk insists his satellite swarm won’t interfere with science. This model disagrees.]

As the frontrunner in this space, Starlink has received the bulk of criticism from those concerned about what it will mean to have thousands more satellites circling around the Earth. Those have included warnings from astronomers, who caution that this level of deployment not only could change the look of the night sky to a casual observer but also threaten their research and long term work, with the light from the satellite potentially reducing the efficacy of telescopes.

Bloomberg noted that Amazon itself recently leveled criticisms at Starlink, as well, accusing the company of breaking the agency’s rules requiring detailed proposals as it looks to expand its swarm of satellites. 

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On Saturday, four explorers splashed down off the Florida coast after spending three days circling the planet. Like the crews who have orbited the Earth before them, they spent some of their time taking advantage of the rare opportunity to study how the human body—their bodies—reacted to an exotic environment featuring diminished gravity and elevated cosmic radiation. 

But unlike previous orbital crews, the members of the Inspiration4 mission, operated by SpaceX, are not professional astronauts who had spent a career preparing for the experience. Rather, they belong to an emerging class of travelers, variously called spaceflight participants, space fliers, or space tourists. These adventurers are distinguished by a combination of wealth and luck. 

Otherwise, however, the first private orbital crew consists of normal people, presenting researchers with a unique opportunity—and a singular challenge. For the first time, investigators had the chance to find out how everyday folks adjust to space. But to do so, they needed to design experiments that anyone could, and would want to, carry out during an out-of-this-world vacation. 

“We’re looking to the future of private nonprofessional people going into space, so we have to strike that balance of the science being easy to implement, easy to execute, and low burden,” says Jimmy Wu, a biomedical engineer at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), which organized Inspiration4’s research activities. “It’s definitely a shift from working with professional astronauts who are paid to do that.”

A battery of tests

TRISH investigators had a host of questions they hoped Inspiration4’s crew—made up of billionaire Jared Isaacman, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, data engineer Chris Sembroski, and geoscientist Sian Proctor—could help answer during their time in orbit. The scientists designed a handful of research projects to answer some of the most pressing concerns. 

Before and after the flight, the crew used a tablet with an accelerometer to see how well they could stay balanced. The system in the inner ear that keeps the body oriented relies on gravity, and its disruption could be linked to the bane of every space traveler: space sickness. Puzzlingly, researchers haven’t found any connection between astronauts who get car sick and those who get space sick, so TRISH scientists are casting a wider net. 

[Related: SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission and launch in 9 photos]

“We haven’t seen any good correlation between what happens on Earth and what happens in space,” Wu says. “We just need a lot more data to understand this and connect with the general population.”

The Inspiration4 participants also used tablets to take ten tests to measure their reaction times and overall cognitive function. When astronauts have taken such tests on the International Space Station, researchers haven’t detected any mental fog. But that might be because the tests are too rough to pick up subtle dips in the already high performance of elite pilots and the like. If space travelers from more diverse backgrounds experience more significant declines, researchers would like to know. 

Real-time health monitoring

A major challenge of spaceflight is keeping the crew healthy in the absence of hospitals and doctors. Star Trek explorers had a “tricorder” device to monitor the general status of their bodies. In a small step toward that future, the Inspiration4 crew field tested two apparatuses for studying their health in real time. 

One was a handheld ultrasound machine for tracking how water moves through the body when it doesn’t have gravity dragging it downward. Technicians take ultrasounds at hospitals, but Inspiration4’s device uses artificial intelligence to watch the images and guide a novice user accordingly. “That allows for more unskilled operators to do ultrasound, rather than going through many months of training to do that,” Wu says. 

The crew also took saliva and pin-prick blood samples, which another apparatus analyzed instantaneously for signs of stress, inflammation, and immunity. The members brought the samples back to Earth for preservation as the first entries in a long-term scientific endeavor: the building of a “biobank.” 

These samples will remain at the Baylor College of Medicine for research into spaceflight phenomena of the body. It was only after astronauts started spending long periods of time on the space station that NASA began to document still-mysterious changes to their vision, for instance. An extensive biobank could help researchers study other still unidentified health effects, especially as a wider range of people venture into space. 

“Twenty years from now it’d be nice to be able to look back” and answer the question, “‘Was this happening with the very first civilian space flights?’” Wu says. 

A crash course in research

But before they could begin amassing this treasure trove of information, TRISH researchers had to design the experiments to be as simple as possible and train the space fliers to carry them out. While professional astronauts have years to prepare for a mission, the Inspiration4 crew had just a few months. And much of that time was spent learning to cope with life-or-death emergencies, such as what to do if the spacecraft’s window broke. 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

Professional astronauts oversee a wider range of experiments, many of which are automated, but the Inspiration4 team still had to study their intended research program. TRISH researchers taught a SpaceX employee how the experiments worked, and that employee trained the crew on site. Now that the spacecraft and its passengers have returned to Earth, TRISH, which paid an undisclosed amount of money to fly its research, waits to find out how successful its projects were. 

“We did our best to get them ready and capable of doing the science, but the nature of it is they’re on their own,” Wu says. 

More space fliers to come

Determining whether the experiments and training program were straightforward and effective enough will be a major research result in its own right, because Inspiration4 likely marks the beginning of a new wave of space travel. 

On average, fewer than a dozen astronauts have orbited the Earth each year since the beginning of human spaceflight in 1961. SpaceX is already on track to match that number in its first year of private flights, according to Wu, and could easily exceed it if the company starts to launch missions every month or two. In the span of a few years, what has historically been a slow drip of health information could become a deluge. 

And TRISH intends to record it all. The institute has already gotten in touch with specific crew members who will fly on upcoming missions, both announced and unannounced. “TRISH is being aggressive about engaging all potential missions because we don’t want to miss the opportunity to collect that data,” Wu says. 

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This post has been updated. It was last published on September 15, 2021.

On September 15, for the first time in history, the United States successfully sent four non-astronaut space travelers into orbit with the historic Inspiration4 mission, operated by SpaceX. The foursome traveled through space for three days in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Florida, on Saturday night.  

The spacecraft lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida carried by a Falcon 9 rocket. While the Dragon capsule reached outer space, it did not dock at the International Space Station. Rather, it soared about 80 miles higher instead. The crew viewed our planet from above for three days in orbit before returning through the atmosphere and landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Watch the launch here:

The main funding for the mission came from billionaire Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment processor Shift4 Payments. Isaacman, who is also a jet pilot licensed to fly commercial and military aircraft, assembled this team himself from a sweepstakes, with each crew member embodying a different aspirational characteristic. Isaacman’s private, all-civilian space mission furthers the push for commercial spaceflight. This journey doubles as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which the site’s FAQ explains by noting that, “if civilization can journey among the stars, we better have conquered childhood cancer along the way.” Isaacman paid for each spot on this flight and donated an additional $100 million to St. Jude.

The youngest among the eclectic crew is 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux, representing hope. A childhood bone cancer survivor, Arceneaux works as a physician’s assistant at St. Jude, where she received treatment as a ten year old. Arceneaux not only became the youngest American to enter space, but the first person in space with a prosthesis—a metal rod in her leg.

Geoscientist Sian Proctor—prosperity—has space travel in her blood; her father worked at the NASA tracking stations during the Apollo missions. While she had never been to space prior to this trip, she was an astronaut candidate and completed tasks in simulated space conditions, making her the most highly trained person on the mission. 

Data engineer Chris Sembroski has aerospace experience, though not of the astronaut type. The former US Space Camp counselor served in the US Air Force, and has a degree in professional aeronautics to boot. His spot represents generosity, as it originally went to a friend of Sembroski who bid on the ticket as part of the fundraiser, but passed it off when he wasn’t able to make the journey.

The crew had been training since March, acclimating to a zero-gravity environment and the huge G-forces needed to power a rocket launch.

Inspiration4 surpassed both Blue Origins’ and Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flights in height and duration.

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Last night, the Inspiration4 mission kicked off, launching four civilians into outer space. This historic mission marks the first private, commercial spaceflight with a crew composed entirely of amateurs. Furthermore, this flight, operated by SpaceX, will surpass those by Blue Origins and Virgin Galactic in both altitude and duration. The Dragon capsule containing the crew, who were selected by commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman, will be soaring about 80 miles above the International Space Station. The capsule will orbit our planet for three days before it returns back into the atmosphere and splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean.

Here’s what the mission has looked like so far.

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As frequent rocket launches make space more accessible, spent vehicles are plummeting back to Earth. In May, a 23-ton Chinese rocket splashed into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, ending days of uncertainty over where it would land. And in March, the four-ton upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket caused a spectacle when it broke apart over the Pacific Northwest. 

On top of rockets, large projects like internet satellite constellations are just now ramping up, so the current drizzle of falling space debris is likely to keep intensifying. 

Now, a team of researchers believes they have the ideal prototype for tracking the brewing celestial storm: dozens of cameras that keep unwavering watch over Spain’s sky. Designed to spot natural fireballs, in February the Spanish Meteor and Fireball Network (SPMN) picked up a Falcon 9 rocket stage burning up over the Mediterranean Sea. The detection suggests that, together with similar “fireball networks” elsewhere, the SPMN could become a valuable tool for helping space organizations understand and minimize the terrestrial risks of space debris, keeping the odds of a rocket crashing through a roof vanishingly low. 

[Related: The COVID oxygen shortage is delaying NASA rockets]

“Fireball networks can be very useful for the aerospace community, as we have very precise information about the things that are going through space,” says Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, an astrophysicist from the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona, and coordinator of the SPMN. 

The Spanish fireball network

The SPMN was never supposed to track falling rockets. For a quarter century, the 200 or so cameras, which are spread out across 37 sites on the Iberian Peninsula, have watched the night sky for the bright streaks left behind when meteors plow into Earth’s atmosphere. The scientists behind the network catalog hundreds of fireballs each year, which they use for two purposes. 

First, they look ahead to predict where the space rocks might have fallen. Using the network, researchers successfully recovered a meteorite from Northern Spain in 2004, which at the time was only the 10th meteorite found in this way. 

Second, they look backwards to estimate where in space the meteor came from. Calculating the original orbits of these objects has helped astronomers discover streams of smaller pieces coming from more threatening asteroids and comets. 

“We are trying to understand the sources of hazards to humans coming from space,” Trigo-Rodríguez says. 

An artificial fireball

Now the team is trying to get a handle on hazards originating closer to home. 

On Feb. 16, three of the network’s cameras picked up a fireball that, from their perspectives in southern and eastern Spain, appeared to be traveling across the crown-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia.

But this fireball moved completely unlike those the SPMN usually detects. When meteors arrive from deep space they come in hot, hurtling through the atmosphere at a steep angle and glowing for just seconds. This object took its time, hanging in the sky for minutes. SPMN researchers quickly realized it must be a piece of space debris, since objects in Earth’s orbit move more slowly and travel nearly parallel to the ground. 

By tweaking the software typically used to analyze the furious flashes of natural fireballs to fit the leisurely arc of the debris, the group calculated the object’s precise path through the atmosphere. The researchers then compared the trajectory with the orbits of debris listed in a US government catalog and found a match. Their fireball was the upper stage rocket of a SpaceX launch of 60 Starlink satellites from earlier that night. The group released their calculations on Sept. 2 in a pre-print, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal Astrodynamics. 

“To our knowledge it’s the first time that someone has done this using wide-field imagery,” Trigo-Rodríguez says, referring to the way fireball network cameras capture broad swaths of the sky. 

Tracking space debris

And it likely won’t be the last. Rocket launches are on the rise, and SpaceX is just one of a handful of companies in the process of assembling swarms of thousands of internet satellites. These satellites will operate for roughly five years before swan diving into the atmosphere. Trigo-Rodríguez expects that the refreshed software, which was written by his Ph.D. student Eloy Peña-Asensio, an aeronautic engineer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and CSIC-IEEC, will flag many more instances of falling debris in the future. Doing so, he says, serves three main purposes. 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

To start, identifying space debris could help calm eyewitnesses who may be alarmed at unusual lights in the sky. The March incident in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, appeared dramatic enough to prompt a child of one observer to ask, “Mom, are we ok?” 

Second, studying the objects’ paths could lead to their recovery. Collecting satellite shards might have some limited scientific value (Trigo-Rodríguez’s past research has found that molten balls of metal can imitate natural meteorites, winning them the tongue-in-cheek-nickname, “meteorwrongs”). But more importantly, it could help researchers understand what can survive a fall from space and whether the debris could be dangerous. 

Next, public knowledge of where rocket and satellite pieces end up could put pressure on space organizations to act responsibly. Most rocket stages dive into oceans through a combination of luck and design (most of the Earth is water and launches generally aim for the middle of the Pacific), but countries are legally responsible for damages if anything goes wrong. 

In 1978, for example, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite crashed in northern Canada, strewing radioactive material across a 600-mile-long strip of land. The Canadian government charged the Soviet Union $6 million Canadian dollars ( about $18 million in US dollars today), and eventually received half that much. 

Fireball networks capable of recognizing space debris, Trigo-Rodríguez suggests, could increase transparency. “All the space agencies around the world should take care to put all these rockets on the right trajectories to decay far from people,” he says. 

Driven by the scientific desire to collect meteorites, fireball networks are already going global. Networks in Australia, Canada, the US, the UK, Argentina, Morocco, and other countries have unified to form the “Global Fireball Observatory,” which continues to expand. Preparing them for artificial fireballs would require just a simple software upgrade. 

“We can establish closer cooperation with [the] aerospace [community] in order to use all the infrastructure we have already built,” Trigo-Rodríguez says. 

Correction Sept. 13, 2021: This post has been updated to correctly name the body of water over which the Falcon 9 rocket stage was burning. It was the Mediterranean Sea; there is no Mediterranean Ocean.

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This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Wade at night into the gently lapping surf at Boca Chica Beach, an undeveloped stretch of sand about 20 miles east of the Texas border town of Brownsville, and ahead you’ll see nothing but Gulf waters meeting sky—endless, dark but for the stars and languid whitecaps. A pensive, ancient view to make you feel small and the world enormous. 

Turn around and everything inverts. Beyond a smattering of working-class Latino families, gathered around bonfires and pickup trucks on the beach, looms something brimming with novelty, brightness, and ambition: the South Texas launch site for SpaceX, where one day a 400-foot rocket may leave Earth en route to Mars. 

Just 1,500 feet from the water’s edge, amid rolling sand dunes and acres of tidal mud flats, rises a launchpad of towering cranes and scaffolding lit up like a sports stadium. Two miles back down State Highway 4, the only road reaching this remote bit of Texas coastline, is a bustling command and production facility. Around 10 p.m. on a June evening, construction workers huddle together on a platform encircling a huge white tank, consulting in Spanish about the job at hand, their acetylene torches showering sparks into the night air. Out front, where the company has erected an illuminated sign reading “Starbase,” tourists arrive to take selfies. One man says he came all the way from Kentucky, hoping to get a job with SpaceX. He’s exultant. “It’s like 530 years ago,” he says, “the last time we settled a new world.”

There are those in Brownsville who call SpaceX—the California-based corporation founded by Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man—a form of colonization. “Brownsville is an area that’s been colonized and recolonized and has done so much to benefit people who come from somewhere else but not the people from here,” says Michelle Serrano, a local activist with the progressive network Voces Unidas.

Musk’s company, a 19-year-old concern now worth $74 billion, is a trailblazer in the field of privatized space travel. Last year, SpaceX became the first private company to carry NASA astronauts from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, the traditional hub of U.S. space launches, to the International Space Station. Musk is presently feuding with fellow space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest individual, over future NASA contracts. Ultimately, Musk’s dream is to establish human society on Mars, an enterprise for which Texas beachgoers and rare wildlife are paying the price.  

About a decade ago, Musk began scouting locations for a new launch site, looking for cheap land near a body of water to catch falling rockets and relatively near the equator for aeronautic reasons. The tip of South Texas seemed to fit the bill. SpaceX began gobbling up properties near Boca Chica Beach, which runs 7 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the ship channel that separates it from South Padre Island. 

Musk met with county and state officials, who rushed to lure him to an area where poverty rates hover around 30 percent. The state kicked in $15 million in incentives, and Cameron County abated the company’s property taxes for 10 years. In 2013, then-state Representative René Oliveira passed a bill allowing the county to close the beach during SpaceX launch activities, a move otherwise forbidden by Texas’ 62-year-old Open Beaches Act, one of the nation’s strongest laws protecting public beach access. 

For years, Musk barely touched the site. Then, in 2018, a space complex began to emerge. By mid-2019, test rocket launches started. Soon, the explosions followed. At least eight times, experimental space rockets met fiery demises during testing or landing, spewing flames and metal debris into crucial shorebird habitat abutting the beach. The company bought out most residents, some under duress, of a tiny subdivision next to the new production facility. Musk’s public enthusiasm also helped spur gentrification in nearby Brownsville, where housing costs rose last year by 20 percent, outpacing most major Texas cities. Meanwhile, local families, who had for generations come to Boca Chica Beach whenever they pleased, found their path increasingly blocked.

Charlie Guillen, 39, has fished at Boca Chica his whole life, just like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Standing in the surf, anglers can reel in redfish, black drum, speckled trout, and whiting. Free of charge and open 24/7, Boca Chica has long been the beach for locals, Guillen says, while tourists pay for entry to the condo-riddled South Padre beach. Guillen, who runs a yearly fishing tournament at Boca Chica, used to come to the beach three or four times a week. But since SpaceX began closing the area every few days for everything from launches to equipment moving, he goes less and less. 

“Boca Chica is the poor man’s beach,” he says. “It’s kind of like the fajita: People used to throw that away, and when they found out the poor guy was eating something pretty good, they took it away and started charging a lot of money for it.” 

According to agreements with federal and state regulators, SpaceX should generally give 14 days’ notice before closing the road to Boca Chica and do so for only 300 hours a year. But advisories posted by the county, and monitoring by the state parks agency, show the company routinely provides only a day or two heads-up. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service and an independent environmental group have calculated that SpaceX closed the highway for more than 1,000 hours—around 42 days—in both 2019 and 2020 and is on a similar pace this year. The company also often changes plans last-minute and exceeds announced times. 

Musk seems to have imported the Silicon Valley mantra of “Move fast and break things” to South Texas, where federal and local officials have mostly stayed out of his way. SpaceX employees have used the shoulder of State Highway 4 as a parking lot, and the two-lane road has seen a surge in traffic, potholes, and roadkill. One family is suing the company over a fatal car accident. Musk’s company also told federal regulators it would block lighting from reaching the beach, where it might disturb nesting sea turtles. A beach visit dispels that notion. Federal documents further state SpaceX is avoiding launches during turtle and bird nesting season, roughly March through September, which is disproved by a glance at the feds’ own public data or Musk’s Twitter feed.

In fact, Musk’s entire Texas project has changed from what the Federal Aviation Administration approved in 2014. Back then, SpaceX said the site would be for launching proven Falcon rockets, the ones it’s used to carry astronauts. That never happened, and the company is instead testing much larger experimental “Starships” designed for Martian travel. Hence the fires and explosions.

Musk seems to see Boca Chica as terra nullius, no man’s land. “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if [a rocket] blows up, it’s cool,” he said of the area in 2018.

On a Saturday morning in June, Mary Helen Flores, a 56-year-old Brownsville native who helps run volunteer beach cleanups, pulls up to Boca Chica in her white SUV. Parked vehicles extend to the horizon in both directions; mothers sit with children in the shallow tide; seagulls and brown pelicans swarm. “There was no other beach like Boca Chica on the entire Gulf Coast that you could drive on for free, stay as long as you wanted, and it was completely undeveloped,” Flores says.“There’s no replacing that, so I don’t understand how it was just pissed away.” 

Mars. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, a planet at least 34 million miles away with no breathable air and temperatures about 80 below zero. Once there, he wants to colonize it, establishing an independent human civilization. Why? To save humanity, if you take his word for it.

“Either we’re going to become a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization, or we’re going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk has said. Elsewhere, he’s stated his only reason for amassing a $160 billion net worth is for this sort of astral charity: “I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” 

There’s a certain logic to Musk’s claims. By burning fossil fuels and proliferating nuclear weapons, we humans have made our planet more catastrophe-prone. Plus, some hundreds of millions of years from now, the sun could grow too hot for life on Earth. Musk believes we need a fail-safe, a vision that’s earned him both fans and detractors.

“The advocates of Mars colonization are saying, ‘Earth has all these problems with regard to its potential habitability for humans,’ which is certainly true,” says Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at John Hopkins University who wrote a recent book arguing against space colonization. “But their solution is to go to an utterly lifeless, vastly inhospitable space millions of miles away and start from scratch, as opposed to saving the rainforests or preventing acidification of the ocean.”

Deudney describes life on Mars as hellish: To breathe and avoid death by radiation, humans would shelter in heavily insulated domes or bunkers. We’d need to create contained, artificial ecosystems, something we’ve been unable to pull off on Earth. Musk says we should “terraform” Mars, or make it Earth-like, while NASA says that’s impossible in the foreseeable future. And if we did ever establish a self-sustaining population—a huge if—Deudney believes we’d come to regret it. 

As space colonies became independent, Deudney argues, war would overtake the final frontier just as it does on earthly frontiers, only deadlier. Think weaponized asteroids. “The space environment is intrinsically violent in ways that are completely alien to terrestrial existence,” he says. “Really, our future generations will curse us for having started this.” Better, Deudney says, to put our limited time and money toward directly addressing threats at home—the only place in the universe that we know is conducive to complex life.

Of course, there are other uses for Musk’s massive reusable rockets, even if Mars colonization never takes off. Take luxury tourism. SpaceX has plans to shuttle three tourists to the International Space Station, in a rocket launched from Florida, for a price of $55 million each. Another billionaire, Richard Branson, became the first person to self-fund a brief trip to suborbital space in July, and his company has sold seats on such flights for about $250,000. For reference, the median household income in Brownsville is $39,000 a year. 

Then, there’s satellite deployment. For its budding internet service, SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites into orbit, with plans to send off about 40,000 more. This swarm of reflective objects, sometimes visible to the naked eye, has already polluted astronomers’ space images with trails of light, like a child drawing with a highlighter. Musk “is screwing astronomy with his satellites,” says Nicholas Suntzeff, professor of observational astronomy at Texas A&M. 

Suntzeff especially fears the potential use of satellites for corporate advertising. Next year, SpaceX plans to ferry a satellite into orbit for a company that will display images of a customer’s choice on the satellite in return for cryptocoin payments. The pictures will be visible only via livestream on electronic devices, but Suntzeff suspects ads will one day be seen from the ground. “When you look up at the sky and instead of seeing the moon, you see Chick-Fil-A, it’s gonna really piss people off,” he says. “The sky is the heritage of all humanity … and a few companies trying to make money will take that away from us.”

Last, there’s the long-standing overlap between space and military technologies. In the century behind us, the Nazi Wernher Von Braun invented the V-2 rocket, a long-range ballistic missile for use against the Allies that later propelled the first man-made object into space. In our current century, the American military already pays SpaceX to launch spy satellites, and the Air Force is interested in using the company’s Starship to deliver large payloads all over the world.

Musk is not the first to dream of developing Boca Chica Beach. In the 1800s, a settlement called Clarksville stood where the sand meets the mouth of the Rio Grande; in the 1930s, an Army colonel from Missouri erected a small seaside resort on the beach. Both projects were ravaged by hurricanes. Musk isn’t even the first rocket enthusiast to grace Boca Chica. In 1933, a skydiving exhibitionist put on a show billed as the Human Rocket, in which he leaped from a moving plane and planned to ignite fireworks with a cigar as he descended. With hundreds gathered on the beach to watch, the man vanished mid-stunt into the mist over the Gulf. Newspaper reports suggest he either drowned or fled to Mexico.

In 1954, a new bridge facilitated travel to South Padre Island, and from then on Padre became the hub for waterfront tourism and entertainment. Boca Chica was left alone to cement its identity as the poor people’s beach, free and a touch wild. 

Perhaps, though, Musk will be the man to stick the landing at Boca Chica. Maybe SpaceX will avoid a serious hurricane hit, a scenario that Texas’ parks department has said could cause “catastrophic damage.” Rather than vanish in the mist, Musk might write Boca Chica into the world history books. Already, he’s taken to calling the area Starbase, and—despite the fact that most of the surrounding land is owned by the state or federal government—he professes plans to settle a kind of company town. SpaceX has also hinted at schemes for a luxury resort.

Maybe, one day, Brownsvillians at Boca Chica will be able to stand in the shadow of a colossal Mars-bound rocket, bathed in the lights of a high-dollar hotel, watching countless satellites careen overhead like for-profit shooting stars, knowing that they were a part of history. Some locals will hold jobs at SpaceX, and a few may even be well-paid enough to buy a ride into murderous space itself. Perhaps, it will all be worth it.

Henry Garcia, a slight 55-year-old, stands in the Boca Chica surf holding his infant grandchild on a Friday evening. As the sun sets, a salty breeze erases the last of the day’s heat. “This is where you release the stress, man, forget about everything,” he says. Garcia has six more family members with him, spanning three generations, grilling chicken nearby and prepping a bonfire. He’s fed up with SpaceX disrupting the area. “We want ’em out of here,” he says. “They stop us from enjoying the beach. It’s all ambition.” 

Asked about the jobs the company brings, Garcia shrugs, then gestures across the yawning Gulf. “I prefer this.”  

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Richard Branson’s historic foray into space is under scrutiny from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after deviating from its flight path—an error that could potentially prevent Virgin Galactic from moving forward with its next civilian mission.

A spokesperson from the FAA told Popular Science an investigation is ongoing into the July 11 suborbital flight, which brought the billionaire and five Virgin Galactic employees from the New Mexico desert to the cusp of space. With a successful takeoff and landing, the mission, dubbed Unity22, was widely hailed as a milestone on the path towards space tourism, though it also attracted criticism for its cost and carbon footprint.

But now, the journey of the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane is being reviewed for a potentially dangerous deviation from its air traffic control clearance space during descent. A report from The New Yorker, which first announced the presence of the investigation, explained that the FAA allocates mandated airspace for private space travel as a way of preventing collisions and other accidents with general air traffic. 

[Related: Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will bring science along on their joyrides]

The New Yorker alleges a yellow caution light illuminated nearly one minute into the rocket motor’s burn on the Unity22 trip, letting the pilots know their path upwards was too shallow. This could have two significant repercussions: the spaceplane could stray from that allocated airspace, and it could also miss arriving at its “entry glide cone” area, where it needs to begin its descent to have sufficient energy to safely reach Earth. As the plane progressed, The New Yorker says that a light illuminated red—a warning that retired Air Force pilot Mike Masucci told the outlet should “scare the crap out of you.”

While the pilots ultimately completed the mission with a smooth landing, Virgin Galactic admits the spaceplane did stray from its path, dropping below protected airspace altitude for one minute and 41 seconds. 

[Related: Jeff Bezos is suing NASA. Here’s why.]

“When the vehicle encountered high altitude winds which changed the trajectory, the pilots and systems monitored the trajectory to ensure it remained within mission parameters,” Virgin Galactic said in a statement to Popular Science in response to The New Yorker report. The statement also disputed what it called “misleading characterizations and conclusions” in the article, saying that the pilots “responded appropriately” to the flight conditions and that “at no time” were passengers, crew, or the public in danger due to this shift.

While the Virgin Galactic statement repeatedly referred to safety, calling it a top priority and part of the company culture, The New Yorker pointed to a pattern of safety issues that have plagued previous journeys, including two technical issues in recent years that called into question the readiness of the spaceplane for flight. The Verge added that Branson’s presence on the future flights had been promised after one such incident in 2014, which killed one pilot and left another “severely injured.” Branson had pledged to take the journey himself to reaffirm trust in the carrier before taking on other civilian customers. 

[Related: Blue Origin brought the first official tourists to space]

But that long-standing plan to get paying participants on board, more than a decade in the making, could be further delayed by the FAA investigation. According to The Verge, Virgin Galactic’s next mission was scheduled for late September and would be its first to generate revenue. However, the FAA told Popular Science the company cannot resume flights on SpaceShipTwo until the administration “approves the final mishap investigation report or determines the issues related to the mishap do not affect public safety.” 

Virgin Galactic said it is taking these concerns seriously and is working closely and in partnership with the FAA to address their concerns.  

“We have been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review and timely resolution of this issue,” the company told Popular Science.

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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit against NASA, accusing the government agency of improperly evaluating proposals. This is the latest move Bezos has made after months of criticizing NASA’s decision to pick Blue Origin’s longtime rival SpaceX as the recipient of a $2.9 billion contract to get astronauts back on the moon.

Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, penned an open letter to NASA, asking them to rethink the contract, offering to waive $2 billion dollars of costs. He also filed a complaint to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

“I don’t know if the public is paying attention to this, but the space community sure is and the space community is reacting very negatively,” says Laura Forczyk, owner of aerospace space consulting firm Astralytical. “It’s seen as pettiness—as throwing a tantrum.” 

Here’s what led to the suit in the US Court of Federal Claims.

What’s the deal with Blue Origin?

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and the company has spent years competing with SpaceX and other players in the aerospace industry for lucrative government contracts. The company’s been slowly building up their technical capabilities, with tech like reusable launch vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American to rocket into space. It’s designed to take six astronauts past the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary to space. 

Then there’s the New Glenn, named for astronaut John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth. It’s designed to be reused for a minimum of 25 flights, making trips to space cheaper and more accessible. 

[Related: Blue Origin brought the first official tourists to space]

Both projects are in line with NASA’s Artemis program, whose mission is getting Americans back to the moon for longer periods of time, on rockets that can be reused. “NASA doesn’t want just the ability to land humans and come back, they want to make it repeatable and affordable,” Forczyk says, “They want to create some kind of longer term, sustainable human presence on the moon.”

[Related: The White House is giving NASA another $1.6 billion to go to the moon. It won’t be enough.]

Even though Artemis is a program that has only officially been around for about two years, the idea of returning back to the moon has existed since the first Bush administration, when it was called the Space Exploration initiative, says Forczyk. Under the second Bush administration, it was called Constellation, but the idea didn’t pick up steam until former Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech in 2019 calling for human return to the moon by 2024.

What happened with NASA?

In April 2020, three companies—Blue Origin, Dynetics, and SpaceX—were all invited to submit lunar lander designs to NASA as part of the Artemis program. The winner of the contract would get to play a hand in transporting people back to the moon for the first time in decades. According to a GAO document, NASA voiced a “preference for awarding two [contracts], pending availability of funds.”

[Related: Jeff Bezos wants to solve all our problems by shipping us to the moon]

A year later, NASA announced that only SpaceX would get the contract. “This was a surprise because everyone anticipated they would select two instead of just one,” says Forczyk.

Both Blue Origin and Dynetics filed complaints to the GAO. SpaceX’s work stopped while the GAO deliberated, but they eventually found no fault in the process, noting that NASA did not have the funding for more than one contract. Elon Musk responded to the news by tweeting “GAO” with the flexed arm emoji. 

Bezos then penned an open letter to NASA chief Bill Nelson on July 26, 2021, saying that this decision to award SpaceX the only contract was “putting an end to meaningful competition for years to come.” He offered to waive payments of up to $2 billion.

[Related: Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will bring science along on their joyrides]

NASA did not respond, and by August 16, Bezos escalated his campaign against NASA, filing a federal court complaint that cited issues in the proposal evaluation process.

And on August 19, a Washington Post reporter announced on Twitter that a NASA spokesperson said it had to pause its work on the human landing system in response to a judge’s stay.

What has the public reaction been like?

Artemis has been plagued by many delays, and some fear this lawsuit could delay the project further.

“It’s unfortunate; he does have quite a bit of wealth, and he could funnel that wealth into paying for this project internally, or he could funnel his wealth into convincing NASA that they need to hire him,” says Forczyk.

Meanwhile, an open letter posted on the subreddit r/BlueOrigin titled “We are NOT like this,” allegedly from the perspective of Blue Origin employees, voices embarrassment at the lawsuit. A few Blue Origin staffers, like engineer Lauren Lyons, have left the company. Engineer Nitin Arora actually left Blue Origin for SpaceX.

“Looking at the bigger picture, this is just a blip,” says Forczyk. “When we bask in the glory of finally getting back [to the moon], it’ll be something long forgotten.” 

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Update: SpaceX released two new videos: a high-resolution video of the first stage landing, complete with the ultimate fiery end, as well as a close-up from the barge. Take a look in the videos above and below.

After SpaceX’s routine Falcon 9 launch to the International Space Station yesterday afternoon, the company took a stab at the extraordinary. They tried to land the main stage of their rocket as it fell back down to Earth (a feat that has never been done before). Landing a rocket after launch would mark the first monumental step toward making reusable rockets a reality, which could drastically bring down the cost of spaceflight in the future.

Pretty soon after the launch, however, SpaceX relayed the bummer news: Like their last landing attempt in January, the rocket hit its target a little too hard and could not be recovered. But now, new video released by SpaceX reveals that the initial reports of a crash don’t do the company justice. A 6-second Vine shows that the rocket did indeed stick its landing–only to fall over afterward.

In the video, the first stage of the Falcon 9–the part of the rocket that contains the main engines and most of the fuel needed for the initial launch–steadily descends from above, slowing down as it approaches the floating drone spaceport (named Just Read The Instructions). Right before it meets the ship, it tilts at an awkward angle but still manages to land. According to Musk, an “excess of lateral velocity” is to blame for causing the first stage to topple over.

Hopefully we’ll know in the coming days what problems can be fixed to prevent this type of instability in the future. But one thing is certain: SpaceX is making progress. With their first rocket-landing attempt, the rocket ran out of hydraulic fluid needed to power its hypersonic grid fins, which help to slow down and steer the vehicle to its ultimate destination. The result? The first stage slammed into the drone spaceport at a mostly horizontal angle.

As this latest video shows, the rocket managed to remain vertical for quite some time before landing. That means there’s only up to go from here for SpaceX–or in this case, upright.

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Eloise Marais is an associate professor in Physical Geography at University College London. This story originally featured in The Conversation.

The commercial race to get tourists to space is heating up between Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. On Sunday 11 July, Branson ascended 80 km to reach the edge of space in his piloted Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spaceplane. Bezos’ autonomous Blue Origin rocket launched on July 20, coinciding with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Though Bezos loses to Branson in time, he was set to reach higher altitudes (about 120 km). The launch demonstrated his offering to very wealthy tourists: the opportunity to truly reach outer space. Both tour packages provide passengers with a brief ten-minute frolic in zero gravity and glimpses of Earth from space. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will provide four to five days of orbital travel with its Crew Dragon capsule later in 2021.

What are the environmental consequences of a space tourism industry likely to be? Bezos boasts his Blue Origin rockets are greener than Branson’s VSS Unity. The Blue Engine 3 (BE-3) launched Bezos, his brother and two guests into space using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. VSS Unity used a hybrid propellant comprised of a solid carbon-based fuel, hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), and a liquid oxidant, nitrous oxide (laughing gas). The SpaceX Falcon series of reusable rockets will propel the Crew Dragon into orbit using liquid kerosene and liquid oxygen.

Burning these propellants provides the energy needed to launch rockets into space while also generating greenhouse gases and air pollutants. Large quantities of water vapor are produced by burning the BE-3 propellant, while combustion of both the VSS Unity and Falcon fuels produces CO₂, soot and some water vapor. The nitrogen-based oxidant used by VSS Unity also generates nitrogen oxides, compounds that contribute to air pollution closer to Earth.

Roughly two-thirds of the propellant exhaust is released into the stratosphere (12 km-50 km) and mesosphere (50 km-85 km), where it can persist for at least two to three years. The very high temperatures during launch and re-entry (when the protective heat shields of the returning crafts burn up) also convert stable nitrogen in the air into reactive nitrogen oxides.

These gases and particles have many negative effects on the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, nitrogen oxides and chemicals formed from the breakdown of water vapor convert ozone into oxygen, depleting the ozone layer which guards life on Earth against harmful UV radiation. Water vapor also produces stratospheric clouds that provide a surface for this reaction to occur at a faster pace than it otherwise would.

Space tourism and climate change

Exhaust emissions of CO₂ and soot trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Cooling of the atmosphere can also occur, as clouds formed from the emitted water vapour reflect incoming sunlight back to space. A depleted ozone layer would also absorb less incoming sunlight, and so heat the stratosphere less.

Figuring out the overall effect of rocket launches on the atmosphere will require detailed modelling, to account for these complex processes and the persistence of these pollutants in the upper atmosphere. Equally important is a clear understanding of how the space tourism industry will develop.

Virgin Galactic anticipates it will offer 400 spaceflights each year to the privileged few who can afford them. Blue Origin and SpaceX have yet to announce their plans. But globally, rocket launches wouldn’t need to increase by much from the current 100 or so performed each year to induce harmful effects that are competitive with other sources, like ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and CO₂ from aircraft.

During launch, rockets can emit between four and ten times more nitrogen oxides than Drax, the largest thermal power plant in the UK, over the same period. CO₂ emissions for the four or so tourists on a space flight will be between 50 and 100 times more than the one to three tons per passenger on a long-haul flight.

For international regulators to keep up with this nascent industry and control its pollution properly, scientists need a better understanding of the effect these billionaire astronauts will have on our planet’s atmosphere.

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A Blue Origin New Shepard rocket blasted off from the flat Texas desert this morning. It was Blue Origin’s 16th time launching the New Shepard model and the third time this particular rocket and capsule have risen to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. But it was the first time the vehicle carried passengers, including a paying customer. 

Fortunately, the flight went according to plan. The New Shepard fired its engines and rose to an altitude of about 66 miles in a matter of minutes, a round capsule detaching from the rocket below along the way. The crew experienced a few minutes of weightlessness as their capsule coasted to a halt and then fell back toward the Earth. After the rocket touched back down on the landing pad, three parachutes erupted from the capsule and hovered above it like gigantic blue and red jellyfish as the vehicle landed in a puff of dust. 

Ten minutes and 18 seconds after it began, the experience ended, and Blue Origin personnel opened the capsule and guided the newly minted astronauts to a scrum of family and well-wishers waiting to congratulate them. 

“It was picture-perfect,” said Gary Lai, the lead designer of the New Shepard rocket, during the live stream. 

Four astronauts

Blue Origin’s milestone first human flight carried four astronauts above the Karman line, the internationally recognized (but somewhat contentious) boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, 62 miles above the surface of the Earth. 

The most prominent passenger was Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin and the world’s richest person. A lifelong space enthusiast, he has personally funded much of Blue Origin’s 20-year endeavor to make human spaceflight more common by selling around $1 billion of Amazon stock annually, according to Reuters. 

And Bezos may have been imagining this moment even longer than that. In the first place, he may have been driven to found Amazon to enrich himself enough to bankroll a space endeavor like Blue Origin, according to his high school girlfriend.  

“Best day ever,” he said on the live stream after exiting the capsule earlier today.

Bezos also invited his brother, Mark Bezos, a marketing executive and volunteer firefighter, along for the ride. “What a remarkable opportunity, not only to be able to have this opportunity but also to be able to do it with my best friend,” he said in an Instagram video. 

The flight made history with its next two passengers, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, who became the oldest and youngest astronauts at 82 years old and 18 years old, respectively. 

The experience held extra significance for Funk, who trained to become an astronaut with NASA in 1961 with a group of women officially known as the Mercury 13 (and unofficially known as the FLATs: First Lady Astronaut Trainees). NASA did not send the women into space, but Funk has been looking for a ride off this rock ever since, even putting down a deposit with Virgin Galactic in 2010, according to The New York Times. Today she got her wish. 

“I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there,” Funk said in a press conference after the flight. “We had a great time, the four of us. I want to go again—fast.” 

The now-youngest human to visit space was a last-minute addition to the crew. When an as-yet anonymous winner of an auction for the seat, who bid $28 million for the experience, backed out due to “scheduling conflicts,” Daemen, a Dutch student, was bumped up from a later flight. His father, Joes Daemen, a Dutch hedge fund manager, bought the seat from Blue Origin for an unknown price. 

[Related: Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin will bring science along on their joyrides]

The return of space tourism

Space tourism was once an almost routine event. Starting with engineer and entrepreneur Dennis Tito in 2001, a company called Space Adventures brokered almost annual trips to the International Space Station on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But the program stopped when the space shuttle program started to wind down and rides to the ISS became too precious to sell—even for the going price of $20 to $40 million. 

Now it’s back, and with more ways to leave the planet than before. In addition to Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic flew four employees (and a few plants) into suborbital space, although not quite to the Karman line, on its first fully crewed flight just over a week ago, and will likely send paying customers on the next jaunt. And SpaceX has partnered with Space Adventures with the intention of sending customers into orbit, a significantly harder technical challenge.  

Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX are all owned by billionaires—two of which periodically trade off the title of world’s richest human. All three companies have faced criticism for pursuing what amounts to a tourism experience for the super-rich while the world grapples with climate change, the pandemic, and other challenges. 

Bezos, for his part, called such criticisms “largely right,” according to The Guardian. “We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those, and we also need to look to the future, we’ve always done that as a species and as a civilization,” he continued. “We have to do both.”

While Musk dreams of an independent and self-sufficient city on Mars that will make humanity a “multiplanetary” civilization, Bezos has long envisioned a world where millions of humans live and work in large orbital settlements whose economies would be tightly linked with Earth’s—a future one could call “super-planetary.”

In the present, Blue Origin plans to sell more tickets for more suborbital launches. Riding high on today’s successful mission, the company may send up two more New Shepard rockets this year.

“Not only did we do it today, but we can do it again and again and again and again,” Lai said.

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On Sunday morning, Sirisha Bandla reached into a pouch strapped to her leg and pulled out a plastic tube containing a seedling in the mustard family and a chemical preservative. As she turned a knob on one end of the tube, the preservative surrounded the young plant, halting all biological activity. Over the next few minutes, at carefully selected moments, she repeated the action on two similar tubes. 

It might have been an ordinary experiment if not for the extraordinary setting. But Bandla, the vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, was floating dozens of miles above the surface of the Earth, pioneering a brand-new form of research.  

“We could be looking back at this in a year or two or ten and saying, ‘Geez, that was the first time somebody did an experiment in suborbital space? Holy cow, I can’t believe there was ever a time we didn’t do this,’’’ says Rob Ferl, a biologist at the University of Florida who helped design the experiment. 

[Related: Why the Virgin Galactic spaceship didn’t reach orbit last weekend]

Bandla carried out the plant experiment aboard the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, which transported her and three other Virgin Galactic-affiliated passengers to the edge of space in a landmark moment for space tourism. 

Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed spaceflight included founder Richard Branson, who reached space just nine days before his billionaire rival Jeff Bezos is scheduled to fly on his own Blue Origin’s 16th launch of the New Shepard rocket. 

Some enthusiasts cheered the endeavor for expanding access to space, while others lampooned it as a joyride for the superrich (early seats have sold for $250,000 a pop to the likes of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry). But as the two billionaires race to make suborbital space tourism a reality, space researchers may win the real prize: the chance to operate novel types of experiments themselves. 

In the days before the flight, Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul, who together run the University of Florida’s Space Plants Lab, trekked to a makeshift laboratory in the hangar of New Mexico’s Spaceport America to prepare the seedings for the NASA-funded experiment. Their immediate goal is to understand how plants, which have evolved to live under the standard pull of Earth’s gravity, initially react to the alien environment of near weightlessness, or “microgravity.” 

This experiment took snapshots of the Arabidopsis plant’s genetic activity at three points: before the onset of weightlessness, in the middle of weightlessness, and toward the end. Future experiments may examine how plants tweak their metabolism or protein use to cope with the loss of gravity. 

These questions are impossible to answer with standard microgravity laboratories. Ferl and Paul have sent seeds to the International Space Station, but plants there live out their entire lives completely free from the Earth’s pull. They’ve also flown with plants on parabolic “vomit comet” rides, but those generate just seconds of weightlessness. Only on suborbital jaunts, like those Virgin Galactic now provides, can experiments probe the transition from Earth gravity to microgravity, as well as a microgravity environment that lasts for minutes.  

Ferl and Paul’s experiment had a second goal reaching beyond plant genetics: to test suborbital experimental procedures in general. They aimed to learn, for example, how long it would take for Bandla to activate the tubes during her two to four minutes of weightlessness, how many samples she could carry, and how she would handle them. This aspect of the research explored the real game-changing opportunity of suborbital research, giving scientists more direct access to their own experiments. 

In almost every field of science, research is a hands-on experience. Climate scientists voyage to the Arctic and Antarctic. Volcanologists trek up volcanoes to measure lava flows first-hand. Marine biologists hop into deep sea submarines to observe the behavior of strange underwater creatures. We’re really comfortable with the idea of scientists going to work in “areas that are crazy dangerous or crazy novel,” Paul says. 

Microgravity research is different. The International Space Station hosts just a handful of astronauts at a time. They activate and monitor a broad range of experiments, which Earth-bound investigators generally set up to be as automatic as possible. It’s far better than nothing, and the ISS-based investigations have produced a massive body of scientific literature. But no computer program or robot can beat the mind and hands of a person. 

[Related: Dozens of baby squid are orbiting our planet right now]

“Only a human can really make a decision as to what is the right time and the right manner in which to execute the experiment,” Paul says. 

And then there’s the price. A fully automated machine that stops an organism’s functioning at exactly the right moment might cost millions to develop. At just a few hundred thousand dollars per seat, Virgin Galactic starts to look like a bargain. 

Soon, Virgin Galactic will fly not only human-tended experiments, but experiments tended by the very humans who designed them. Last year NASA chose Alan Stern, the head scientist of a high-profile Pluto flyby mission, to test how stars and other heavenly bodies appear to astronomical equipment through Virgin Galactic’s windows. Bezos’s rival suborbital company, Blue Origin, also plans to launch experiments into suborbital space soon. That research will initially include automated experiments from the Space Plants Lab, and Ferl expects that human-operated investigations will follow. 

“Our real hope for 2021 is to help unlock the capability for both of these providers to be able to fly scientists,” Ferl says. “That’s why [Sunday’s flight] was such a big deal.”

It may have been just a few minutes of weightlessness for Bandla, Branson, and the rest of the crew, but the mission could be the start of a new era for researchers in space. 

“We are on this frontier of getting to the new normal, and eventually this will be normal,” Paul says. “But for right now, it’s still a novel, awesome thing.”

Correction July 15, 2021: A previous version of this article misspelled a biologist’s last name. He is Rob Ferl, not Fern.

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John M. Horack is the Neil Armstrong Chair and Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

“Suborbital” is a term you’ll be hearing a lot as Sir Richard Branson flies aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity winged spaceship and Jeff Bezos flies aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle to touch the boundary of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

But what exactly is “suborbital”? Simply put, it means that while these vehicles will cross the ill-defined boundary of space, they will not be going fast enough to stay in space once they get there.

If a spacecraft – or anything else, for that matter – reaches a speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h) or more, instead of falling back to the ground, it will continuously fall around the Earth. That continuous falling is what it means to be in orbit and is how satellites and the moon stay above Earth.

Anything that launches to space but does not have sufficient horizontal velocity to stay in space—like these rockets—comes back to Earth and therefore flies a suborbital trajectory.

Why these suborbital flights matter

Although the two spacecraft launched in July 2021 will not reach orbit, the accomplishment of reaching space in private spacecraft is a major milestone in the history of humanity. Those aboard these and all future private-sector, suborbital flights will for a few minutes be in space, experience a few minutes of exhilarating weightlessness and absolutely earn their astronaut wings.

A well-thrown baseball

Conceptually, the flights that Branson and Bezos will be on are not terribly different from a baseball thrown into the air.

The faster you can throw the baseball upward, the higher it will go and the longer it will stay in the air. If you throw the ball with a bit of sideways velocity as well, it will go farther down-range.

Imagine throwing your baseball in an open field. As the ball rises, it slows down, as the kinetic energy inherent in its velocity is exchanged for potential energy in the form of increased altitude. Eventually the ball will reach its maximum height and then fall back to the ground.

Now imagine that you could throw the baseball fast enough to reach a height of perhaps 60 miles (97 km). Presto! The baseball has reached space. But when the ball reaches its maximum height, it will have zero vertical velocity and start to fall back to Earth.

The flight may take several minutes, and during most of that time the ball would experience near weightlessness—as will the newly minted astronauts aboard these spacecraft. Just like the hypothetical baseball, the astronauts will reach space but won’t enter orbit, so their flights will be suborbital.

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SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, appears to be on a hiring spree. On its careers page, the company–which currently employs more than 3,000 people–lists nearly 200 open positions. The page is up to date, SpaceX spokeswoman Hannah Post tells Popular Science.

Many of the openings are for different types of engineers, but there’s room for everyone from a line cook to a space suit engineer. New college grads might be happy to know there are four types of positions explicitly aimed at them.

The aerospace industry is a major employer in the U.S. (though prone to boom-bust cycles). Take heavyweights like Northrop Grumman, which employs about 70,000, and Boeing, which employs more than 170,000. As private spaceflight gains ground, smaller companies such as SpaceX are adding even more jobs to the industry.

About a dozen of the new SpaceX positions are related to the company’s Dragon craft, which brings cargo to and from the International Space Station. In 2012, the Dragon became the first non-government-built craft to exchange cargo in space. The company is now working on tweaking the Dragon to send humans to space, according to its website.

So what else does it take to send private ships to space? Check out some of the surprising positions SpaceX is looking to fill, plus their job requirements:

Visual Coordinator

The visual coordinator has to “maintain on a daily basis [the] pristine aesthetic appearance of company corporate headquarters.” He or she also “takes an active role in selecting furniture, décor, and interior details.”

[Crane Technician Assistant

Besides a minimum of two years in the crane service industry and a willingness to work overtime, SpaceX helpfully specifies that it wants someone with “no fear of heights” and “great hand skills.”

Could This Be You?

General Helper

This job is exactly what it sounds like. The general helper would do everything from repairing machinery to landscaping to carpentry. He or she would need to know how to operate small power equipment, fix plumbing, install lights and more. Hats off to anyone who has all these skills.

Space Suit Design Engineer

Looks like SpaceX wants its own suits. The space suit design engineer would work with the Dragon crew systems team. He or she would design, analyze and test suit ideas. Applicants need at least a bachelor’s degree and two years of experience in structural or composite hardware engineering.

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Aside from its monumental rocket landing attempt, last week’s SpaceX launch made headlines for another reason: It jettisoned an espresso machine into space for the first time ever. Called the ISSpresso, the coffee maker is about the size of a microwave, and all it needs is a pouch of water and a capsule of espresso to make a great pick-me-up for sleepy astronauts.

While space-faring coffee machines may make for interesting cargo, the Falcon 9’s Dragon capsule also held other precious freight. Embedded within the capsule, five experiments–ranging from musculoskeletal and neurological research on rodents to synthetic muscles–made their way to the International Space Station. The sponsors of this research? Private companies including Novartis, Merck, and Ras Labs.

The station’s primary function is to serve as a research laboratory. Its sterile microgravity environment, surrounded by the harshness of space, makes it a unique place for testing the behavior of various materials and textiles, as well as experimenting with the growth of biological tissues and crystals. NASA has conducted a significant amount of research on the station, but now the space agency is beginning to understand how the ISS could help the private sector as well.

CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

That’s where CASIS comes in. Short for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, CASIS manages research conducted in the U.S. National Laboratory on the ISS. In order to get the maximum utility out of the orbital laboratory, CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

“We’re working with large pharma, biotech, and material tech companies, as well as small innovative startups,” Cindy Bouthot, CASIS director of business development, tells Popular Science. This most recent payload aboard the Falcon 9 included the fifth series of payloads sponsored by CASIS.

From a research and development perspective, the ISS holds a number of unique properties and variables you can’t recreate easily for experimentation on Earth. For one, its microgravity environment can accelerate the onset of disease, making it attractive for companies hoping to understand the aging process.

“Any living organism in a microgravity environment is in a very different environment than what they’ve experienced in their evolution,” says Michael Roberts, CASIS senior research manager. “When you remove that gravity vector, you uncover gene expression and protein expression that help us to understand various pathways in the body, which are similar to pathways that cause disease on Earth.”

Research Launches To Space

An equally appealing component of the station environment is also reduced sedimentation. On Earth, gravitational forces cause particles in a fluid to settle. This can muck up experiments that involve things like protein crystal formation, as the particles within the crystals aren’t evenly distributed.

That’s something Merck hopes to bypass, by crystalizing two types of human monoclonal antibodies on the space station. (Monoclonal antibodies are important medical tools, often used to target cancer cells and treat autoimmune diseases.) The company hopes that by learning how to grow these crystals in microgravity, they can develop the best crystal structures to improve drug delivery.

“On the station, you’ll have reduced sedimentation, reduced molecular diffusion as well as reduced convection currents,” says Paul Reichert, research fellow at Merck. “All this adds up to larger crystals which are more pure and have more uniform particle size distribution. In the short term, we want to see what benefits we get from this, and see if we can mimic those conditions with Earth processes.”

And of course, there is the severity of space right next door. Material companies hoping to put their products through the ringer can introduce them to the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit, which experiences a wide range of temperatures over the course of a few hours. Bouthot mentioned an undisclosed car company that is proving its engine can withstand the harsh space environment.

“We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

While conducting research and development on the space station may seem attractive to companies, there’s still the cost to consider. Bouthot says CASIS offers a good return on investment, but sending an experiment into space is still not cheap.

“With this entire infrastructure that’s been created, we’re not charging them for the launch vehicle or the astronaut being their lab tech,” says Bouthot. “Obviously there are internal development costs, their own resources, all of those types of efforts associated with the project have a cost. That can range anywhere from $50,000 and beyond, and they may use CASIS grant money to help defray that cost, or we may ask the customer to pay for that.”

Unfortunately, CASIS doesn’t have much money to give. With a budget of $15 million a year, the non-profit sometimes has to get creative to convince companies that they should send their lab work to space. Otherwise, the station’s resources are at risk of underutilization.

“When we talk with companies, we do lead with the science,” says Buothot. “We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

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4:55 p.m.: Another update from Elon. Looks like the company is making progress! The rocket did, in fact, land. Musk says we’ll have only pictures for now, but video will be posted in a few days after the drone ship returns to port.

4:31 p.m.: There you have it from the SpaceX CEO himself. Just like the last landing attempt, the final stage hit its target but just couldn’t slow down enough. Hopefully we’ll learn more about the source of the issue and if it can be resolved for future attempts.

A Great Launch

4:25 p.m.: The Dragon capsule is now in orbit, and we’re waiting on word from the final stage. Looks like that will come after the livestream ends.

4:17 p.m.: Stage separation is a success! Now comes the hard part. The first stage has to make it down safely to the autonomous drone ship below.

4:15 p.m.: We’re waiting for stage separation now, when the large first stage separates from the Falcon 9’s second stage.

4:10 p.m.: LIFTOFF!

4:09 p.m.: The strong back holding the rocket has retracted, and we’re hearing a few more “gos” for launch. Looks like we’re set!

4:04 p.m.: We’re well into the terminal countdown, and the Falcon 9 has switched over to internal power. Just a few minutes to go.

3:58 p.m.: The mission team is “go” for terminal countdown.

3:55 p.m.: Liftoff is on target so far, and it looks like we’ll be go all the way through the launch window. But if SpaceX is not able to launch today, the next attempt will be made on Thursday April 16.

And we’re back at it again today. SpaceX is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 rocket at 4:10 p.m. Eastern in Florida. According to the company, weather is 60 percent “go” for the launch, though it looks like lightning and clouds may still be a problem. Lightning from an approaching anvil cloud scrubbed the first launch attempt yesterday, so let’s hope the clouds die down a bit.

Meanwhile, Just Read The Instructions is ready and waiting in the Atlantic for a first stage rocket to come and land on it.

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Between the SpaceX rocket launch and the start of the 2018 Olympics, it sure was easy to get inspired last week. But, while others launching rockets out of the earth’s atmosphere or performing super-human feats of athletic prowess, we were here keeping tabs on the big tech stories so we could collect them here for you. No need to thank us. It’s all part of the job.

A dummy went to space

Elon Musk and his band of rocket scientists (and publicists) finally launched the Falcon Heavy rocket last week. You can read about the successful operation here and see why we chose Falcon Heavy as one of our Best of What’s New innovations last year. Some time this week, take a break from filing the TPS reports your boss gave you and think about that dummy flying through space in a billionaire’s used car.

Olympic fever set in

The 2018 Olympic games are happening right now in South Korea and they have given us a surprising amount of tech to talk about. You can click here to read about the innovative Olympic stadiums of the past, present, and future. Or, you can click here and find out how to stream this year’s games, so you can watch curling instead of doing your work.

It’s time for new Emojis

The 2018 release from the Unicode Consortium contains Emoji 11.0, which brings 157 new adorable little pixel blobs to the 2,666 that previously existed. The list includes people with red, curly, and no hair. There’s also a partying face and “leg.”

Waymo and Uber settled their self-driving car lawsuit

You may have missed it, but ride-hailing service Uber has been locked in a legal battle against the Alphabet-owned, self-driving vehicle company, Waymo since January 2017. The case alleged that a Google engineer gave Uber trade secrets regarding self-driving car tech. It’s a complex issue of intellectual property and it’s likely not the last one like this we’ll see. This one surprised many when the two sides settled early, giving Waymo a small stake in Uber.

An intern reportedly leaked the iPhone source code

Apple is protective of its property—intellectual or otherwise—so it was a big surprise earlier this week when the code for its iBoot software showed up on code-sharing service GitHub. iBoot is a crucial piece of the iPhone infrastructure that ensures security during the devices boot process. You shouldn’t worry about the security of your phone because of this leak, but it’s a pretty fascinating story, especially when you consider this Motherboard report that says Apple interns perpetrated the leak.

Meet ESPN’s new streaming service

ESPN will soon have its own streaming service, which will cost $5 per month. It won’t allow users to watch ESPN live as if it were on TV, but it will give access to “thousands” of live sporting events not available on the typical channels. Expect a lot of streaming news out of ESPN’s parent company, Disney, soon, as it begins to reveal its plans for the post-Netflix era.

Nobody’s buying CDs so Best Buy is saying “bye bye” to them

Starting on July 1, 2018, Best Buy will no longer sell audio CDs, but it plans to continue selling vinyl records for another two years. It’s a sad day for those of us who grew up with these shiny 4.7-inch platters spitting out our favorite songs. But, I couldn’t even find a CD in my house to take a picture for this article, so maybe the time is right after all.

Under Armour made a connected shoe

Under Armour Hovr sneaker

Energy return is a metric that indicates how much a sneaker can push you forward as its cushioning compresses and rebounds. The higher the energy return, the less work you have to do with every stride. Under Armour redesigned the sole of its new Hovr shoes, then added a digital sensor and transmitter to track things like pace, cadence, and distance during your run. It could be the thing you need to re-start your stalled New Year’s resolution.

Now, get back to watching curling!

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Whether they’re in Star Wars, Halo, or Warhammer 40,000, I’m a big fan of sci-fi planetary invasions, so my ears perked up when I heard the U.S. Air Force wants to invest $48 million into researching reusable rocket technology that could help shoot cargo or special operations troops into space and then bring them down to an austere base or combat zone anywhere on the planet in under an hour.

At least, that could be a capability in the next few decades if all goes well, and that’s a lot of ifs. The Air Force put the $48 million request in its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal. In the request, titled “Rocket cargo,” the Air Force says it seeks to “leverage a commercial rocket to deliver [Air Force] cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity.”

The branch hopes the capability would provide U.S. Transportation Command with a cheap and fast alternative to sealift or airlift, and it could also allow Air Force Special Operations Command “to perform current rapid-response missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement,” which is wicked fast compared to a 10-plus hour flight across an ocean in a C-17 Globemaster III transport jet.

While the Air Force did not specify which commercial rocket it hopes to strap its cargo to, Ars Technica pointed out that only one matches its description: the Starship rocket being developed by the private space exploration company SpaceX. A fully reusable heavy launch rocket, Starship is designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, according to SpaceX’s website. Once completed it will be the world’s “most powerful launch vehicle ever developed,” the company boasts.

But don’t pull on your Halo Orbital Drop Shock Trooper cosplay just yet. The Air Force was clear in its budget justification that the service does not intend to invest in developing Starship. Instead the funding is meant to help the Air Force understand if and how it can use the rocket for military applications. For example, the funding would help researchers come up with ways for Air Force loadmasters to load or unload a rocket, rapidly launch one from “unusual sites,” figure out where it might be able to land and detect enemies, and even investigate whether the rocket could airdrop its payload after reentry. 

The Air Force has already spent $9.7 million this fiscal year gathering performance and design data on Starship, and the service plans to continue doing so as SpaceX keeps testing the rocket. In fiscal year 2022, the Air Force hopes to test the rocket in greater detail, including a wind tunnel test to figure out if air-drops from the rocket are possible.

If Congress approves the funding, and if Starship works out, and if the Air Force can figure out how to use it for military applications, it could open up some really cool sci-fi scenarios.

“When you can launch an austere airbase in a space capsule, that’s frickin’ awesome!” Will Roper, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters in November during a briefing on the service’s new Advanced Battle Management System.

“Just to be able to just have it come down, halfway around the world, with everything you need to be able to maintain and operate a small fleet of airplanes—refuel it, rearm it and get it back in the fight,” Roper added.

The chief of U.S. Transportation Command, Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, said a drop platform like this could redefine military logistics.

“Think about moving 80 short tons, the equivalent of a C-17 payload, anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” he said in October. “We should challenge ourselves to think differently about how we will project the force in the future, and how rocket cargo could be part of that.”

Lyons’ comments came just weeks after he revealed during a National Defense Transportation Association event that the Pentagon had signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with aerospace pioneer SpaceX to develop potential shipping routes that pass through outer space.

U.S. Transportation Command “has identified that commercial, point-to-point space transportation may provide a unique capability, enabling the command to better support moving equipment and eventually people quickly around the globe to meet our national objectives, global emergencies, and natural disasters,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Nirav Lad, principal investigator for space transportation CRADAs at the command, said in a statement.

Whether the under-an-hour capability promised by rocket delivery is worth the added cost is an open question, The War Zone reported. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes the cost of future Starship launches will be as low as $2 million a pop, which is about four times the cost of sending a C-17 to do the job, according to The War Zone.

There’s also the question of survivability, as The War Zone asked. How smart would it be to send a big noisy target like a rocket into enemy territory, and then launch it back?

Hopefully the Air Force will answer these questions in the coming fiscal year. And if we ever hear Gen. Lyons start chanting “express elevator to hell!” we want to be the first to tell you.

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China recently unveiled drawings of the capsule it plans to use to carry humans and cargo into space in the 2020s, and the design looks strikingly familiar. With a flat top, sloping sides, and a wide bottom, all of the crew capsules in development today look like candy gumdrops. Where does this shape come from?

You might recognize it from the vehicle that brought the Apollo astronauts home. With few exceptions, human spaceflight hasn’t changed much since those days. The Soyuz capsule uses a similar shape today, and SpaceX, Boeing, and NASA are all designing brand new spacecraft with almost the exact same design.

All of these vehicles are similar because of three competing variables that spacecraft designers have to contend with: weight, space, and heat.

Drawing of the Apollo concept

“Weight is the number one problem,” says Pasquale Sforza, an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida and author of the recent book, Manned Spacecraft Design Principles. “Everything has to be really strictly fashioned for the weight.”

Astronauts need as much space as possible in order to do their jobs and be comfortable. But every pound of a spacecraft’s weight can add $10,000 to the cost of launching it. To maximize space, spacecraft designers like to use spherical shapes. These pack in as much internal volume as possible while minimizing the surface area–the walls.

“Weight is the number one problem.”

But a perfect sphere won’t do. As the spacecraft return to Earth at speeds of 17 to 25 thousand miles per hour, they’re pushing through the air and creating a lot of friction. The friction generates a potentially dangerous amount of heat, and the spacecraft’s shape determines how hot the vehicle gets.

In the early days of launching stuff into space and back again, engineers experimented with pointy-nosed vehicles. Those pointy nose cones were great at reducing drag and flying through the air efficiently, but unfortunately they melted when they tried to reenter the atmosphere.

It was NASA aeronautical engineer Harry Julian Allan who came up with the idea of using the blunt-nosed reentry vehicles like we use today.

The blunt-body principle

Once they’re built, Orion, Crew Dragon, and the rest will drop into the atmosphere bottom first. Their broad bottoms will run into air molecules on the way down. Those particles will rebound off the vehicle and crash into the incoming air. This creates a layer of air around the vehicle, so that the shockwave created by the vehicle doesn’t touch it. The layer shields the spacecraft from the heat of reentry and shapes the airflow around it.

By contrast, a pointy tip does come into contact with the shockwave, exposing the front-most part of the craft to extremely high temperatures.

Pointy shockwave

Similarly, a narrow sphere wouldn’t be great at deflecting that heat, but a larger sphere would be too bulky to maintain a practical weight. So the result is something in between. Spacecraft designers gave these craft the rounded bottom of a very large sphere, but cut off the sides to shave off unnecessary weight.

The rounded base is important, says Orion engineer Stuart McClung. “If you made it flat it becomes very inefficient. It would be like pushing a flat plate through water–the pressure waves would probably make it very rough and choppy.”

Drawing of Apollo’s reentry

The spacecraft’s sides taper into a narrowed top because as the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere bottom first, it comes in at an angle, skimming through the atmosphere instead of plunking straight down. The angled sides mean that less of the spacecraft is exposed to the friction during that skimming, and that means the sides don’t need to have additional heat shields that would make the vehicle heavier.

What about the shuttle?

Space shuttle Discovery lands at Edwards Air Force Base

The retired space shuttle is an exception to the gumdrop rule. Essentially an airplane, the shuttle was designed to land horizontally on a runway so it could be reused again later. But it still followed the same rules as Apollo-inspired spacecraft. The shuttle didn’t enter the atmosphere nose-first. Instead, it approached Earth at a sharp angle so that its broad underside faced the atmosphere–basically belly flopping into Earth’s atmosphere.

The Mercury and Gemini vehicles were also a bit different from the gumdrop shape. These spacecraft were more funnel-shaped, with narrow, cylindrical tops broadening into that familiar cone-shaped bottom. Just like with the Apollo craft, that cone-shaped bottom entered the atmosphere first. The elongated part was just the aerospace equivalent of a car trunk.

Project Mercury paved the way for human spaceflight

“If you’re going on a biking trip and you don’t have enough room in your trunk for the bike, you might strap it on the top of your car,” explains Sforza. It’s the same thing with Mercury and Gemini spacecraft.

However, says Sforza, “It’s not a great idea to have all the stuff hanging out the back of the spacecraft. It can give you some stability problems that are not good…. As time progressed people saw that the Apollo solution was really the best compromise.”

CST-100

Concept drawing for China’s new crew capsule

Crew Dragon

A mock-up of the Orion capsule

Soyuz

Apollo

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Long March 8

China has plans to launch reusable space rockets to compete with the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

The Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the leading builder of Chinese space launch rockets, announced that its Long March (CHang Zheng in Chinese) LM-8 space rocket will launch in 2020.

Like the SpaceX Falcon and Falcon Heavy, the LM-8’s first stage will be reusable, using leftover fuel to land vertically. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that CASC has previously promised to make all its rockets reusable by 2035.

Repeat Long Marches

The LM-8 is a medium-sized space launch vehicle, capable of carrying 7.7 tons to low-earth orbit. It shares the same first stage core as the larger Long March 7 (which is China’s newest man-rated rocket), but compared to the Long March 7, it has only two K2 liquid rocket boosters. Once the LM-8’s second stage separates to enter orbit, the LM-8’s first stage will descend back to the ground by carefully burning remaining fuel to maneuver onto the landing pad, with the aid of grid fins. In the last moments of descent, landing struts will unfold from the bottom of the rocket to ensure a smooth touchdown. The boosters will separate and parachute back to the ground.

LM-7

The tech LM-8 shares with the Long March 7 could mean that the LM-7—and other larger Chinese space launch rockets—could be retrofitted with resusablity. Additionally, CASC is planning to test grid fins on a Long March 4B rocket next year to refine the technology. Test launch of a reusable, smaller Long March 6 rocket is planned for 2020. Success in these tests will fit into CASC’s plan to make all its Long March rockets—from the super heavy “moon rocket” Long March 9 to the Long March 6—reusable by 2035.

New Line Rockets

This development is just one step in private Chinese companies’ larger path toward a reusable space launch market. Linkspace’s New Line 1 rocket, which will also land vertically via its reusable first stage, has plans for a 2020 flight. And CASC and its rival CASIC both plan to have their spaceplanes flying in 2020.

You may also be interested in:

• China’s opening a factory to build engines for hypersonic missiles and spaceplanes
• China Could Become a Major Space Power by 2050
• China plans to launch rockets into space from massive freighters and planes
• China’s Private Space Industry Prepares To Compete With Spacex And Blue Origin
• China Aims for Humanity’s Return to the Moon in the 2030s
• A Private Chinese Space Company Just Scored A Foreign Contract for the First Time
• China Launches the Long March 5, Its Largest Ever Space Rocket

Peter Warren Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He has been named by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues. He was also dubbed an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Jeffrey is a national security professional in the greater D.C. area. They both are Associates with the U.S. Air Force University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.

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Blue Origin Touches Down for the First Time

On April 2, 2016, Blue Origin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ space company, successfully reused the same booster for the third time to send a rocket to space. This remarkable feat, which is becoming more and more common with both Blue Origin and SpaceX, signifies a giant shift in rocketry because it dramatically reduces the cost needed to get people or supplies into orbit. For Blue Origin, the cargo will mainly be wealthy tourists who want to gaze at the stars from outside Earth’s atmosphere. So, if you want to go to space and you’re not an astronaut, you’ll probably have to pay Bezos for the privilege, but what should you expect? Well, fear not, weary space traveler, we’ve made a play-by-play with images to ensure you’re ready for your launch day. Here we go!

We Have Ignition

Liftoff

Liftoff From Afar

Your View From the Capsule

Goodbye, New Shepard

Welcome to Space!

The Return Home

New Shepard Touches Down

Slowing Down

All Said and Done

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Falcon 9 and Dragon Takeoff on a Crisp, Clear Day

SpaceX, the poster child of commercial space flight, has been capturing our imaginations since the company was founded back in 2002, though it took them until 2010 to successfully return a craft from low-Earth orbit. Now, almost six full years from that first successful mission, SpaceX is leading humanity’s charge into space. Their latest feat, landing a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, was a major accomplishment that was picked up by news outlets all over the world. The hope, for the Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, anyway, is to eventually use SpaceX technology to get to Mars and eventually set up a colony. With so much ahead of them, let’s take a look back at some of their best moments through photos.

Grasshopper Soaring Through the Sky

A Field of Rockets

A Dark and Stormy Night

Launch and Land

Abort, Abort!

A Dragon Flies

On the Dragon’s Back

Falcon 9 and Dragon Liftoff!

Falcon 9 Closeup

Falcon 9 Lands on a Barge

The SpaceX Team Gazes at Endeavour

Merlin Test Fire

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Want to live and die on Mars? Mars One has officially begun its worldwide search for astronauts who will fly to Mars in 2023—and never come back.

The first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars.

The ultimate goal is to select 24 to 40 candidates who will travel to Mars in groups of four. Mars One wants to land the first group (two men and two women, ideally from four different continents, says CEO Bas Lansdorp) on the red planet in 2023, with the other groups following one at a time, every two years. Applications close August 31, 2013.

Mars One lander

The nonprofit organization plans to televise the final rounds of the search in 2014, which means the first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars. But first, Mars One is asking the public to rate the application videos to help narrow down the selection pool. According to Norbert Kraft, the chief medical officer and head of the astronaut selection program, aspiring Martians should have five qualities: resilience, adaptability, curiosity, empathy, and creativity.

Mars One habitat

To filter out spam and frivolous entries, Mars One is charging an application fee that varies by country (it’s $38 in the United States). Applicants must create a 30- to 70-second video that explains why they want to go to Mars, and why they’re the best candidate. The pool will be narrowed to 24 to 40 in 2015.

If you’re one of the (uh, lucky?) people chosen for the program, you’ll move to the United States to spend the next seven years as a full-time, salaried employee of Mars One. Nine months of each year will be spent learning dentistry, emergency medicine, general medicine, engineering, biology, mechanics—anything you might need to know on an inhospitable planet with a population of four. The other three months of each year will be spent in a Mars habitat mock-up, complete with a 40-minute communication delay to the outside world and simulated emergencies. The hardest thing they’ll face during the simulation? A broken toilet, Lansdorp says. “That’s when people get out of control.”

Mars farm

It will cost $6 billion to get the first group of four to their new home (the reality show is supposed to fund the mission). The company will use SpaceX spacecraft to send rovers and supplies ahead of the astronauts, and then the SpaceX Falcon Heavy will get the crew to Mars, where they will assemble their habitat and begin growing their own food. Once on the red planet, the crew can do what they want—they won’t be taking orders from Mars One or anyone else back on Earth. “They will make a new civilization,” Kraft says. “They will make their own holidays, their own laws. We need to send mature people, because we won’t be telling them what to do.”

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We’re on our way to Mars. NASA has a plan to land astronauts on its surface by the 2030s. Private spaceflight companies like SpaceX have also expressed interest in starting their own colonies there, while the infamous Mars One project has already enlisted civilians for a one-way trip to our planetary neighbor in 2020.

While many may dream of living their remaining days on Mars, those days may be numbered. The Martian environment poses significant challenges to Earth life, and establishing a Mars habitat will require an extraordinary amount of engineering prowess and technological knowhow to ensure the safety of its residents.

The technology required to keep astronauts alive on Mars isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years.

Though we may soon have the launch vehicles needed to transport people to Mars, a lot of the technology required to keep astronauts alive on the planet just isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years. For those eager to get to Mars as soon as possible, take caution: A number of tragic outcomes await if you head that way too soon.

You’ll Crash

Let’s say you’ve spent many months on your deep space voyage, and you’ve finally made it into orbit around the red planet. Congratulations! Now you need to get down to the surface—and that’s going to be tricky.

The problem is Mars’ atmosphere. The air around Mars is quite thin–about 100 times less dense than the atmosphere around Earth. Spacecraft returning to our planet rely on a combination of parachutes and drag from the atmosphere to slow them down. The heavier the object, the more drag it needs to prevent it from slamming into the surface.

But with so little atmosphere surrounding Mars, gently landing a large amount of weight on the planet will be tough. Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact.

Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator

“How we get down through the atmosphere to the surface is a critical challenge,” Bret Drake, deputy manager of the exploration missions planning office at NASA, tells Popular Science. “With current landing techniques, we can land only a metric ton on Mars. That’s not big enough to get a colony going; we’ll need much bigger capabilities.”

According to Drake, NASA will need to land between 20 to 30 metric tons in one trip to get all of the astronauts and supplies needed for a planetary habitat down to the surface safely. To do this, the space agency is coming up with unique lander designs—notably their inflatable Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Shaped like an iconic flying saucer, the LDSD’s disc shape and added inflatable balloon increase the surface area of the lander, allowing it to slow down in thinner atmospheres.

The LDSD is still undergoing tests here on planet Earth, with an upcoming test in Hawaii scheduled for June. Whether the lander will be able to land such a heavy payload on Mars’ surface has yet to be determined.

As for Mars One and SpaceX, no specific information has been given about how they plan to land on Mars just yet.

You’ll Freeze

Welcome to Mars! (That’s assuming you’ve made it down in one piece.) It’s time to get acquainted with your new home’s weather conditions.

Mars temperatures average around -81 degrees Fahrenheit, but swing wildly depending on the season, the time of day, and the location, ranging from 86 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator to -284 degrees Fahrenheit near the poles. That means astronauts will have to be equipped to battle harsh, bitter cold.

Mars Polar Ice Caps

NASA has learned a lot about sheltering astronauts from fluctuating temperatures, thanks to years of housing humans on the International Space Station. When exposed to the sun, the ISS endures heats exceeding 200 degrees, and then plunges into -200-degree temperatures on Earth’s night side. The ISS and astronauts’ space suits use specialized thermal control systems and processes like sublimation to both repel excess heat and to shield people from the cold.

Yet those control systems are designed to work well in vacuum. Entirely new methods will be needed for space suits and habitats in the atmosphere of Mars. Though it’s thin, it still contains gases which can convect heat to and from a suit (similar to how wind cools us down here on Earth). So astronauts will feel the rapid temperature changes much more harshly.

“We would need a solution that provides better insulation for the cold environments and a different way of rejecting heat for the hot environments,” says Drake. “A spacesuit in a vacuum is very similar to a thermos, but a space suit on Mars is much more like a coffee cup sitting on a kitchen counter – the coffee cools much faster in the plain cup on the counter top as compared to the coffee in the thermos.”

You’ll Starve

Mars Farming

Living in a habitat on the Martian surface will be somewhat similar to living in the remote research outposts of Antarctica. All the food and supplies needed for these stations must come from other continents, and cargo resupply missions aren’t frequent.

Mars is just a bit further away from mainstream civilization than Antarctica is, and any resupply missions to a Martian habitat would take months or years to complete. If any colony hopes to survive on the red planet, there must be some form of self-sustainability when it comes to food. That means you’ll need some interplanetary farming skills.

Mars One’s plan is to grow crops indoors under artificial lighting. According to the project’s website, 80 square meters of space will be dedicated to plant growth within the habitat; the vegetation will be sustained using suspected water in Mars’ soil, as well as carbon dioxide produced by the initial four-member crew.

“The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew.”

However, analysis conducted by MIT researchers last year shows that those numbers just don’t add up.

“When you’re growing all the crops required to feed four people indefinitely, the carbon dioxide produced by the crew is insufficient to keep the crops alive,” says Sydney Do, an aerospace engineer at MIT and lead author of the report. “So essentially the crops die off very quickly, within 12 to 18 days.” Adding more people wouldn’t solve the issue, because then there wouldn’t be enough to eat. “The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew’s dietary requirements,” said Do. Talk about a catch-22.

So what can be done to fix this problem? You can grow fewer crops, but that means the astronauts will eventually run out of an important food source. Or you can find a way of introducing extra carbon dioxide, perhaps through CO₂ scrubbing technology. Such innovation, which would involve absorbing gas from the thin Martian atmosphere, is only in its infancy here on Earth. But if such tech can be developed for a Martian habitat, using it to grow an increased supply of crops may have some consequences when it comes to the crew’s oxygen supply.

You’ll Suffocate (Or Maybe Explode)

Growing crops on Mars isn’t just for feeding hungry astronauts; plants will serve as a vital source of renewable oxygen for the habitat. It’s a much better option than consistently sending heavy oxygen tanks to the red planet, which will take up too much precious space on resupply missions and cost a lot of money to transport.

Studies have shown plants may be able to grow in Martian soil, however crops have never been grown in the Mars gravity environment, so further testing is required to see if vegetation can survive at all. But if that works, the plants required to feed a multi-person crew will be producing a lot of oxygen. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

According to Do’s report, too much oxygen in a closed environment can lead to an increased risk of oxygen toxicity for the crew, and even worse, spontaneous explosions. So O₂ will have to be vented from the habitat. To do this, the astronauts would need a specialized method for separating oxygen from the gas stream. There are a number of methods for doing so here on Earth (cryogenic distillation and pressure swing adsorption) but none of these technologies have been tested for a Martian environment, and considerable research and development would be needed to make these techniques viable on another planet.

“Significant technology development is required, because the tech isn’t there right now,” says Do. “The technologies needed for this habitat can work here on Earth, but they need a lot of human tending and are very large. In terms of practical use in a space envrionment, it would require miniaturizing them, decreasing cost, and increasing their reliability.”

Recently NASA proposed “ecopoiesis” on Mars –- creating a functioning ecosystem that can support life. Their idea is to send select Earth organisms–like certain cyanobacteria–to Mars, which can then feed on the planet’s rocky terrain to produce oxygen. “Ultimately, biodomes on Mars that enclose ecopoiesis-provided oxygen through bacterial or algae-driven conversion systems might dot the red planet, housing expeditionary teams,” according to a NASA statement. However, the space agency didn’t provide word on how much carbon dioxide the organisms would need, and whether or not they could be sustained by air produced by crew members.

And then there’s MOXIE–the Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment–which could negate the reliance on plant-based oxygen. Developed by MIT researchers, this machine works by taking carbon dioxide from the Mars atmosphere and splitting it into oxygen and carbon monoxide. A low-scale version of MOXIE will make its way to Mars on NASA’s next rover, planned for a 2020 launch. If it works, MOXIE could provide a renewable source of oxygen without the conundrum posed by growing crops.

Mars 2020 Rover

You May Not Even Make It There At All

All of these scenarios only become critical issues if you actually make it to Mars in the first place. But the sad truth is you might not even survive the trip. Barring any complications with the spacecraft’s hardware or any unintended run-ins with space debris, there’s still a big killer lurking out in space that can’t be easily avoided: radiation.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays—highly energized particles. This space radiation easily penetrates the walls of spacecraft, and it’s possible that long-term exposure can have weird effects on human health.

A recent study on mice revealed that long-term exposure to cosmic rays might lead to some abnormal changes in the brain. After subjecting mice to simulated cosmic rays, researchers noticed the mice had lost many important brain synapses. Subsequent behavioral studies on the mice showed they exhibited less curiosity and seemed confused—an eerie result, with upsetting implications for a future trip to Mars.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays.

But perhaps even more alarming is space radiation’s known ability to increase the likelihood of getting cancer. Currently, NASA monitors every astronaut’s lifetime exposure to space radiation over the course of his or her career. If ever an individual reaches a 3-percent increased risk of fatal cancer from space radiation, NASA grounds the astronaut for good.

On the space station, astronauts are partially protected from cosmic rays thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, so it takes them some time before they reach that 3 percent limit. But on a years long, deep space voyage, there’s no magnetosphere to keep them safe. Plus some astronauts may be more susceptible to radiation exposure than others.

“Because women in general live longer than men, in the NASA prediction model, they’re much more likely to develop cancer in their lifetime with the same amount of exposure as a male,” says Dorit Donoviel, deputy chief scientist of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), says. “Calculations have indicated a woman probably should not go to Mars, because the cumulative exposure over the duration of the mission would exceed the maximum allowable 3 percent lifetime cancer risk.”

Mars or Bust?

All of this may seem like a major bummer, but it highlights just how many obstacles we need to overcome before heading to Mars. NASA admits they’re not quite ready either, with the space agency currently soliciting ideas from the general public on how to keep Mars astronauts safe. The contest—dubbed the “Journey to Mars Challenge“—will award $5,000 to three winning participants who come up with ways to develop the elements necessary for sustaining a human presence on the red planet.

“This could include shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions and medicine, but participants are encouraged to consider innovative and creative elements beyond these examples,” NASA said in a statement about the challenge.

Little is known about SpaceX’s plans for a Mars mission, but CEO Elon Musk says he hopes to unveil the details later this year. Yet NASA administrator Charles Bolden has a message for SpaceX, Mars One, and all other private companies with big dreams of visiting the fourth rock from the sun: You’re going to need help. Speaking at a U.S. House Committee Meeting in April focusing on space and technology, Bolden expressed his confidence in NASA’s efforts to get to Mars despite the challenges, though he holds less confidence for all private endeavors. “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars.”

The challenges of surviving long-term in a Mars habitat are also explored in The Martian, the debut novel of Andy Weir which will be getting the Hollywood treatment later this year. The book follows astronaut Mark Watney, who struggles to survive alone on Mars after his crew mistakes him for dead and leaves the planet without him. Watney must overcome significant obstacles, such as growing his own food and finding clever ways to procure water. Weir echoes a sentiment shared by NASA: Even if you have all the right technology, you can’t just prepare for a perfectly executed mission. “The main thing you have to do for a Mars trip is account for failures,” he says. “How do you make sure the mission plan accounts for this and that? For the book, I was using my imagination about ‘Hey, what could break?’ But there are several things, several problems we haven’t solved yet.”

Though Weir’s book focuses on the worst-case scenario, he’s confident that we will get to our neighbor someday; it’s just going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. “Getting to Mars is an enormous undertaking that I don’t think we have the technology to do currently,” says Weir. “But we could. It’s going to happen.”

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Tired of being stuck in traffic on the highway or waiting endlessly for a delayed subway? Almost three years ago, Elon Musk envisioned The Hyperloop, a new type of public transit that would whisk commuter-filled pods efficiently across hundreds of kilometers in a matter of minutes via tubes running either above- or below ground; and of course, only second to teleportation in terms of “overall coolness.” Despite start-ups trying to get in on the competition sponsored by Musk’s company SpaceX, a student team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology emerged earlier this year as the front-runner when it won the competition’s design phase. On Friday, MIT finally unveiled the prototype pod that it will test this summer at a 1.6-kilometer racetrack near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

MIT‘s design placed first among more than 115 teams from 20 countries during the first phase of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition at Texas’s A&M University in College Station. The top five contenders included teams from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech); and the University of California, Irvine.

Despite Musk’s original idea of a pod floating on an air cushion or rolling along a track on wheels, MIT’s team ended up opting for magnetic levitation as a solution to a tough engineering problem: not just how to propel the capsule, but how to keep it on the track, and just as importantly, how to make it stop. The University of Colorado Denver’s HyperLynx team developed a hybrid of Musk’s original vision and MIT’s mag-lev principle — a pod that uses wheels for traveling at less than 160 kilometers per hour and an air cushion for higher speeds.

Greg Monahan, who leads the team’s levitation efforts, stated: “One of the most interesting parts of the Hyperloop is the attempt to go significantly faster than any other type of land travel,” says Greg Monahan, who is pursing a master’s in mechanical engineering and leads the team’s levitation efforts. Once a vehicle nears the speed of sound—1,236 kilometers per hour—”any type of contact with the ground or a track gets really complicated from an engineering standpoint.

Among the 30 finalists to publicly reveal their pod design, MIT’s mag-lev prototype, which costs about $150,000 to build, is 2.5 meters long, weighs 250 kilograms and is expected to reach speeds up to 369 kilometers per hour with an acceleration of 2.4 Gs. SpaceX’s decision not to require competition pods to accommodate passengers had a significant impact on the MIT design — so far, MIT’s designed pod cannot be made bigger to fit passengers.

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When Alan Eustace lifted off into space from the New Mexico desert this past October, it was with a quiet whoosh, and a slight jostle of his harness. The 57-year-old computer scientist from Google—outfitted in a 260-pound pressurized space suit—dangled solo from a polyethylene balloon as thin as a dry-cleaning bag. As the balloon rose steadily into the air, the small bubble of helium inside began to expand, and with each mile the balloon changed shape. At first it undulated skyward, limp and oblong, like a jellyfish. Then it grew into a soft, bulbous teardrop. Finally, as Eustace neared his destination, 25 miles above the planet’s surface, it became perfectly firm and rounded, a shimmering object the size of a football stadium. Above him spanned the blackness of space. Beneath him lay what has long drawn humans to these heights: the soul-altering view of the curvature of Earth.

To most, Eustace’s flight seemed the antithesis of space travel, which since the dawn of the space age has been synonymous with the fiery roar of a rocket. The first private companies racing to take paying customers to the edge of space—Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and Blue Origin—promise the kind of thrill ride experienced by astronauts. But there’s an alternate space race taking shape, one whose selling point is slow and serene. A handful of startups are rushing to pioneer tourist trips to the stratosphere beneath enormous balloons. “Balloons are a beautiful mechanism for taking off,” Eustace says. “You’re perfectly balanced; it’s perfectly quiet; there’s no vibration as you’re going up.” Once at altitude, passengers will drift with the winds as they peer from the comfort of a pressurized capsule. After a few hours, they will glide back to Earth beneath a wing-shaped parafoil.

“It’s going to be the ultimate Facebook status update: the entire family in space.”

For one company, Eustace’s­ StratEx mission was proof of principle—a “one-man version” of stratospheric balloon tourism, says Taber MacCallum. He and his partner, Jane Poynter, headed Paragon Space Development Corporation, which managed Eustace’s flight plan and built his life-support system. The couple then started World View Experience, a Tucson, Arizona, operation that intends to be the first to take customers to 100,000 feet, or 19 miles, for $75,000 a head. They project the maiden flight will take place by 2017.

Zero2Infinity in Barcelona and Chinese startup Space Vision also anticipate flying passengers in the next few years. They are selling tickets for about $125,000 and $80,000, respectively. The fees are steep, but not when compared with $250,000 for a seat on Virgin­ Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane, or the $50 million broker Space Adventures charges for a weeklong jaunt to the International Space Station.

Altogether, balloons could offer a more inclusive form of space tourism. “It’s a very slow, gentle ride up and a slow, gentle ride back, and you get to be up there for hours,” MacCallum says. Without the gravitational forces of takeoff and landing, the flight comes with minimal health restrictions. Motion sickness is unlikely to be an issue. Couples might get married in near-space, or celebrate a grandparent’s birthday. World View is already taking $7,500 deposits to secure seats on future flights. “We’ve had families sign up and buy the whole capsule,” MacCallum says. “You can take your parents and children. It’s going to be the ultimate Facebook status update: the entire family in space.”

In 2002, two years before Scaled Composites claimed the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight, Zero2Infinity’s founder, José Mariano López-Urdiales, wrote a paper for grad school entitled “The Role of Balloons in the Future Development of Space Tourism.” In it, he calculated stratospheric ballooning could be a $10 billion-a-year industry. Much of the technology required to send tourists to such altitudes—the balloons, the helium fuel, the pressurized capsules—had been well proved, López-Urdiales noted. It’s also relatively affordable and easy to procure.

Rocket flight, in contrast, is both costly and difficult. The public got a stark reminder of that this past fall, when Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo exploded over the Mojave Desert, killing a test pilot. “When you light a rocket, 10,000 things can happen, and only one of them is good,” says Michael López-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who recently signed on to advise Zero­2­Infinity. With balloons, he says, “you’re not going as fast, you’re not going as high, you’re not putting as much energy into the system.”

Whereas Virgin Galactic plans to soar to nearly 330,000 feet—just past the 62-mile mark widely considered the threshold of space—balloons will top out at just over 100,000 feet. The difference is not as significant as it might seem. “At that altitude, you’ve got 99 percent of the atmosphere underneath you,” says former space-shuttle commander Mark Kelly, now the director of flight operations for World View. “You’re essentially in a vacuum. You’re in the blackness of space.” He agrees with López-Alegria that balloons pose less risk. “If you can take the complexity out of getting people to that vantage point,” he says, “at least theoretically you can do it a lot safer.”

The straightforward nature of balloons has long been appealing. In fact, they powered the very first space race. In 1931, a balloon lifted Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer to the stratosphere in a pressurized capsule, a feat described in the August 1931 issue of Popular Science as an “adventure [that] surpasses fiction.” As we wrote then: “Seventeen hours later, after being given up for dead, they returned safely from an altitude of more than 52,000 feet, almost ten miles, shattering every aircraft altitude record.” New records continued to be set and broken through the 1950s. And then in 1960, U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger rose to 102,800 feet. His record stood for 52 years—until October 2012, when Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner ascended to 128,100 feet. Eustace passed Baumgartner’s milestone two years later, reaching 135,890 feet.

Like Kittinger and Baumgartner before him, Eustace floated briefly in the stratosphere, taking in a view he calls “marvelous.” As he remembers now, “It’s beautiful watching how the light diffuses through the different levels of the atmosphere.” And then Eustace released his balloon and fell back to Earth protected by only his space suit. His body reached 822 miles per hour, exceeding the speed of sound, before the atmosphere thickened and a parachute deployed to slow his descent. To succeed at ushering in ­a new form of balloon-based tourism, companies will have to figure out a way to get customers not only up, but also down.

A balloon ride to the stratosphere will be a three-part act: the launch, the pleasant cruise at altitude, and the trip back to Earth. The first part should be straightforward. For its commercial flights, World View plans to use a balloon that’s more than 400 feet in diameter—the same size as the one that carried Eustace. (Though it will be towing a 9,000-pound tourist capsule, the balloon doesn’t need to ascend as high.) Because of the StratEx mission, World View’s team has practice launching it.

Zero2Infinity has been launching unmanned balloons as a test for two different business ventures: stratospheric tourism and a commercial satellite delivery system. It’s also designed a doughnut-shaped craft that it plans to adapt for both applications. The version that will carry tourists, called a Bloon, will be big enough to hold two pilots and four passengers. The company has so far built a prototype half that size and used it to send a small humanoid robot to near-space. (“In the old days it would have been a dog or a monkey,” López-Urdiales says.) Equipped with cameras and sensors, the robot helped the engineers at Zero2­Infinity understand the passenger experience. When the robot looked through the windows, which ring the outside wall, reflections marred the view. As a result, the window’s position will likely change, López-Urdiales says.

World View envisions an oblong capsule with viewing ports on each side. About the size of a small Winnebago, it will have seats for six passengers, a pilot, and a crew member. Passengers will need to be buckled in for liftoff and landing, but most of the ride will be a casual sail, like a skiff gliding across the surface of a lake in a light breeze. Although winds at 100,000 feet can reach 130 miles per hour, the high speed won’t be perceptible. That’s because Earth, which provides the only reference point, will appear to barely move. The capsule will have a bar and a bathroom, MacCallum says, and the crew will double as bartenders and tour guides.

Both MacCallum and López-­Urdiales agree that balloon tourism should provide a shirtsleeve environment throughout the flight. “The goal is to have no training, no space suits,” MacCallum says. “This will be very similar to a commercial-airline flight, where you’re given a briefing and off you go.” But outside the pressurized capsule, the environ­ment is lethal. Exposure would mean near-instant death. For that reason, the companies will have to decide how to balance comfort with safety in the event of an emergency.

The capsule will have a bar and a bathroom, MacCallum says, and the crew will double as bartenders and tour guides.

“At the very least the pilot should be wearing a space suit,” says Art Thompson, whose aerospace company, Sage Cheshire, built the pressurized capsule that carried Baumgartner to the stratosphere. “If you have an issue with the craft, you want the pilot to be able to be in control.” The smartest strategy,­ Thompson says, might be to convince tourists to wear suits too. Of course, space suits require training, and looking like an astronaut might not have as much appeal as being able to easily sip a cocktail or hold your kid’s hand at 100,000 feet. At this point, the companies just seem to be banking on their ability to get the capsule down if a problem is detected—no awkward garments or free-fall skills required.

The third phase of the journey, the return, will be the most difficult. So World View is now heavily focused on refining the parafoils that will deliver the capsules to Earth. “We want to have enough cross-range to be able to fly to an airstrip and gently land in a predetermined place,” MacCallum says. “Doing that from 100,000 feet has never been done.” Because the air at that altitude is so thin, many doubted it was possible. But the company has now flown unmanned parafoils from 100,000 feet three times, each with a payload of about 100 pounds. This summer they plan to step it up by a factor of 10, testing the GPS-guided system with a 1,000-pound payload over the southwestern United States. “Assuming all that goes well, by the end of this year we’ll be at full-scale flight with a 9,000-pound capsule and commensurately large parafoil,” MacCallum says.

One focus of Zero2Infinity’s upcoming flights, also scheduled for this year, will be to test the high-speed telemetry link that will beam live video down from the capsule. Another arm of the company focuses on developing huge parafoils that could act as rescue systems for traditional aircraft. While they would be much larger than the ones eventually used for tourist capsules, having two applications for the technology accelerates the development while reducing the risk and cost, López-Urdiales says.

During tourist trips, the parafoils will be guided at least partially by pilots, and so both companies will need to conduct manned test flights. Some of those test pilots will likely be former NASA astronauts. Kelly says that people who have flown the space shuttle, like him, won’t be starting from scratch. The shuttle was also a glider that made an unpowered descent. Similar to a parafoil and a capsule, it encountered a lot of drag for the amount of lift it could create. To train, Kelly will spend time this summer jumping out of airplanes and learning to fly a small parafoil. Though he’s in charge of assembling a team of World View pilots, he expects that he’ll complete at least some of the early manned test flights himself, as well as serve as pilot on the first commercial trip to the stratosphere.

The simplicity of World View’s vision—at least compared with rocket flight—is what attracted Kelly to the project, he says. Potential tourists will likewise be drawn for the same reason, in hopes of experiencing the same payoff. Before he went to space for the first time, Kelly was sure the most remarkable thing would be floating in zero gravity. “That wasn’t the case,” he says now. “The biggest takeaway is looking at the planet with your own eyes—a round ball just floating there in the cosmos.”

The Ride of Your Life

Space tourism will offer different experiences, depending on the cost of a ticket—and your taste for adventure. Here are two.

Stratospheric Balloon

Stratospheric Balloon

1. You board the capsule a couple of hours before dawn. The monstrous polyethelyne balloon that will lift you into the stratosphere towers in the air above. You choose a seat, but it doesn’t really matter—they all swivel for a 360-degree view. After a five-minute briefing from the pilot, a former astronaut, the craft begins to rise. 

2. The ascent is slow and steady, averaging about 11 mph. You barely feel it. As the helium inside the balloon expands, the shape transforms from a long, thin teardrop into a taut, rounded object. After an hour and a half, the balloon reaches 100,000 feet. You’re free to walk around, use the restroom, or have a cocktail.

3. The craft drifts at this altitude. Its movement is gentle; the pilots refer to it as “sailing.” They point out constellations and planets. Soon, the sunrise begins, illuminating the winding scar of the Grand Canyon 19 miles below. Your pilot describes his own first experience with the so-called overview effect, the emotional shift in perspective that comes with gazing down at Earth. You pull out your phone and snap a picture, a selfie from the stratosphere.

4. After two hours, the pilot vents helium from the balloon to begin a descent. He then sets the balloon free, leaving the capsule hanging from a 100-foot-wide parasail. It begins a directed glide. The wind pushed the balloon several hundred miles, and the parafoil will make up most of that distance on the return. The pilot’s attention is focused on flying—this is the part of the trip he has trained for. The sensation is similar to being in a small, perfectly silent airplane. The swooping descent takes less than an hour, delivering you to an airfield four to five hours after you lifted off.

Rocket-Powered Plane

Rocket-Powered Plane

1. You’re secured into the passenger seat of the Lynx suborbital spaceplane, seconds from takeoff. You’ve passed your medical examination and spent two days training, learning tricks of the trade like shallow breathing to handle G-forces­. Though the cabin is pressurized, you’re wearing a pressure suit as backup. Air traffic control speaks through the radio in your helmet. “Cleared for takeoff. Three…two…one. Ignition.”

2. The four rocket boosters in the plane’s tail ignite, and the spacecraft roars off the runway. In 60 seconds you’re at supersonic speeds, although from inside the cockpit you can’t really tell. All you know is that you’re going fast. You tilt back as the Lynx’s nose rises, hurtling up through the atmosphere at an 75-degree angle. The altimeter clicks upward toward 330,000 feet, and the surface of Earth fades away.

3. Then, suddenly, it’s just you, the pilot, and the blackness of space. Gravity doesn’t seem to tug at your arms anymore, and you can see far beyond the curvature of Earth. You’re weightless. The pilot adjusts the boosters to keep you on track, but this is your time to take in the view.

4. After about five minutes, you begin to descend. The force of gravity returns, stronger than before. Re-entry is swift and hard. At its greatest, you feel the pressure of four times gravity’s pull. The force lessens as the Lynx grips the atmosphere, and soon you’re at cruising altitude. The spacecraft feels more like a commercial plane now, and the landing gear lowers as you make a final approach. After your 30-minute ride you touch down, back where you started.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Wish You Were Here.”

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Send emails to the past! Live on Mars! I guess the clever thing would be to pretend these new programs are real, but you’re all too smart for that, so we’ll just be straightforward and let you know that Google has a few April Fool’s Day jokes going today which prove once again that even mega-corporations can have a sense of humor.

The new “custom time” feature – announced in red, bold type in your gmail, which certainly suggests legitimacy – supposedly allows users to send email into the past. For journalists in particular this would be pretty attractive, since it would give you plenty of time to hit your deadlines. But, alas, the e-flux capacitor, causality-dodging technology that makes it possible is purely fictional.

Even better: The company announced its partnership with Virgin Galactic in a new project called Virgle, which will lead to the first human colony on Mars in 2014. Google co-founder Larry Page: “We feel that ensuring the survival of the human race by helping it colonize a new planet is both a moral good in and of itself and also the most likely method of ensuring the survival of our best – okay, fine, only — base of web search volume and advertising inventory. So, you know, it’s, like, win-win.”

You can fill out an application to be one of these pioneers here.

Via CNET

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U.S. astronauts have been bumming rides to space from Russia for more than three years. Soon they won’t need to. This year, NASA officially selected the SpaceX Dragon Version 2, along with Boeing’s CST-100, as the nation’s new taxi to and from the International Space Station.

the story here

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Update on March 4: Yesterday, Starship number SN10 exploded on the ground after landing. That marks the third consecutive explosion of a SpaceX Starship rocket. The story below, first published on February 17, outlines the company’s controversial approach with the large space vehicles.

In February, a gleaming, 15-story rocket exploded in a massive fireball over a coastal testing facility near Brownsville, Texas. A video of the fiery crash, broadcast via YouTube by SpaceX, looked like something out of a Michael Bay blockbuster.

To many observers, the crash of the SN9 Starship rocket may have seemed like a significant setback for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and his team of pioneering engineers who hope someday to take people to Mars. But to SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker, the crash was all in a day’s work. “We had, again, another great flight up,” Insprucker said on the video following the crash. “We’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit.”

Work on that landing, indeed. Here’s what to know about that fiery event, a previous one in December, an upcoming attempt (update on March 4: that one exploded too), and why the FAA is involved.

What happened to SpaceX’s Starships SN8 and SN9

Sending rockets to space is hard. Landing them back on earth intact so they can be reused is even harder. NASA has known this for decades, but now we are in a new era of space travel, with private companies like SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and other private firms who are racing to open up space to the public in a way that only science fiction movies could imagine just a quarter-century ago.

The February 2 crash came less than three months after another Starship rocket, the SN8 (the SN stands for Serial Number), also exploded on December 9, 2020, at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility near Brownsville, Texas. Though spectacular and seemingly dangerous, both explosions were not entirely unexpected. (It’s worth noting that both were uncrewed tests, and no one was hurt.)

In a tweet on November 24 before the SN8 launch, Elon Musk said that a “lot of things need to go right,” and gave the possibility of total success a “1/3 chance.” Despite the SN8 crash, SpaceX declared afterward that the flight represented an “awesome test,” and added, “Congratulations, Starship team!” In a tweet following the crash, Musk said the explosion was caused by low fuel tank pressure.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship flies, belly flops, and bursts into flames]

The SpaceX Starship program began in 2016 with the goal of launching cargo and as many as 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. During its early development stages, Musk said that the Starship vehicle could potentially launch people into space by 2020, but he has since backtracked on that statement, saying that there are likely “hundreds of missions,” still ahead before that happens.

The Starship rocket is actually the second stage of a two-part reusable launch system. When fully operational, the Starship carries payload and passengers and is lifted into space using a first stage, or booster rocket, called the Super Heavy. The booster is paired with the Starship to help the vehicle leave Earth. Neither should be confused with the company’s tried-and-true Falcon 9, which has proven capable of landing reliably back on earth (usually). The Falcon 9 also does not execute a belly-flop maneuver like the Starships do.

Why the FAA is involved following the Starship explosions

As much as Musk and his SpaceX team would like to frame the thunderous destruction of their spacecraft as a routine part of the arduous process of sending people to space, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has stepped in, raising concerns about how the rocket company is managing its launches and addressing public safety concerns.

The Verge reported in late January that the December launch “violated the terms” of the company’s FAA test license; an investigation of the incident included “a comprehensive review of the company’s safety culture, operational decision-making, and process discipline,” an FAA spokesperson told Popular Science.

The regulatory scrutiny prompted an angry reply on Twitter by Musk, who expressed his frustration with the agency’s critique: “Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” tweeted Musk. “Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

The launch also led some space insiders to call into question SpaceX’s apparent impulsiveness. “I am very critical of SpaceX after it demonstrated that it had effectively become a ‘law unto itself’ when it launched the SN8 test flight,” says David Todd, an analyst at Seradata, a UK-based firm that tracks rocket launches and satellites.

As a result of the FAA scrutiny, the launch of the SN9, which was scheduled for launch on January 28, was delayed for about a week after the agency requested additional information about the vehicle and flight plan before giving final approval.

“While we recognize the importance of moving quickly to foster growth and innovation in commercial space, the FAA will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety,” FAA spokesperson Steve Kulm told The Verge. “We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.”

The agency ultimately gave the go-ahead, expressing satisfaction that SpaceX had taken the necessary steps to ensure public safety, and the launch of the SN9 proceeded on February 2.

After a successful initial launch, the stainless-steel Starship SN9 reached an altitude of 6.2 miles, as planned, but when one engine failed to ignite as it descended, the craft could not right itself and exploded on the ground.

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

The FAA has opened a second probe into the company’s launch practices following SN9. An FAA spokesperson said via email: “A mishap investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, not to place blame. It seeks to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions to avoid a similar mishap.”

Again, SpaceX seemed to take the explosion in stride, assuming a seemingly nonchalant attitude towards the crash. In an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast on February 11, Musk said, “This is a test program. We expect it to explode. It’s weird if it doesn’t explode, frankly. If you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge.”

As the space company readies for the launch of the SN10 (update on March 4: it exploded), Musk and his team are projecting a higher possibility of success, perhaps as high as 60 percent. But the company is also hoping to reframe expectations: “These test flights are all about improving our understanding and development of a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo on long-duration, interplanetary flights and help humanity return to the moon, and travel to Mars and beyond,” SpaceX said on the Starship website.

All told, SpaceX’s collaboration with NASA is a remarkable development in the public-private partnership that has captured the public’s imagination and refueled an interest in human space travel not seen since the early Space Shuttle missions. But the recent explosions in many ways highlight a cultural divide in an arena—space—that has traditionally been the domain of government agencies. Some experts suggest that the staid government approach may be outdated and in need of a more modern perspective.

[Related: Ralphie from ‘A Christmas Story’ could have been the first child in space. Then disaster struck.]

“NASA tries to model everything to the nth degree whereas SpaceX works on the basis of ‘test it until it breaks,’” says Todd.

Todd said the SpaceX “test-to-destruction” approach has the advantage of getting a space launch system operational relatively quickly, “however, it may mean that launch failures happen more often—especially on early flights—when compared to using NASA’s more detailed modeling approach.”

He suggests that eventually these “teething problems” will eventually be ironed out, but the tension between the FAA and SpaceX will likely continue into the foreseeable future.

This story was first published on February 17, 2021. We’ve updated it since that time.

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SpaceX has proven itself to be a behemoth in the emerging commercial launch industry. Its Falcon family of rockets has accounted for more than a quarter of worldwide rocket launches in each of the last five years, and no other private company can transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

But space is a big place, with ample room for all kinds of activities that companies, researchers, and tourists might pay to pursue. And for many of those goals, the beefy Falcon rockets are overkill. Last week, two companies developing unique technologies specifically suited for more modest missions passed major milestones: Virgin Orbit launched nearly a dozen small satellites into orbit using an airplane-mounted rocket, and Blue Origin prepared to send astronauts to the edge of space with the fourteenth test of its New Shepard rocket, foreshadowing another year of growth for space companies large and small. Here’s what we have to look forward to.

Virgin Orbit

Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit (not to be confused with its sister company, Virgin Galactic, which targets suborbital space tourism) joined the handful of private companies who have managed to hurl a satellite fast enough to put it into orbit around our planet. A modified Boeing 747, Cosmic Girl, took off from an aerospace test center in California, flew over the Pacific Ocean and dropped a rocket—LauncherOne. LauncherOne promptly ignited and sustained its burn (unlike a doomed test flight last May), whisking its payload of ten miniature satellites called CubeSats safely into space. In orbit the CubeSats, which was designed mainly by university groups, will monitor Earth’s weather and climate, look for space debris, experiment with how the seeds of planets might have formed, and more.

“A new gateway to space has just sprung open,” said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart in a press release.

Hart hopes it will be a gateway unlike those other launch companies are developing. By converting an airplane into a rocket launcher, Virgin Orbit specializes in small, low-cost payloads. To that end, the 70-foot LauncherOne can lift about one ton of cargo into orbit (as opposed to SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon-9, which can handle payloads up to fifty times heftier).

But what LauncherOne lacks in muscle, it makes up for in flexibility. Its parent Boeing-474 can, in principle, fly to and launch from any airport in the world, giving clients the ability to buy a ride to the precise orbit they want. Launches are relatively affordable too, with flights reportedly going for about $12 million a pop—roughly four to five times cheaper than shooting off a Falcon 9.

The two companies offer different services. SpaceX is building the equivalent of a space railroad—a mass transit system that moves bulk goods for the lowest possible price per pound. Virgin Orbit, in contrast, aims to be more like the Lyft of space, taking individuals and small groups exactly where they want to go for a lower absolute price per trip. Both companies let customers share rides to defray costs, but it takes a lot to fill a Falcon 9, so minor missions often tag along with larger ones and launch on their terms. Virgin Orbit is betting that small satellite makers will pay extra for a prompt and convenient ride into space rather than waiting around.

After the successful test flight, Virgin Orbit is now open for business. It holds contracts with the US Space Force and the UK’s Royal Air Force, among other clients, flights for which could begin this year.

The company can reach space, but whether it will turn a profit in doing so remains to be seen. While satellites are indeed shrinking in physical size, competition in the light launch market is heating up. Rocket Lab, a New Zealand–United States company, has put nearly a hundred small satellites into orbit since 2018 and charges around $5 million per launch. Firefly Aerospace and Astra are companies developing similar capabilities. And where Astra, Firefly, and Rocket Lab have raised and spent in the ballpark of $100 million to design and test their rockets, according to reporting by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, Virgin Orbit’s investments are pushing a billion dollars.

Blue Origin

Another company looking to turn low-key space missions into a business is Blue Origin, a Jeff Bezos venture funded in part through the sale of his Amazon stock holdings. While Blue Origin is developing vehicles to compete more directly with SpaceX in delivering payloads both into low earth orbit and even to the lunar surface, it has demonstrated the most progress on its New Shepard rocket—a fully reusable system for launching a crewed capsule to the upper reaches of our atmosphere.

Blue Origin tested its New Shepard rocket for the 14th time on Thursday in what was essentially a dress rehearsal for a crewed flight. The rocket rose from the desert of West Texas, pushing the RSS (“Reusable Spaceship”) First Step to an altitude of 65 miles—a hair over 62 miles, one standard definition of where space begins. The RSS First Step separated from the rocket near the peak of the trajectory, marking the section of the flight during which future crew can experience a brief period of weightlessness, then both vehicles safely touched back down on the ground. New Shepard autonomously steered itself back to the launchpad, while the crew capsule deployed parachutes and landed some distance away, about ten minutes after launch.

This test flight showcased a number of upgrades to the crew capsule, highlighting Blue Origin’s space tourism focus, including a slow panning motion (for a full 360-degree view), a new communication system linking passengers to mission control, and environmental controls to keep the windows from fogging up. The company intends to test a similar hardware setup again before attempting a crewed flight, according to CNBC.com, possibly this year.

“We’re getting very, very close to flying our first astronauts, so that’s why it’s critical that we test these systems,” said Ariane Cornell, the company’s director of Astronaut and Orbital Sales, in a webcast of Thursday’s launch.

If Blue Origin can keep that timeline, it just might become the first company to offer access to space on a “budget.” While it hasn’t officially announced pricing for the ten-minute jaunts, reporting from Reuters suggests tickets may fall in the $200,000 to $300,000 dollar range—in line with suborbital tourism rival, Virgin Galactic. A brief thrill ride for the price of a home can hardly be considered affordable, except perhaps in comparison with the other ways to get off the planet that might be available this decade, which will likely run in the millions to tens of millions of dollars.

In this respect, Blue Origin will be testing more than just rockets as it inches closer to flying its first astronauts. The space tourism industry will be watching for the answer to a question that for years has been little more than speculation: How many people will be willing to burn a minor fortune to get to the edge of space?

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For SpaceX’s rocket scientists, Mars got a few miles closer yesterday. The company’s flagship spacecraft rose to new heights, executed a controlled freefall back toward the ground, and exploded on impact.

Company executives dream of SpaceX becoming a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in shuttling people or cargo to and from the nearby parts of the solar system. But to do so, they need a spacecraft that’s flexible enough to navigate alien atmospheres and reusable enough to make it home in one piece. Starship, they believe, is that vehicle.

Founder Elon Musk debuted the first prototype of the 160-foot tall, stainless steel behemoth last fall, and the ship’s development has continued at a breakneck pace since then. Over the summer, the fifth and six iterations of the vehicle (dubbed SN5 and SN6, SN standing for Serial Number) each hopped 500 feet into the air before touching straight back down. Today SpaceX used its eighth prototype, SN8, to conduct the vehicle’s first high altitude flight test, an essential step toward making Musk’s dreams of interplanetary transportation a reality.

In anticipation of the launch, SpaceX enthusiasts have been camped out at Boca Chica, Texas—the primary site of Starship’s development—for days. The SN8′s maiden flight could have come as early as Friday, but the launch date slid repeatedly as observers read SpaceX’s plans in the tea leaves of local road closures and Federal Aviation Administration flight restrictions. Starship nearly took off on Tuesday, but one of its engines automatically stopped the countdown with one second remaining.

At last, the colossal rocket blasted off the launchpad Wednesday evening, lifted by the might of three methane guzzling Raptor engines—a first, as the short hops had used just one. After reaching an altitude of nearly eight miles, higher than most passengers will ever travel in a commercial plane, the vehicle executed its daring landing maneuver—the “belly flop”—for the first time.

The SN8 rose for about five minutes, then cut off its engines and tipped sideways, presenting its undercarriage to the ground. Completely horizontal, it fell like a skydiver—a position designed to increase the spacecraft’s surface area—and air resistance—to slow the plunge. If and when Starship returns from orbit (or beyond), it will be coming in hot, and this “aerobraking” method will help break the gigantic spacecraft down to manageable speeds. Computers kept the SN8 level by flapping stubby fins attached to its base and nosecone. After about a minute and a half seconds of silence, the engines roared to life, righting the rocket and aiming its base back at the launchpad.

But it did not stick the landing. The rocket came in a little too hot, bursting into a fireball on the launchpad, which Musk on Twitter attributed to a low fuel tank pressure. Despite the spacecraft’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as he often calls explosions, Musk celebrated the test flight’s successful ascent and belly flop, congratulating the SpaceX team on collecting all the data they needed. “Mars,” he added, “here we come!!”

And the team might not have to wait long before they get a second shot. SN8 is no more, but the assembly of SN9 is nearly complete.

If and when Starship can land safely, it just might be the last rocket SpaceX builds. The colossal body will be able to hoist 220,000 pounds of cargo to Low Earth Orbit, according to the company. That’s four times the capacity of the Falcon 9, three times the capacity of the space shuttle, and approaching twice the capacity of the Falcon Heavy—currently the world’s most powerful launch system.

And the company is designing it to go just about anywhere. Its raison d’etre, of course, is to ferry people and materials to the Red Planet and enable Musk’s endgame, a Martian city. There, the vehicle will use a similar belly flop to arrest itself as it falls through Mars’s thin atmosphere.

It may also reach the moon. NASA awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract in the spring to develop Starship as a vehicle to potentially return astronauts to the lunar surface (Blue Origin and Dynetics also received funding to build lunar landers), and the company intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon (but not land) in the mid-2020s.

SpaceX is even tapping the spaceship for terrestrial applications. The Falcon rockets cost tens of millions of dollars per launch because the upper stage returns from orbit too quickly to be recovered, but the bellyflopping Starship should be fully reusable. Musk hopes to someday launch the vehicle for $2 million a pop, which would make it the company’s the most affordable ride to space by far. At those prices, Starship could even deliver cargo for the military, or fly wealthy passengers between major cities in under an hour.

While the sky would prove no limit for a fully operational Starship, the system still has a long way to go. In addition to installing the rocket’s innards, the company next needs to assemble the Super Heavy, a massive lower stage booster that will give Starship the oomph it needs to actually get into orbit. Musk has said he hopes that might happen as early as next year. It’s an aspirational goal (he forecast an orbital flight in 2020 during the Starship unveiling last year), but keen-eyed observers have already spotted the first Super Heavy prototype being built at Boca Chica.

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On April 12, 1981, the space shuttle Columbia blasted off from the Florida coast. NASA dubbed the flight Space Transportation System-1, or STS-1 for short, and it marked the first of 135 space shuttle missions. Over the next three decades, a fleet of five shuttles would carry more than 800 astronauts into orbit, where they accomplished feats including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS).

Sunday night, the Crew Dragon capsule—Resilience—lifted off the launchpad with four ISS-bound astronauts aboard. As a demonstration of the United States’ ability to put human beings in space, the mission, designated Crew-1, harkens back to STS-1. After nearly a decade of bumming rides off the Russian space agency (and paying handsomely for the privilege), NASA officials look forward to being able to stuff the ISS full of astronauts and take full advantage of the facility’s research capacity.

Yet the Crew-1 mission is also a sign of how much the space industry has changed since the first shuttle took off. Resilience belongs not to NASA but to SpaceX, a private company who designed, built, and operates the spacecraft. The space agency mentored the company throughout the vehicle’s development, but ultimately acts as a customer, booking SpaceX seats for astronauts much as the FBI might buy an agent a ticket to fly Delta. And now that SpaceX has a proven track record of flying astronauts into space, it’s eager to expand its clientele—with NASA’s blessing.

“In this new era, especially in the low earth orbit, NASA has the ability to be a customer,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine at a press conference ahead of a crewed demonstration flight of Crew Dragon in June. “One customer of many costumers.”

The Crew Dragon capsule is the first graduate of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative with roots reaching back to the Bush administration aiming to free up funding for deep space exploration by having private companies handle simpler operations nearer to Earth. After years of development and testing delays, SpaceX became the first to cross the finish line this summer when it flew NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS and brought them safely back home with a test flight—Crew Dragon Demo-1.

Sunday’s launch marks the first operational, long-term flight of a Crew Dragon vehicle, now fully certified for official use, and the end of NASA’s reliance on Russia’s Soyuz space capsule to reach the ISS. The two agencies have enjoyed a friendly post-Cold War relationship, but Soyuz dependence meant launching on Russia’s schedule. And it wasn’t cheap either. While a recent seat cost NASA 90 million dollars, Space.com reports, SpaceX tickets are expected to start off at around $55 million. Moving forward, NASA and the Russian space agency plan to share rides and swap seats without exchanging money.

“It’s also good to have your own capabilities, said Mike Hopkins, the spacecraft commander

at a press conference before launch. “It’s great for the world to have options.”

And more options are coming, with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule also nearing Commercial Crew alumni status. A pair of software glitches stopped it from reaching the ISS during an uncrewed test flight last year, but the company hopes to try again next year.

So far, SpaceX’s mission appears to be going smoothly. Resilience lifted off just ahead of tropical storm Eta at 7:27 pm Sunday Eastern time, and the first full commercial crew—comprising NASA astronauts Hopkins, Victor Glover (the first Black astronaut on the ISS since its construction), Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi—settled in. Upon reaching orbit, Resilience became a microgravity environment, which the crew indicated to spectators online by letting a Baby Yoda doll float weightlessly across the capsule.

Roughly three and a half hours after launch, the four astronauts (along with Baby Yoda) climbed into the ISS, exchanging hugs with the three crew members already on board—Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins.

But the new arrivals won’t have much time to rest, because NASA is keen to squeeze as many science results as it can out of the $100-billion orbiting laboratory. Glover will take biological samples to see whether his diet in space will affect the microbes in his gut and his immune system. The crew will also attempt to grow radishes, experiment with rock-munching microbes that could assist with future space mining operations, and test drive the cooling system of NASA’s next generation spacesuit, among other experiments.

“It’s going to be exciting to see how much work we’ll be able to get done while we’re there,” Hopkins said. “I think they’re going to keep us pretty busy.”

And the crew should be even more productive than usual. With both the Soyuz and Crew Dragon operational, the space agencies have been able to pack the ISS—which usually hosts between three and six astronauts—with a long-term crew of seven for the first time. In fact, the station now brims with so many astronauts that it has run out of sleeping berths, so Hopkins may be snoozing in the Resilience capsule itself, he said during the press conference.

The four astronauts will remain in space for the next six months before returning to Earth, but SpaceX and NASA plan to keep up a high cadence of flights. As many as seven Dragon capsules (carrying crew, cargo, or both) may visit the ISS over the next year and a half, maintaining the station’s no vacancy status.

“This mission represents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously, knocking on wood,” Shotwell said, according to The Verge.

With NASA’s seal of approval that SpaceX is ready for human spaceflight, the company is free to take on well-heeled private clients as well. Seven space tourists visited the ISS between 2001 and 2009 (after which the Soyuz became oversubscribed), all excursions brokered by the company Space Adventures. Now that Crew Dragon is open for business, space tourism for the ultrarich might be poised for a comeback.

SpaceX has already announced a partnership with private spaceflight company Space Adventures to fly a record-breaking high orbit around the Earth in a Crew Dragon, without docking with the ISS. The first flight could take place within two years.

Space Adventures isn’t the only company demanding SpaceX’s new services. Axiom Space—which plans to assemble its own private space station this decade—has announced that it will fly the first “fully private” flight to the ISS late next year. Former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, Israeli fighter pilot and businessman Eytan Stibbe, and two unconfirmed passengers (rumored to be actor Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman, who intend to film a movie in space) will form the four-person crew of mission “Ax-1.” The passengers will spend ten days aboard the ISS, but no word yet on where they’ll be sleeping.

For SpaceX’s ambitions to bring space closer to Earth, the sky seems to be proving no limit at all.

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On June 8, 1959, the Navy launched a rocket carrying 3,000 letters from the submarine USS Barbero, floating off the coast of Florida. “Before man reaches the moon,” Postmaster General Arthur A. Summerfield predicted, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.”

“Missile mail” failed to take off, but the government never gave up on the notion of delivering cargo to far off places in record times. Now the military has asked two private companies, SpaceX and a consulting business called the Exploration Architecture Corporation, to analyze whether rockets could fling payloads far heavier than postcards around the globe, Army general Stephen Lyons announced at a virtual conference of the National Defense Transportation Association last week. The military’s workhorse cargo aircraft, the Boeing C-17 Globemaster, can fly a tank to Afghanistan in about a dozen hours, but rocket delivery would be far faster.

“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said, according to SpaceNews.

Under the deal, known as a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, the companies will volunteer their time and resources to work with the US Transportation Command—a military organization that coordinates the movement of weapons and other resources—to study whether rockets might join planes, trucks, and ships in the military’s fleet of transportation vehicles. Lyons suggested that SpaceX could launch a test flight as early as next year.

Rockets and war have long gone hand in hand. In fact, Nazi Germany used one of the first functional modern rockets, the V-2, to terrorize European cities toward the end of World War II. After the war, the USSR and the US raced to scoop up V-2 hardware and key German rocket scientists, acquisitions that would launch the space programs of both countries.

Now things have come full circle. Supported in part by NASA contracts and expertise, SpaceX has emerged as space powerhouse with a growing fleet of rockets capable of placing satellites into orbit and hurling cars toward Mars. To reach orbit a rocket must exceed 25,000 miles per hour (nearly three dozen times the speed of sound), and high above the Earth’s surface there’s no air resistance to slow it down. The bottom stages of SpaceX rockets generally land near their launch site, but there’s nothing stopping the company from bringing them down on a different part of the planet.

Lyons didn’t say which vehicle the military is eyeing for recruitment, but a 2021 demonstration could involve either the company’s Falcon 9 workhorse, or its Falcon Heavy powerhouse, both of which have already demonstrated multiple successful flights. The former can carry 50,000 pounds of cargo to orbit for $62 million, and the latter 140,000 pounds for $90 million, although those figures would likely depend on the flight trajectory. By way of comparison, the C-17 aircraft has a maximum capacity of about 165,000 pounds and has been sold to American allies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Or the military could be waiting for SpaceX’s upcoming Starship launch system, a fully reusable two stage rocket capable of hoisting 220,000 pounds of cargo to orbit. The company has built a handful of bare-bones prototypes of the first stage, some of which have made small “hop” flights. Construction of the first prototype booster may begin this fall, but so-called “point to point” flight tests on Earth remain years away, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. He has claimed that Starship operational costs could be as low as $2 million per flight.

If SpaceX can make Starship a reality, they have big plans for the platform. While the rocket was designed primarily to fly passengers around the moon and to Mars, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell has said that the company also hopes to take advantage of what she calls the system’s “residual capacity” to transport passengers between continents on Earth. At a 2018 TED talk, she predicted that Starship would someday shuttle blast well-heeled travelers between most major world cities in 20 to 40 minutes.

“This is definitely going to happen,” Shotwell said.

Of course, the company has a lot of details—both logistical and engineering—to work out before it does. How will air traffic control adapt to a world with rockets blasting off as often as planes take to the skies? Can explosive spacecraft ever be made as safe as commercial aviation? How will passengers stomach accelerating to 25 times the speed of sound in a matter of minutes?

If SpaceX is serious about operating what amounts to a hypersonic airline, learning to moving cargo around the globe for a client with deep pockets and might be a logical first step. The company has been discussing the idea with the military since at least 2018, and now it seems like their pitch might have landed.

“I had no sense for how fast SpaceX was moving, but I’ve received their update and I can tell you they are moving very rapidly in this area,” Lyons said.

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Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo last week completed its second successful test flight from Spaceport America in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, marking another important milestone toward the launch of Virgin Galactic’s commercial service. The company said in a news release that Mark “Forger” Stucky and Michael “Sooch” Masucci, both commercial astronauts, commanded SpaceShipTwo Unity’s flight. The test flight was conducted under a set of stringent operational protocols to ensure safety against COVID-19, including enforced social distancing as advised by state guidelines as well as universal mask usage.

SpaceShipTwo’s glide, flown at higher speeds, allowed the team to continue to evaluate systems and vehicle performance in advance of future rocket-powered space flights. Flying VSS Unity in glide configuration at higher speeds enables certain vehicle systems to operate close to the environment seen during phases of rocket boost on a spaceflight. The spaceship achieved a glide speed of Mach 0.85 after being released from the mothership VMS Eve at an altitude of 51,000 feet. Unity completed multiple test-points before touching back down smoothly for a runway landing at Spaceport America.

“Forger and Sooch performed a series of maneuvers with Unity designed to gather data about performance and handling qualities while flying at higher speeds,” according to a company press release. “This data will be verified against similar maneuvers that were performed in the previous glide flight to enhance aerodynamic modeling. Pending the completion of an extensive data review of this flight, the team will start preparing for the next stage of our flight test program—powered spaceflights from Spaceport America. In addition to the data review, we have several steps to complete, including final modifications to the spaceship customer cabin and detailed inspections of the vehicle and systems.”

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Update 6/1 at 8:33 am EST: The launch proceeded successfully on 5/30 after being scrubbed on 5/27 due to weather. Both astronauts have now boarded the International Space Station.

At 4:33 p.m. ET today, a classic scene may return (weather permitting) to Cape Canaveral after a nine-year hiatus. Two astronauts will don flight suits, climb into a vehicle perched atop a powerful rocket, and blast off toward the International Space Station (ISS).

If all goes according to plan—at time of this publication, chances of favorable weather hover around 50 percent—the mission will mark two historic milestones. First, space veterans Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will become the first NASA astronauts to launch from American soil since the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011. And second, they will be the first human beings ever to fly to orbit on hardware designed, built, and operated by a private company—Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, commonly known as SpaceX. The mission represents a pivotal moment in an ongoing shift in how NASA handles crewed exploration, as well as a stepping stone toward a future where any well-heeled adventurer can purchase a ticket to space.

“In this new era, especially in low earth orbit, NASA has the ability to be a customer,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine at a recent press conference, “one customer of many customers in a very robust commercial marketplace.”

NASA’s astronaut program has continued since 2011, and the agency has kept the ISS staffed by purchasing more than 70 rides on the Soyuz spacecraft from the Russian space program—pricey tickets that have cost the agency a total of around four billion dollars. But over the last decade or so, NASA has also invested at least three billion dollars in SpaceX and worked closely with the company to help it develop a vehicle—the Crew Dragon—capable of bringing astronauts to the space station. (The NASA program that funded SpaceX and others, Commercial Crew, has also awarded around five billion dollars to Boeing to develop its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which may launch with astronauts next year.)

“NASA has been an extraordinary customer, an extraordinary partner, and a mentor for us,” said Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president. “We’ve learned from them. We’ve obviously been pleased by their financial support, technical support, and knowledge.”

With the ability to reach orbit on their own terms restored, NASA officials hope to get more astronauts to the ISS, boosting the amount of research they can accomplish. They also look forward to having more flexibility: The cadence of available Soyuz seats has tended to set the duration of most missions at around six months in recent years, but the commercial crew vehicles may let the agency experiment with shorter and longer missions, according to Kirk Shireman, the program manager for NASA’s ISS program.

And it’s arguably an even bigger day for SpaceX. In 18 years, the rocket company has gone from startup to space heavyweight. It now carries out 70 percent of commercial launches worldwide, according to Bridenstine, and has also resupplied the ISS using its Dragon capsule 20 times. But founder Elon Musk dreams of establishing lunar bases and Martian settlements in the not-so-distant future, and building space metropolises will take more than food, tools, and materials. With today’s launch, SpaceX takes its first step toward moving people around the solar system—not just cargo.

While NASA has overseen more than 150 flights, this time will different because SpaceX will largely sit in the driver’s seat. NASA will participate in mission management, but the company will lead it, according to Steve Stich, the deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program. That means that if the astronauts encounter a problem, they’ll be reporting it to SpaceX’s flight control team in Hawthorne, California, although NASA will be listening in.

Both organizations, however, have devoted thousands of hours of testing and training to minimize the chances of anything going wrong. NASA officials know the heartbreak of losing astronauts all too well, and SpaceX employees are keenly aware of the heavy responsibility that comes along with flying human beings. At their technicians’ own request, SpaceX started attaching photographs of Behnken and Hurley to every work order, according to Shotwell, keeping the unprecedented stakes of this mission front of mind. “There’ll be a little sense of relief when they’re in orbit,” she said, and “more when they get to the station. I’ll start sleeping again when they’re back safely on planet Earth.”

After Behnken and Hurley launch, it’ll take them about 19 hours to chase down the ISS. Crew Dragon will fly mainly on autopilot during this period, although the crew will have two brief chances to take the wheel (which, in this case, is not a “wheel” but a collection of large touch screens). They will take control first when the spacecraft reaches orbit to test the capsule’s responsiveness to twisting and rolling commands, and then again when the vehicle is few hundred feet from the ISS.

The original plan had been to bring the astronauts right back home, but about six months ago NASA decided that since Behnken and Hurley were going all the way to the ISS, they might as well stay awhile. Simulations suggest that Crew Dragon can remain in space for 119 days before the trace amounts of oxygen that persist hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface degrade its solar panels. SpaceX and NASA will keep an eye the craft’s performance, and will determine the mission’s length by weighing the tradeoff between keeping extra hands on board the ISS and completing the mission’s main goal: to demonstrate that SpaceX’s hardware, software, and mission management are ready for the big time. A successful end-to-end test will wrap up the experimental portion of the vehicle’s development, letting official operations begin with the subsequent flight, “Crew 1,” whose timeline will depend on how this flight unfolds.

“We should not lose sight of the fact that this is a test flight,” Bridenstine said. “We’re doing this to learn things.”

Some people might feel nervous at the thought of being the first to hurtle through space in a relatively unproven vehicle, but Behnken and Hurley act cool as cucumbers. They’re aware of the unique positions they occupy in the history of the crewed space program—Hurley flew on the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011, and Behnken helped assemble the ISS—but they remain too focused on the task at hand to wax poetic about it.

“You have to go in knowing as much as you can about the vehicle and procedures, hyper focused on making sure all the work is successful,” Hurley said. “From the historical perspective, we’ll let somebody else talk about that when we get back.”

Nevertheless, they’re honored to be breaking new ground. After the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle vehicles, Crew Dragon will become the fifth American spacecraft to carry human beings into orbit. “It’s probably a dream of every test pilot school student to have the opportunity to fly on a brand-new spacecraft,” Behnken said.

Behnken and Hurley, while not tourists themselves, are also serving as pioneers for the fledgling space tourism industry. In some sense, today represents SpaceX’s debut operating the world’s first “spaceline.” NASA is currently it’s only client, but a successful demonstration of crewed spaceflight could change that quickly. In fact, the company has already announced that seats aboard Crew Dragon will be available to the general public soon, and Hurley, for his part, says that’s exactly how it should be. “Just that look out the window alone is worth going in people’s minds,” he said. “Access to low earth orbit needs to get greater and less expensive, and I think this is part of that exercise.”

Crowds of hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch past launches, but this time around NASA is inviting all to participate in the historic moment online. The agency will host a variety of digital festivities, and the launch will be broadcast on NASA Live and SpaceX’s website. The SpaceX and NASA teams have adopted a variety of anti-COVID-19 measures, and Behnken and Hurley are well quarantined. All parties hope to keep space enthusiasts safe, too.

“We don’t want an outbreak” resulting from spectators clustering at Cape Canaveral, Bridenstine said. “We need a spectacular moment that all of America can see and all of the world can see, to inspire not just us who have been waiting for years for this but to inspire the generations that are coming.”

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Summer star gazers in rural areas are used to seeing a handful of satellites streak across the sky. But in the coming years, eagle-eyed amateurs may be able to pick out hundreds. And for professional astronomers, research will never be the same again.

The race to blanket the globe in satellite internet is on. SpaceX leads with its fleet of Starlink satellites, which aims to provide high speed connectivity to anyone on the planet. The company has already placed more than 350 of the 570-pound, 30-foot wide machines into orbit, 60 of which launched on Wednesday. The company plans to eventually construct a “megaconstellation” of tens of thousands of satellites, with additional swarms to follow from Amazon and the UK company OneWeb. Ever since the first strings of bright new lights started passing overhead, astronomers have fretted about the future of their field. Now one of the most comprehensive analyses yet of the first 12,000 Starlink satellites brings both good and bad news.

The damage the satellites inflict on astronomical research will vary by project and observatory. The celestial newcomers don’t pose an existential threat to the field, but dealing with them will likely become a significant part of how astronomy is done in the future. “This is a wakeup call for astronomers generally to start thinking about the mitigations,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of the analysis.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk claims that Starlink will pose no danger to scientific progress. “I’m confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries, zero,” he said at a conference last Monday. “We’ll take corrective action if it’s above zero.”

The company is cooperating with a variety of astronomical organizations to minimize its influence on the night sky, but completely eliminating that effect appears next to impossible. In fact, the near-Earth environment is already undergoing an upheaval, according to McDowell’s report, which is under review by the Astrophysical Journal Letters. While thousands of satellites currently circle the Earth (many of them defunct), the zone SpaceX is targeting sits relatively empty. Before the first Starlink launch less than a year ago, there were just 400 large satellites (over 220 pounds) orbiting at low altitude (under 370 miles)—the kind that are easiest to see. Today, Starlink satellites have nearly doubled that number, and the network is only three percent complete.

A sky with 12,000 low-flying Starlink satellites in their current incarnation would look drastically different to the naked eye. McDowell built a simulation considering the satellites’ size, altitude, number, and observed brightness based on reports he commissioned from a network of amateur astronomers. He then calculated how many satellites would pass overhead at different points during the night, for various seasons and locations around the globe. City-dwellers won’t notice a thing, but according to McDowell’s model (which is based on SpaceX’s FCC filings), star gazers in rural areas would see the horizon swarm with hundreds of dim specks as sunlight glints off of the satellites’ metallic surfaces, dozens of them passing directly overhead. The exact number of visible satellites will depend on conditions but peaks in the hours after sunset during the summer—prime time for sky watching.

Fortunately for amateur astronomers, SpaceX is experimenting with painting the Earth-facing side of its satellites black to dim their reflectivity. The company launched its first “darksat” prototype in January, and it does appear to be about 2.5 times dimmer than its shiny counterparts, according to a pre-print published on Monday based on a single pair of observations. McDowell says that this reduction—if confirmed—would likely push the satellites right to the edge of human vision. You might notice a disorienting sense of movement if you squint hard enough, but you probably won’t be able to distinguish specks of light.

“That’s probably enough to save the naked eye sky,” McDowell says. “But it’s not enough to save professional astronomy.”

Astronomers are a diverse bunch, studying everything from local space rocks to distant black holes, and Starlink’s effects will be equally varied. Some research projects, especially those that operate late at night during the winter, will barely notice SpaceX’s additions. At these times, the sun lies entirely behind the Earth, and no reflective sunlight reaches the satellites. That came as a relief to McDowell. “I was unduly pessimistic initially,” he says, “but the fact that it’s not so bad in the winter is important. I was pleased and surprised to see that.”

The bad news, however, is the Starlink components will shine brightly in telescope mirrors during the first and last hours of the night when the sun hovers below the horizon, especially during summer. These conditions are ideal for observing objects near the sun, such as surveys that hunt for asteroids, including those that might someday collide with Earth. Projects like these just can’t be done on midwinter nights. If you restrict yourself to winter observing, McDowell says, “you’re losing half the sky essentially.”

With satellites launching at a monthly, and eventually bi-weekly cadence, McDowell suggests that researchers start preparing for the rapidly approaching Starlink future now.

The simplest way to edit out the unwanted streaks left behind by satellites is to use software. If astronomers take five pictures of a target, and if a satellite photobombs only a couple of frames, researchers can blend the photos together to erase the satellite. This method will work best for observatories with fewer satellites overhead, such as those deep in the southern hemisphere, and will come at the cost of valuable observation time to capture the extra data.

Other observatories will need specialized hardware. A system where small cameras surround the telescope’s main mirror in a ring, for instance, could grant the instrument a sense of peripheral vision. When the cameras spot a satellite coming, they could snap a shutter across the telescope’s field of view, temporarily blinding it until the spacecraft is gone. Projects targeting dim objects by using exposure times much longer than the momentary blips of passing satellites would benefit from this sort of scheme.

Ultimately though, each of the world’s many observatories will have to go through a period of trial and error while it works out which strategies best fit its location and specifications, and sees what problems crop up. “It’s going to change the environment so much that there will be unexpected consequences we haven’t thought of,” McDowell says.

But even if they can find the substantial funding needed to support longer observing runs and new hardware, there’s a limit to how much astronomers can adapt to a sky full of moving lights. At some point, if every image has multiple satellite streaks astronomy would just grind to a halt. McDowell suggests that researchers can learn to live with Starlink’s tens of thousands of darkened satellites, but stresses that in the long term astronomy will need an international treaty limiting the overall number if it is to survive.

“I think the compromise between astronomers and space explorers is that we have to work out some mitigations for a much more crowded sky,” he says, “but the space community has to ultimately set a cap on just how crowded that sky can get.”

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But McDowell praises the company for its demonstrations of good faith, such developing the darksat and consulting directly with the Vera Rubin Observatory—a flagship facility coming online in 2022. He hopes that additional measures, such as painting the darksats’ antennas black, will continue to minimize the big shifts on the horizon.

“I’m mildly less worried than I was for the short term,” he says. “But it’s still a real change in the sky.”

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Have you always dreamt of leaving Earth? Are you a member of the two, or better yet three commas club? Well it’s a great time to be alive because after decades of delays, the space tourism industry may finally be taking off. Not just the kind Dennis Tito pioneered in 2001, where you buy a ticket from the Russian government to visit the International Space Station (ISS), but real honest-to-goodness free market tourism with multiple private companies vying to turn your hard-earned millions into an out-of-this-world experience.

SpaceX, which is preparing to launch astronauts to the ISS any month now in its newly human-rated Crew Dragon capsule, announced last week that NASA won’t be the only paying customer for its new vehicle. The private company is also offering to launch up to four private citizens into orbit in late 2021 or 2022. And SpaceX is far from the only company on the verge of starting space tourism operations. Here’s a primer to where and when you can go, and how much it might cost you.

Touch the sky

The entry-level trip is the short-but-sweet suborbital flight. You fly more or less straight up at least 62 miles—the boundary between Earth and space, according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale—snap a few selfies, and come straight back down. At the peak of the flight you’ll experience a few minutes of weightlessness, see the sky turn black, and finally find out for yourself whether the Earth is round or flat.

Virgin Galactic has been promising to provide this sort of service “this year or next year” for a decade, but this year they might actually deliver. The company is currently conducting the final tests of its VSS Unity spaceplane in New Mexico, and in a presentation to shareholders last fall said that it was targeting summer of 2020 for the first passenger flight. Virgin Galactic has taken deposits from 600 would-be astronauts and will charge $250,000 per seat. While it’s initially targeting clients worth at least $10 million, it expects that economies of scale will soon push down the price, opening the experience to those worth $1 to $5 million, according to the presentation.

In budget space tourism, Virgin Galactic will face competition from Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company. Blue Origin has also developed a crewed capsule that it will launch to a similar height on a rocket, before touching down for a parachute landing. The company’s New Shepard passenger rocket has made multiple test flights and could start commercial flights this year, CEO Bob Smith told CNBC.com last fall.

Around the world in 90 minutes

Those looking for some quality time in space may want to hold out for the orbital flight SpaceX announced last week. Having already demonstrated its Crew Dragon capsule’s ability to reach orbit (and safely escape an exploding rocket), SpaceX is partnering with tourism company Space Adventures to offer orbital flights around the Earth in 2021 or 2022.

“This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it,” said Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s President, in a press release. (Or at least those with wallets as big as their dreams).

Interested individuals will earn bragging rights as the highest-flying private astronaut to date, as the Crew Dragon will orbit more than twice as high as the International Space Station. Participants would enjoy a view of the planet unseen since the Gemini program in the 1960s, according to the press release, and would enjoy weightlessness throughout the orbit or orbits—each of which would last about 90 minutes.

Space Adventures hasn’t announced a price, but tens of millions would be a reasonable guess. NASA will pay about $55 million per Crew Dragon seat and an earlier SpaceX deal (which has since fallen through) with Bigelow Space Operations priced seats at $52 million, but both of those missions involved visits to the ISS. This orbital flight is a “free flyer” and won’t rendezvous with any craft in orbit, which could make it a bit more affordable.

A stay in a many-star hotel

Spending a few nights in orbit is a conceivable goal for this decade, but details remain vague and the experience would, in some cases, require building new hardware.

NASA announced last summer that it will allow tourists to sleep on the ISS for the bargain price of $35,000 a night. But before you go cancelling your Virgin Galactic seat, keep in mind that figure represents the bare-bones price that a space tourism company will pay NASA. Unless you have your own rocket, you’ll likely be paying a much steeper cost for a whole package that includes training and transportation.

Bigelow Space Operations immediately announced that it had purchased four seats on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule and would be charging about $52 million each for a one to two month visit to the ISS, although those plans have since been cancelled.

One question is where tourists would sleep, as the ISS doesn’t exactly have a ton of vacancies. To that end NASA recently reached an agreement with Houston company Axiom Space to build a commercial segment and attach it to the ISS. Parts could launch as early as 2024, and would be Axiom’s first steps toward assembling its own private space station—one featuring designer interiors and wi-fi. Axiom hopes to start offering 10-day stays on the ISS next year, according to its website. It doesn’t list a price but NASA spaceflight reports that the company signed a contract with a customer last year worth $55 million.

Challenging Axiom in the private space station arena could be a company called Orion Span, which aspires to open the doors of its Aurora space station in 2022. A 12-night excursion will reportedly cost $9.5 million—a true bargain considering that it includes the launch price (rocket TBD). No word lately if Orion Span is on track to meet its 2021 launch goal, but the website accepts fully refundable $80,000 deposits in USD, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Don’t lose that receipt.

To the moon and beyond

If you’re planning a trip beyond low earth orbit in the foreseeable future, your name is probably Yusaku Maezawa. In 2018 SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed that Maezawa, the billionaire founder of Japanese fashion site Zozotown, had booked a trip to fly around (note: not “to”) the moon on the Starship rocket—Musk’s vision for a heavy lifting, fully reusable system that will service orbit, the moon, and Mars.

Starship is currently under rapid development, with SpaceX producing many simple prototypes as it moves toward its first orbital flight. Neither Maezawa nor SpaceX has said how much he’ll be paying for the historic week-long flight, but Musk has said that Maezawa’s support has contributed to development costs, which he estimates at $2 to $10 billion. Maezawa recently stepped back from his retail company, selling a controlling stake for $2.6 billion—in part to allow more time to train for the moon mission, Forbes reports.

But if all those destinations are too rich for your blood, there’s always Mars. Building a million-person city will be an all-hands-on-deck enterprise, and Musk has long said he aims to get one-way ticket prices down to a modest $500,000 so that middle class folk can afford to sell their homes and join the Martian workforce. Or, failing that, you can always take out a loan and work it off through indentured servitude.

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When the Falcon 9 rocket burst apart into a puff of flame and white smoke on Sunday, the Crew Dragon capsule soared unscathed above it.

The explosion would have come as a setback during normal flight operations, but for this intentional safety test, events could not have played out more smoothly. “As far as we can tell thus far, it’s a picture-perfect mission,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX’s Chief Engineer and founder, in a press release. “It went as well as one can possibly expect.” Now that the capsule has proven itself capable of handling emergencies both in the air and on the ground, SpaceX expects to launch its first astronauts in the late spring or early summer.

For this test, the rocket blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday morning, hoisting the Crew Dragon spacecraft aloft with two mannequins inside. About a minute and a half later—while flying faster than the speed of sound—the capsule automatically separated from its booster, as it would in the unlikely case of an in-air emergency. The capsule’s eight “SuperDraco” engines fired, carrying it clear of the rocket, which exploded about ten seconds after separation. (No need to feel bad for SpaceX though, this Falcon 9 rocket had already reached space three times on previous missions—a solid chunk of its theoretical 10-flight lifespan.)

The Crew Dragon capsule coasted to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet, about three times higher than commercial airplanes fly, before plummeting back to Earth. Four parachutes slowed its decent to a comparative crawl, and nine minutes after launch it splashed down gently in the Atlantic Ocean, about 20 miles off the coast of Florida for recovery.

The in-flight abort system proved that should anything go wrong on the way to the International Space Station (ISS), the capsule will be able to bail the astronauts out—the spacecraft version of a test pilot’s ejection seat. “For this test, Falcon 9’s ascent trajectory will mimic a Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station to best match the physical environments the rocket and spacecraft will encounter during a normal ascent,” SpaceX wrote in a pre-flight statement.

Last March the company demonstrated the Crew Dragon capsule’s ability to reach the ISS with the Crew Demo-1 mission, and planned to follow it up with an in-flight abort test over the summer. But the capsule blew up on the launchpad during a firing test of its engines in April, which pushed back the timeline. Now with the in-flight abort test complete, no major hurdles stand in the way of the long awaited Crew Demo-2 mission, which will bring veteran astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS. Musk expects to have the capsule ready for launch by the end of March, and that it might fly—depending on NASA’s schedule—sometime between April and June. In the meantime, SpaceX plans to carry out further tests of its newest parachute design, which have suffered some recent failures.

Crew Demo-2 can’t come soon enough for NASA, which has been relying on Russia’s space agency to launch American astronauts in its Soyuz spacecraft ever since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. The space agency has funded the development of two private alternatives, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner, but both timelines have slipped repeatedly. NASA once hoped to be flying astronauts again by 2015.

NASA’s final seat on Russia’s Soyuz leaves Earth in April, although the agency could potentially buy additional rides if needed. Those seats have historically cost the US about $86 million a pop, and NASA’s Office of Inspector General has calculated that seats on Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will each cost roughly $90 million and $55 million respectively. Both companies say that those numbers will come down after accounting for cargo and full seven-astronaut capacity. Once the commercial crew capsules are operational, NASA and Russia will share rides without exchanging money, according to Spaceflight Now.

Spaceflight is unpredictable and no one knows for sure when each capsule will be ready, but for now NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine expressed satisfaction with Sunday’s step forward. “This critical flight test puts us on the cusp of returning the capability to launch astronauts in American spacecraft on American rockets from American soil,” he said. “We are thrilled with the progress NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is making and look forward to the next milestone for Crew Dragon.”

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NASA has set the ambitious (some might say aspirational) goal of sending a crew to the moon in 2024, but this time it doesn’t want to go alone. On Monday, the agency announced that five new companies will be joining its lunar support posse: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp., Ceres Robotics and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc.

And they’ll come in handy. Doing all the science, all the scouting and mapping, and building all the necessary rockets, vehicles, and infrastructure to explore the moon is a lot of work. As NASA continues with its Artemis program to return humans to the moon, it will be relying on help from the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) initiative, which establishes a roster of companies that can bid on missions to take NASA hardware to the moon. If all goes well, these five plus nine other collaborators named last year will compete for contracts collectively worth up to 2.6 billion dollars over the next decade, and the lunar surface will experience traffic the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the Apollo program.

“What I would like to do is build up a cadence of at least two [lunar missions] per year,” said Steve Clarke, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate during a conference call on Monday.

The quintet of companies runs the gamut in terms of size and space experience. On the heavy lifting end, SpaceX will offer its reusable Starship platform for shipping up to 110 tons of material to the moon—roughly the weight of two military tanks. The company unveiled a simple prototype of the ship in September. Though it has not yet built the rocket needed to launch it, the company expects it to be functional within a few years. “We are aiming to be able to drop Starship on the lunar surface in 2022,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said on the call.

For midsize loads, NASA may call on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, which has been in development for a few years. The Blue Moon will reportedly be able to handle a few tons of heft, and will also rely on fuel cells (as opposed to solar power) to survive the long lunar night.

The Sierra Nevada Corporation will be developing a trio of delivery vehicles based on technologies derived from current satellite hardware and the Dream Chaser, a crewed spacecraft under development since 2004.

NASA also selected two relative newcomers, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems and rover developer Ceres Robotics. In total the five companies, chosen from eight applications received after a call for proposals in July, join nine other companies previously named in 2018 as CLPS providers.

Now, when NASA wants to send a science or exploration mission to the moon, such as the upcoming ice-prospecting VIPER rover in late 2022, the CLPS pool of partners will theoretically serve as something like a lunar version of Uber. Rather than arranging the whole ride from scratch, NASA will describe where it wants to go and the instruments or equipment it would like to bring. Then the private partners will then submit bids and compete for the privilege of getting the hardware from terra firma all the way to the moon’s dusty surface. “These are not NASA missions. These are CLPS provider missions,” said Clarke. “We are operating along with [the providers] and buying a ride.”

When each of the fourteen providers will be capable of delivering such a ride remains to be seen, but two companies from the previous group, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, have already won contracts worth nearly 80 million dollars each to land missions in 2021. NASA originally awarded a third contract for a 2020 landing, but the company has since cancelled the agreement.

The agency will have plenty of work for any companies that are able to step up, with a dozen science packages and technology demonstrations already ready or nearly ready to go.

In addition to bringing NASA’s breakneck lunar timeline one step closer to reality, the billions of dollars invested in CLPS will also, the agency hopes, have a build-it-and-they-will-come halo effect. Once a few companies are regularly delivering payloads to the lunar surface, the thinking goes, those services could attract others interested in paying to send equipment into space, opening up a lasting shipping lane between the Earth and the moon.

“We’re on the precipice,” Clarke said, “of seeing the commercial services expand and flourish with not just NASA as a customer but lots of other customers. I think this is a catalyst here and we’re going to see this grow more and more over the next five years.”

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The Earth just gained five dozen new artificial satellites. The newcomers represent a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of functional machines already up there, but also an early raindrop in a deluge of tens of thousands to come.

Private space company SpaceX, which launched the satellites on Monday, is driving the orbital boom with its construction of the Starlink constellation—a flock of satellites that will eventually number in the thousands intended to blanket the planet with internet access. But while the enterprise will increase connectivity here on Earth, astronomers fear it will sever them from the rest of the universe, filling the night sky with unavoidable streaks of light. Such vast assemblies have been prohibitively expensive in the past. But Monday’s launch featured SpaceX’s most reusable (and frugal) rocket yet, and the company appears to be capable of singlehandedly changing our local space environment.

SpaceX launched the stack of satellites, each weighing 500 pounds, from Cape Canaveral on Monday morning, releasing them into orbit 174 miles above the Earth. They will continue to spread out, extend their solar panels, and rise into higher orbits over the following days. There, they’ll join a batch of prototypes from a previous launch, making for a current constellation just shy of 120 working satellites.

After the last Starlink launch in May, strings of satellites glowing with reflected light from the sun as they paraded across the sky delighted some observers. But the astronomical community, which has spent decades designing and building sensitive optical equipment tuned to pick up the faintest of glimmers from across the galaxy and beyond, sees the same sight as a menacing threat to their enterprise. Until recently, such low and bright satellites numbered only in the hundreds, according to the International Astronomical Union, which posed little risk to observations and nocturnal animals. But Starlink and similar constellations could rapidly change that.

“We do not yet understand the impact of thousands of these visible satellites scattered across the night sky and despite their good intentions, these satellite constellations may threaten both [astronomy and wildlife],” the Union said in a statement.

Eager to fund its Martian ambitions, SpaceX hopes to start selling internet service made possible by its satellite constellation sometime in 2020. CEO Elon Musk has already tweeted via a Starlink connection, and the company plans to ramp up fast. Monday marks the first of nearly every-other-week launches planned to push the constellation size past 1,000 satellites over the next year. The constellation’s planned size has swelled from 12,000 satellites to more than 40,000, paperwork submitted to the International Telecom Union revealed last month. That’s twenty times the total number of working satellites currently in orbit from every nation combined. Space is about to get crowded.

Astronomers are scrambling to see how the influx of night lights will affect their operations. An earlier simulation found that the original 12,000-satellite version of Starlink would make the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope—a billion dollar venture—unusable about 20 percent of the time, Shannon Hall reports in the New York Times. Researchers are currently updating their calculation to see what the company’s new plan will do to theirs. SpaceX, for its part, has said it will work with astronomers to take steps such as painting the satellites black to reduce their shine.

The constellation may affect the general public too. Once completed, the global sky will contain four to five times more Starlink satellites than it will visible stars. In fact, 500 satellites will be simultaneously visible from certain points, according to calculations by astronomer Alex Parker. Urban dwellers who count themselves lucky to see Jupiter on a good night likely wouldn’t notice, but rural stargazers could experience a drastically different night sky. “I’ll wait to see what happens when they reach their operational orbits, but my heart sank when I saw those first pictures,” Parker wrote on Twitter after the first launch.

Musk believes that the satellites won’t impact astronomy, and that the economic benefits of a global internet represent a “greater good.” He has also tweeted that the future of astronomy lies in space anyway.

Monday’s launch showcased the reason why SpaceX can afford to assemble space infrastructure on such an unprecedented scale, setting not one but two records for rocket reusability. The bundle of satellites flew on a Falcon 9 whose booster stage was being launched for a record fourth time. The booster went on to make its fourth landing too. “These boosters are designed to be used 10 times,” said SpaceX Starlink engineer Lauren Lyons during launch commentary according to Space.com. “Let’s turn it around for a fifth, guys.”

The protective capsule that carried the satellites at the nose of the rocket, known as the payload fairing, had been to space before too—another first for the company. The nose cone originally ferried a communications satellite for the Arab League into orbit on a Falcon Heavy in April, after which SpaceX was able to recover and refurbish the fairing. Over the summer SpaceX started successfully catching more of its fairings (which cost $6 million each, about 10% of the $62 million sticker price for a launch) with a giant net before they hit the corrosive seawater, making future fairing reuse more likely.

The Falcon family, however, will never achieve full reusability, since the upper stage returns from orbit too fast for recovery. For that milestone, SpaceX is betting everything on its next generation system, the more maneuverable Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster. Despite being able to hoist more than four times as much stuff into orbit as the Falcon 9, Musk recently estimated that Starship launches will cost SpaceX about 30 times less than its semi-reusable sibling, coming in at around $2 million dollars—roughly a million for fuel and a million for refurbishing the recovered parts and putting them back together.

SpaceX plans on retiring the Falcon family in the 2020s and relying exclusively on the reusable Starship system for all its space activities, from Mars missions to Starlink launches. No word yet, however, if all that extra launch capacity will be able to move the earthbound telescopes out beyond the glare of the expanding Starlink constellation.

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Had there been a real launchpad emergency, Boeing’s test dummy would have been perfectly safe.

By escaping the launchpad—where a disaster like a rocket explosion could theoretically take place—and touching down nearby, the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft passed a crucial flight test Monday morning. It was one of two major remaining trials before NASA can certify the vehicle ready to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Boeing’s Pad Abort Test, as it’s called, came just one day after SpaceX announced a string of successful parachute tests, setting it up for an in-flight safety demonstration later this year. The overdue successes come as welcome news for NASA, which will otherwise be locked out of the ISS after its last ride from the Russian space agency next spring. It could conceivably purchase another one to replace the American astronaut returning to earth next fall, but would need special permission from congress to continue doing business with Russia, which supports Iran’s nuclear program, into 2021.

Meant to simulate the rescue of a crew in the event that the rocket they’re sitting on malfunctions, the Pad Abort Test put every safety system of the Starliner capsule through its paces. From atop a test stand at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the vehicle blasted off and flew away from the launchpad, reaching an altitude of nearly a mile. It then released a series of parachutes to right and slow the craft, which landed gently on a pillow of airbags a minute and a half after launch. One parachute failed to deploy, but the test dummy inside was none the worse for it.

“[It was] really a test of a system that we hope we never have to use,” said NASA commercial crew project manager Kathy Lueders in an interview on Twitter, “but it really gives us confidence when we see all those different aspects of a system tried out and put through an arduous test like this.”

Launchpad anomalies pose especially grave threats to astronauts, according to Boeing, because the crew needs to get away from the rocket it’s sitting on quickly, and the capsule needs to get high enough for the parachutes to work effectively.

But Boeing doesn’t have time to rest on its laurels. After this milestone, both NASA and the company are looking ahead to an Orbital Flight Test, when an uncrewed Starliner will launch, dock with the ISS, and return to Earth. This final test could take place on December 17 of this year, after which NASA can approve the first crewed flight, which will likely happen early next year.

Racing Boeing to the launchpad is SpaceX, which performed a similar Pad Abort Test in 2015. The company highlighted its recent progress on Twitter over the weekend with a video of a parachute dragging a test weight out of an open aircraft, triggering the deployment of three main chutes. The footage, from October 31st, captured the 13th successful parachute test in a row, according to SpaceX. Earlier trials tested a single parachute, while the final Crew Dragon capsule will have four.

SpaceX team has completed 13 successful tests in a row of upgraded Mark 3 parachutes for Crew Dragon. Most recent test demonstrated the parachute system’s ability to land the spacecraft safely in the unlikely event that one of the four main parachutes fails. pic.twitter.com/VJzDeS8UAG

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 3, 2019

Following a parachute test failure in May, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk considers the system one of the program’s most pressing concerns, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a visit to the company’s headquarters in October. “Elon has told me, and he’s showed me, that that’s where their priority is,” Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews. “They’re putting as much resources and manpower as they can to getting those parachutes ready.”

Like Boeing, SpaceX also faces one major hurdle before it can fly its first astronauts—an in-flight abort where the Crew Dragon will launch from the pad as if on its way to space, and then demonstrate the ability to bail out and land. The capsule arrived in Cape Canaveral last month, and Musk expects it to fly before the end of the year.

While it’s good news that Boeing and SpaceX seem poised to fly crews in early 2020, spaceflight timelines are notoriously difficult to hit. Both capsules were once supposed to fly in 2017, but have suffered continual delays. NASA’s last ride to the ISS aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft leaves next spring, so any additional holdups to the SpaceX and Boeing programs could put the space agency’s access to the space station at risk. The situation has caused “full panic” at NASA, according to reporting by Eric Berger of Ars Technica.

But with testing targets now being measured in weeks rather than years, both Boeing and SpaceX are hoping to deliver NASA out-of-this-world holiday gifts: vehicles that can get anybody to and from the ISS safely, test dummies and humans alike.

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Elon Musk wants people to live on Mars, and now he has the “Starship” he’ll use to get them there—or at least a bare-bones prototype of it.

The SpaceX founder and CEO showed off a spotlight-illuminated spacecraft in Boca Chica, Texas on Saturday, celebrating the company’s progress and laying out his vision for its future. To Musk’s left stood a Falcon 1, the rocket that solidified the company’s place in the new space race when it first reached orbit 11 years ago. Looking forward, Musk insisted Starship’s complete reusability would be the key to opening up the final frontier.

“Which future do you want,” Musk asked the crowd. “The future where we are a spacefaring civilization, out there among the stars, or one where we are forever confined to Earth?”

The Starship “Mark 1” prototype stands 164 feet tall, measures 30 feet across, and looks like what a kid might sketch if you asked them to draw a spaceship. Although original designs from 2016 (back when the vehicle was called the “Interplanetary Transport System”) called for carbon fiber construction, on Saturday Musk touted the switch to steel for the old-school material’s strength in both the icy depths of space and the inferno of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Coming in at just two percent the price of high-tech composite materials, steel is also easy to work with. SpaceX welded the Mark 1 outside in the elements (Musk was in too much of a hurry to erect buildings for fabrication), a flexibility that might come in handy elsewhere. “On Mars, you can cut that up. You can weld it. You can modify it no problem,” Musk said. “I’m in love with steel.”

The Mark 1 features three Raptor engines (future Starships will have six), which Musk says will provide enough juice to take off from the surface of the Moon or Mars. But the silver rocket will need a lot more help to fully escape Earth’s formidable gravitational pull. Just as the Crew Dragon capsule sits on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, and the Apollo lunar module perched atop a Saturn V, Starship could someday hitch a ride to orbit on a large booster, currently dubbed the Super Heavy. SpaceX hopes to start building the booster, which is about 60 feet taller than Starship itself, after flight testing a handful of Starship prototypes. The main challenge, Musk said, will be building the 24 to 31 Raptor engines needed to power each booster.

Both parts will be fully reusable, returning to Earth for soft landings as SpaceX has increasingly done with more of its Falcon 9 rocket parts in recent years. By keeping the machines as simple as possible, Musk hopes to keep maintenance low, letting launch costs stay close to the price of refueling the vehicles.

But first SpaceX will see how the Starship prototype flies, and Musk, often chided for his self-described “aspirational timelines,” wants to move quickly. The first hurdle will be a controlled hop, similar to recent test flights of the Raptor engine, but higher. Musk mentioned 65,000 feet as a target altitude to hit in the next few months. “It’s going to be pretty epic to watch that thing take off and come back,” he said.

SpaceX will continue to build additional prototypes at its Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral facilities. The fourth or fifth iteration will attempt the next major milestone: orbiting Earth and returning to the ground. Musk said he was targeting an orbital flight in the next six to nine months, though he admitted the timeline sounded a little wild. Building the Mark 1 took four or five months, he said, and future iterations could come even faster.

Musk went on to paint a picture of the full Starship system, which he says will be able to ship 150 tons of science experiments, people, building materials, food, and other necessities to orbit. After refueling there, it could then land the same payload on the surface of the moon or Mars. Doing some on-the-spot figuring, Musk ballparked the cargo capacity of a theoretical fleet of ten Starships, each launching at an optimistic three times per day, at around 1,000-times greater than what humanity can currently put in orbit. “You need that if you want to build a city on Mars,” he said.

Starship will provide affordable delivery of significant quantities of cargo and people, essential for building Moon bases and Mars cities pic.twitter.com/0BImZP1qmM

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2019

Given SpaceX’s track record, its capable scientists very well may build a launch system resembling the one they’re promising. But building a liveable Martian city—much less a thriving one—will take more than dumping millions of tons of cement and glass onto the Red Planet’s surface. Musk received two questions about SpaceX’s plans for life support, but gave little indication that the company is actively working on the question of how to keep a million mouths fed, watered, and breathing on a Mars settlement. “Relative to the spacecraft itself,” Musk said, “that’s not super hard.”

The International Space Station (ISS) does make and recycle what it can, but it still relies on regular supply shipments from Earth. A Martian settlement would have to go farther in recreating a mini-ecosystem, capable of producing its own food and water and purifying its own air, due to the vast distance. Experiments on Earth have revealed just how difficult it will be to find stability. Arizona is home to the Biosphere 2 facility, for instance, which hosted a number of high profile, closed-ecosystem experiments in the 1990s. One problem, researchers later realized, was that uncured cement conspired with a surprising abundance of soil microbes to throw off carbon dioxide and oxygen levels.

Even though the ISS doesn’t have nearly as much dirt or greenery as Biosphere 2, astronauts there also struggle to deal with fallout from unwanted hitchhikers. A tube for urine control, for instance, becomes so overgrown with bacteria that astronauts need to replace it every few weeks, according to John Rummel, a biologist with the SETI institute and past Planetary Protection Officer for NASA. “Earth microbes run the space station now,” he says, “and we just try to keep ahead of them.”

Getting off the planet may be rocket science, but living off the planet will require significant advances in biology and microbiology too. And SpaceX may already be getting a taste of how hard working in that intersection can be. While its rocket fleet racks up new flights, landings, and commercial contracts, its efforts to ferry humans to the ISS languish years behind schedule—a fact NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine lamented on Twitter before Saturday’s presentation.

My statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019

Musk attributed the delay to the challenges in optimizing production, commenting that despite the speed of the Starship prototyping, its development takes less than five percent of SpaceX’s resources. The fact that competitor Boeing has experienced nearly identical struggles meeting the same timeline further emphasizes the difficulties of crewed spaceflight.

Despite the challenges, Musk remains optimistic that humanity’s future lies in space and stresses that while getting to Mars won’t solve Earth’s numerous and immediate crises, he finds inspirational value in dreaming big. “There are so many things to be concerned about, so many troubles. These are important and we need to solve them. But we also need things that make us excited to wake up in the morning,” he said, “and space exploration is one of those things.”

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A European satellite dodged one belonging to SpaceX over the Pacific Ocean on Monday morning, hopping around the other spacecraft after a communication glitch left SpaceX unresponsive to follow-up messages.

While the odds of a collision remained low—never exceeding 1 in 1,000—the extraterrestrial game of chicken highlights the growing challenge of flying satellites through Earth’s ever-more-crowded orbital environment. Streets have stoplights. Airports have air traffic controllers. But space remains wide open, with European Space Agency (ESA) operators addressing Monday’s near miss the same way one might request a sick day—writing a polite email and hoping for a speedy response. As SpaceX and other companies build global internet networks using “mega constellations” of thousands of satellites, experts say only a better traffic control system can keep our space-based infrastructure from coming crashing down.

“I don’t think this is something we should consider normal in the 21st century,” says Holger Krag, the Head of Space Safety at ESA.

The U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which maintains the Department of Defense’s catalog of more than 20,000 crisscrossing space objects, notified the ESA about a potential crash (diplomatically called a “conjunction”) about one week in advance. The ESA gets hundreds of conjunction warnings every day, Holger says, and the risk initially looked too low to merit wasting precious fuel on a maneuver.

But the orbits of ESA’s Aeolus, which studies wind patterns, and SpaceX’s Starlink44, one of a 60-satellite pilot program for a future internet service, continued to inch closer. The collision risk reached 1 in 50,000 on August 28, prompting the ESA and SpaceX to exchange emails, but both agreed that evasive maneuvers would not be necessary.

The next day, however, the risk reached 1 in 10,000—the industry standard for taking action. ESA pinged SpaceX again, but heard nothing back. The ghosting didn’t bother the space agency, though, because they already knew that the Starlink satellite would be staying put—enough information to avoid a catastrophic hallway dance while they shifted their own course. “We actually like it that way,” Holger says. “Only one needs to take action.”

A SpaceX spokesperson said that after the first email exchange, a bug in the on-call paging system stopped them from seeing the rising risk estimates, and that had they been aware they would have communicated more with ESA to decide which satellite should move. “SpaceX is still investigating the issue and will implement corrective actions,” the spokesperson said.

The collision risk peaked at 1 in 1,000 on September 1, and ESA sent commands to get its satellite to safety. The next morning, half an orbit before its rendezvous with Starlink44, Aeolus fired its thrusters three times, boosting it up by nearly 1,000 feet. The satellite phoned home half an hour later and has since resumed its normal wind-watching activities.

ESA operators may have avoided creating satellite confetti this week, but Krag is worried about next time—and the many close-calls that will follow. SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation alone would mean a ten-fold increase in the number of active satellites, and other companies plan to launch similar swarms.

As those numbers swell, operators will have to work harder to avoid pileups. The industry considers collision risks more likely than 1 in 10,000 worth spending fuel on, because even though one such event is rare, when they consider the hundreds of potential events each day the danger starts to add up. At the 1-in-10,000 level operators can avoid 90% of the risk with just a couple of maneuvers per year, Krag says, but that math will change as more satellites enter the fray.

And a single slip-up can have lasting consequences. Space debris has tripled since the year 2000, and just two events—a 2007 test where China intentionally destroyed one of its satellites and a 2009 crash between a pair of U.S. and Russian satellites—showered their respective orbits with enough junk to account for about a fifth of that jump.

A bunch of groups are working on ways to get the riskiest pieces out of the fast lane, but most experts—and the White House—agree that we need a better system to keep the machines that power our maps and timekeeping systems from becoming scattered clouds of expensive rubble. “We do not want to write emails anymore,” Krag says. “We need protocols and automated coordination.”

He first proposes assisting the Air Force’s tracking efforts with more accurate ground-based observations to nail down exactly where each object is. “You can [safely] fly within 10 meters if you know the accuracy to one meter,” he says.

ESA will also propose the development of a communication network and protocols—fixed plans for when a conjunction seems likely. Member satellite operators would all share the same information about location and speed, and, for instance, could even agree on standard movement plans so everybody knows what everybody else will do without ever crafting a polite email. Eventually, Krag hopes artificial intelligence could run the entire system autonomously.

He imagines such clever technological solutions will convince countries to opt-in to the network, but other experts suggest a more specific legal framework is also necessary. Chris Johnson, the space law advisor to the Secure World Foundation, says that any space traffic network will also need a way to resolve disputes and enforce decisions.

Future legal code should also specify what responsibilities each operator has, he says, such as staying on top of collision risk estimates rather than waiting for a message from the Air Force. For his part, he suggests that SpaceX’s communication glitch is an explanation, but not an excuse. “Could you tell an officer, ‘well, I didn’t know that I was speeding because my speedometer doesn’t work’?”

Developing better tracking and avoidance technology and agreeing to communal rules won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, maybe ESA and SpaceX should set up a Slack channel.

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It was one giant leap for a silo-shaped prototype, one small hop for SpaceX’s Martian ambitions.

The 60-foot-tall “Starhopper,” a partial mockup of the vehicle Elon Musk hopes will one day land on other worlds, soared nearly 500 feet into the Texas sky on Tuesday afternoon. This second and final test flight represents the most significant trial yet of the company’s Raptor engine. While the trial frustrated residents in Boca Chica, many of whom evacuated their homes for safety concerns, it encouraged aerospace enthusiasts with its demonstration of a new type of rocket that runs on methane—an essential feature for a space program targeting the moon and beyond.

“People have talked about using methane engines for decades, and they’re finally here,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and spaceflight historian.

Tuesday’s flight was the latest run in a sequence of increasingly demanding experiments for the Raptor engine. After years of development, SpaceX began test firings with the contraption on its side and locked in place. It then followed with two more tests of the prototype nose up and tethered. The six-story, stainless steel cylinder finally flew freely for the first time in July, hovering a few dozen feet off the ground—although a cloud of billowing smoke obscured the vehicle for most of the time.

Tuesday’s round marked SpaceX’s second flight attempt this week—a day after an electrical issue stopped the Raptor’s igniter (like a spark plug for rockets) from setting off the controlled explosion just as the countdown hit zero. The more recent, successful test showcased the engine’s capabilities in a clearer light. It rose about 50 stories into the air, appearing to hover above the mottled brown and green landscape before touching down on a nearby pad. The full flight clocked in at 57 seconds.

In addition to tens of thousands of online viewers following various livestreams, a number of Boca Chica residents watched the hop too—although not necessarily out of interest. Fearing that a “malfunction” such as an explosion could shatter windows in nearby houses, the police department handed out fliers asking people to leave their homes (with their pets) when they heard the wail of a siren, ten minutes before flight.

Rocket scientists and aficionados, however, embraced the display of technology that will likely power the next generation of spacecraft. The single-engine Starhopper is a baby step toward the full vision: a 35-engine booster rocket (the Big Falcon Rocket) and a six-engine “Starship” spacecraft that Musk hopes will someday carry people to the moon and Mars.

“This is a key test of the Raptor in flight,” McDowell says.

The Raptor replaces the company’s Merlin family of engines, which ran on a refined form of kerosene, like most traditional rocket engines. The oil emerged as the industry favorite in the 1950s because it offered the most push per pound of fuel. Methane, however, has other advantages. In addition to producing fewer toxins, it’s the obvious choice for anyone who wants to leave this planet—and its abundant stockpiles of energy—behind.

Even if Mars were somehow hiding an unexpectedly rich fossil record, petroleum, the source of kerosene, needs a lot of processing to be turned into rocket fuel. Future astronauts could manufacture methane on Mars, though, by shuffling around the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the planet’s naturally occurring ice and CO2-rich atmosphere, McDowell explains. Leftover oxygen atoms could be turned into liquid to make up the other half of the explosive formula. Looking even farther out into the solar system, the compound appears to be everywhere. “In the lakes of Titan,” McDowell says, “you can put in a teacup and scoop up some methane.”

NASA has fired methane rockets on the ground and with small aerial craft before, but this week’s SpaceX flight cues their debut on a large-scale vehicle intended for orbit—putting the commercial company on track to be the first to use them for suborbital and orbital flights, possibly as soon as 2020.

But Musk and his team will have competition. Blue Origin, an aerospace company run by Jeff Bezos that’s also developing reusable rockets, has similarly chosen methane as the fuel for its BE-4 engine. The company carried out firing tests at full power in early August and hopes to use the model to push its upcoming New Glenn vehicle into orbit in the early 2020s.

Now that SpaceX has gotten its Raptor off the ground, the next technical hurdle will be turning what looks like a “flying water tower” into a proper spacecraft that can withstand the heat generated by hurtling through the atmosphere at multiple times the speed of sound. The engine will also have to prove itself under various air pressures at different altitudes, as well as in the vacuum of space.

These environments aren’t likely to foil SpaceX’s veteran engineers, McDowell says. Instead, he thinks the real test of the Raptor’s design will be whether unforeseen bugs like corrosion or clogged fuel lines crop up during the longer firing durations needed for it to actually travel somewhere.

Nevertheless, McDowell expects that between SpaceX and Blue Origin, a new era of rocket engines is on its way. “Methane engines are coming,” he says, “and this is the first real serious free flight.”

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SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy launch is set for Monday, and it will undoubtedly be the Falcon Heavy’s most exciting and most challenging mission to date. It will mark the rocket’s first ever nighttime flight and its third flight overall, and it’s both the feat itself and the payloads it’s carrying that make this such a monumental event.

For starters, there’s the reusability aspect. A Falcon Heavy rocket is essentially three Falcon 9 first-stage boosters strapped together. All three are capable of coming back and landing vertically on the ground, to be reused later on. The side boosters being flown in this mission were both recovered from the Arabsat-6A mission conducted in April, so you could think of this mission as being made of approximately two-thirds recycled material.

While the mission’s success will help the Falcon Heavy become formally certified for delivering national security payloads for U.S. agencies, the real excitement is centered around what the rocket is taking into space this time around. The Falcon Heavy will be tasked with carrying out the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) mission, which will deliver some of the most dynamic space instruments and experiments ever launched into orbit. There are 24 different payloads going into space, meant to test out some of the most unique emerging technologies and furtherer some of the most novel research investigations being pursued by the scientific community.

Perhaps the most high-profile payload is LightSail 2, the Planetary Society’s prototype solar sail technology for propulsion in space. The concept behind a solar sail is to use sunlight as a mechanism for propelling a spacecraft through space, eliminating the need for a finite chemical propellant. LightSail 2 is made of ultrathin Mylar designed such that when photons hit the material, they exert a radiation pressure which produces a small bump in accelerative force, propelling the sail forward. It’s small, but over time, this force builds up more and more, and theoretically it could reach a velocity that surpasses our best chemical propellant technologies.

The $7 million LightSail 2 is the second iteration of the Planetary Society’s solar sail concept. The first, LightSail 1, was launched in 2015, but was only really meant to test out some of the spacecraft’s hardware and software.

LightSail 2 will go well beyond that, demonstrating the spacecraft’s ability to use sunlight alone to accelerate and increase its orbital distance from Earth. The sail, which is about 344 square feet and composed of four individual triangular sails, is folded into a 10-pound cubesat the size of a loaf of bread. A few days after the mission releases the cubesat into orbit, the solar sail will pop out, unfold, and spread into its full position. The entire sail is fitted with an array of solar cells, avionics, and other sensors to help the mission team navigate the spacecraft and control its orientation.

The team will turn the sail towards the sun for half of each orbit, and for about a month it will continue to speed up and until it hits a target altitude of about 447 miles, where it will be potentially visible in the night sky for about a year.

“It’s really a romantic notion that has tremendous practical applications,” Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, told reporters during a media call Thursday. Solar sails, said Nye, could be used to help satellites reach speeds that could match Earth’s orbit, or be used as part of cargo delivery systems into deep space (something NASA’s future NEA Scout mission to the moon will seek to demonstrate). Solar sails are also seen as a potential solution for making interstellar travel more viable. We’re still decades away from that vision, but Nye emphasizes that “the only way anyone thinks we can do [interstellar travel] is with solar sails.”

The other high-profile project going up on Monday’s launch is NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM), a demonstration of an alternative form of in-space propulsion called AF-M315E, a hydroxyl ammonium nitrate fuel, that is purportedly less toxic, less costly, and more efficient than conventional chemical propellants.

Christopher McLean, the principal investigator for GPIM at Ball Aerospace, which is collaborating on the project, explains that this propellant is 50 percent denser, meaning “for the same volume we get 50 percent more ‘miles per gallon’, so to speak.” As far as safety goes, most conventional propellants like hydrazine have a very low vapor pressure, which means the gas can readily spread throughout a room and affect people’s health, as well as potentially react to other chemicals and start a fire. AF-M315E, on the other hand, has no vapor pressure—it could sit in a beaker on the counter without any concerns. “When we fuel the spacecraft, we can ship the fuel via FedEx,” says McLean. It can be installed into a rocket without much worry. As opposed to the myriad of occupational hazards posed by hydrazine (including as a potential carcinogen), McLean compares AF-M315E’s toxicity to household chemicals.

The GPIM spacecraft going up Monday is equipped with five thrusters for propulsion, steering, and acceleration. Over three months, the spacecraft will undergo a series of firings to demonstrate whether AF-M315E will allow the spacecraft to do everything expected of a viable propulsion system in space. The real milestone for GPIM will be slowing down to lower the spacecraft’s orbit with enough precision and control so it doesn’t plunge into the atmosphere. The following 10 months will involve more data collection as it uses up the rest of the fuel, after which the GPIM spacecraft will reenter the planet’s atmosphere.

AF-M315E probably won’t completely replace hydrazine, especially if it doesn’t get a decent name change. But McLean thinks if the test proves successful, AF-M315E’s safety profile and cost-effectiveness would make it appealing to parties looking to take part in spaceflight.

A few of the other payloads going up on STP-2 include a new Deep Space Atomic Clock built and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Air Force’s DSX spacecraft tasked with making experimental space weather measurements, a series of meteorological and climatology satellites jointly operated by the U.S. and Taiwan, and a new reconnaissance and surveillance spacecraft.

STP-2 is expected to launch at 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, June 24, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a launch window open for four hours. SpaceX will, of course, attempt a landing of all three first-stage boosters, and you’ll be able to watch the mission live-streamed from the comfort of your home.

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NASA announced last week that it would open the International Space Station up to new opportunities in the commercial sector, giving businesses the ability to send private astronauts into space for up to $35,000 a night. The move comes as part of a grander effort in U.S. space policy to hand the reins of low-Earth operations over to the commercial sector, as the agency devotes more time and resources to deep space ambitions of sending humans to the moon and Mars.

“We’re hoping new capabilities will develop that can one day take over for the space station,” Robyn Gatens, the deputy space station director for NASA, said at Friday’s announcement. “We won’t transition off station until we have something else to go to, so we don’t have a date certain.”

While the move makes it possible for private companies to use the ISS as a hotel for rich thrill-seekers, NASA is adamant that it is not making a foray into space tourism. Private companies—ones able to figure out their own launch service needs—can pay $11,250 a day per person for their crews to use life support systems and the station’s toilet, and $22,500 per day for access to food, medicine, and other supplies. NASA would even charge for power, at a rate of $42 per kilowatt-hour. But the agency contends that none of these charges are designed to make any real profit; they would simply help offset some of NASA’s costs.

While there weren’t any hints of the announcement beforehand, this is far from a surprising move. John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University, says the genesis of this decision goes back to 1983. President Reagan wanted NASA to establish a permanently crewed space station, and part of the administration’s sales pitch to Congress was that such a platform could open up opportunities to businesses interested in spaceflight, enabling “billions of dollars of economic activity in space.” Technically, says, Logsdon, this decision is 30 years overdue.

Freedom never came to fruition, and NASA folded its vision into the ISS—including the push to use such a platform to expand private-sector spaceflight. This was actually a selling point for the international community. “Commercial activities are part of the reason why the ISS’s partner countries chose to participate,” says Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz, professor emerita in space law at the University of Mississippi and editor in chief emerita for the Journal of Space Law. “One of the four major bodies of law contained in the ISS Intergovernmental Agreement covers intellectual property,” and the partner countries all signed on under hopes that the ISS could be used as a laboratory for innovation, including contributions from private companies.

According to Gabrynowicz, the IGA allows each ISS partner to select its own astronauts. Countries have always had the option of outsourcing those spots to private companies with their own candidates, as long as they have the consent of the other ISS partners. If NASA decided to rent out a couple astronaut beds to SpaceX, for instance, those SpaceX astronauts would be under the jurisdiction of the U.S., be governed under U.S. law, and required to follow the crew code of conduct required of anyone else on board. There wouldn’t even be any new rules or regulations to write.

The most significant change is in terms of implicit policy. The U.S. module is designated as a national laboratory. While there are already a number of significant commercial activities that occur there, everything revolves around research. With this new change, “you can do commercial marketing activities,” says Logsdon. Companies will not be allowed to establish sponsorship deals with ISS partners, nor will NASA astronauts be allowed to endorse products, but paying customers will be able to produce ads and commercials in space. “It’s allowing a broader range of activities aboard the station,” he says. (The potential for sponsored Instagram posts alone boggle the mind.)

Arguably, that’s just part of the natural evolution of the station. For much of this past decade, there have been discussions about what might succeed the ISS. With NASA currently working on the Gateway, an orbital space station designed to help facilitate a permanent return to the moon and deep space exploration efforts like the journey to Mars, the push to turn the ISS over to the private sector has grown in recent years. The Trump administration came into office expressly interested in giving businesses more opportunities to expand their presence in orbit, and used this as part of its argument to end federal funding for the ISS by 2025, as shown in internal White House documents leaked last year.

And as Logsdon points out, “underpinning all of this is a desire from NASA to stop paying for the station.” The agency spends more than $8 million a day on ISS operations.

Spaceflight is still incredibly expensive, and it will be up to private companies to generate actual revenue by marking up ticket prices. For example, a proposal by Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Space Operations calls for sending as many as 16 private astronauts to the space station next year for 30 to 60 days, at a whopping $52 million per seat aboard a SpaceX launch. (SpaceX, it should be noted, has yet to actually send an astronaut to the ISS.)

The spaceflight industry consistently insists that off-world activities such as mining and tourism could be worth trillions of dollars in the future. Access to the ISS gives companies a chance to take those estimates for a spin.

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Blue Origin is shooting for the moon. At the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Amazon billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos officially unveiled the company’s Blue Moon lunar lander—capable of taking 6.5 metric tons to the lunar surface. A larger version is designed to ferry humans to the moon as well.

“This vehicle is going to the moon.” Bezos told the event’s attendees, revealing a massive piece of spaceflight architecture. But whether the company can make good on those declarations in the next five years remains to be seen.

Bezos began with an extended intro on the increased energy needs for civilization here on Earth, describing those trends as “unsustainable,” something he’s previously espoused. “We will run out of energy on Earth,” he said. “This is just arithmetic. It’s going to happen.”

Rather than just investing more money in renewable forms of energy like solar or wind, or promoting smarter methods of power consumption, the richest man in the world thinks we can solve this dilemma by having people live and work in space. And he believes we should mine the moon’s resources to make it happen.

“We were given a gift—this nearby body called the moon,” said Bezos. He touted its water resources, and the potential to extract those materials out of the lunar south pole. That water ice could be used as a plentiful reservoir for sustaining a permanent lunar settlement, while also being split into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel.

There are also plenty of other potentially valuable resources to mine from the moon, like platinum-grade materials and helium-3, and the low lunar gravity makes it relatively easy to ferry those things back to Earth.

Blue Moon is certainly the heftiest lunar lander design to date. Besides an ability to take a large cargo or people to the surface, the lander can carry a rover on its ceiling, and also has an ascent module that can leave the lander and travel away from the surface. The spacecraft is also fitted with the company’s brand new BE-7 engine, which will have its first test fire this summer.

The announcement seems spurred in part by the Trump administration’s push to have NASA return humans to the moon in the same time frame Bezos has laid out. Vice President Mike Pence told the public in a speech in late March that the White House was directing NASA to accomplish this goal “by any means necessary.” The administration included an endorsement for using rockets and spaceflight architecture built by the private sector if NASA’s own technologies are unable to safely land on the moon by 2024.

Bezos explicitly referred to Pence’s speech, and told attendees he believed, after having started work on Blue Moon three years ago, the company could successfully land it on the moon by 2024. With timelines for both parties matching up, Blue Origin could potentially offer NASA the use of its lander to take humans to the moon.

Blue Origin is notorious for often staying mum about what it’s working on, but the company does have a history of talking about its lunar ambitions. Two years ago, Bezos first discussed Blue Moon with the The Washington Post (which he owns), saying the company was looking into setting up a cargo delivery system to the moon—an Amazon for a lunar outpost—as soon as 2020. And in that interview, Bezos said Blue Origin was looking into landing a vehicle near the 1,600-mile-long, eight-mile-deep Shackleton crater at the south pole of the moon. Some areas near the crater unusually receive a constant amount of sunlight (which could provide a reliable source of energy to solar powered systems), and scientists also believe a trove of water ice is located within the crater itself.

(The company alluded to the crater in a cryptic tweet posted in April that displayed a picture of the ship Ernest Shackleton used in his voyage to Antarctica.)

Last year, the company announced it was already coming up with concept designs for Blue Moon and a lunar lander capable of making touchdown on the surface, and other executives had previously suggested a Blue Moon landing could happen in 2023.

Blue Origin’s plans sound about as exciting and audacious as they come, but the company so far has made very little of the progress it needs to succeed. Blue Origin’s famed flagship launch vehicle right now is the New Shepard, which has been launched numerous times (including last week) and is a partly-reusable system but has only gone to suborbital space. The company aims to launch humans aboard New Shepard later this year. New Glenn, which should also be reusable, is still in development and won’t fly until 2021. Bezos did reveal that it will cost less than $1 million to refuel. By comparison, the much less-powerful Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX, which can haul up into space only a fraction of New Glenn should be able to do, costs about $300,000 to $400,000 to refuel.

Blue Origin is closer to getting to the moon than ever before, but it still has a long way to go.

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The problem with failing in spaceflight is that your failures are extremely loud and incredibly public. Once again, SpaceX is at the forefront of the public eye, after a failed engine test at the company’s landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida likely resulted in the destruction of the company’s Crew Dragon vehicle—the same spacecraft that SpaceX is developing and testing to take astronauts into low Earth orbit. It’s still unclear what caused the accident, but almost certainly the repercussions are going to push back plans to return human spaceflight operations to American soil.

Here’s what we know: On April 20, SpaceX conducted a routine launchpad test of its Crew Dragon vehicle—specifically, the same one that pulled off a successful uncrewed test flight in March into space which docked at the International Space Station. The company is currently preparing for an important test of the vehicle’s launch abort systems this summer. This trial would demonstrate the spacecraft’s ability to fire its newly designed SuperDraco engines (parts of which have been made through 3D printing) and pull onboard astronauts to a safe distance away from the Falcon 9 booster .

According to Florida Today, and other eyewitness accounts, a huge wave of smoke began billowing from the launchpad. A video of the incident has now been taken offline, but Ars Technica reports it showed the company counting down towards the firing of the Crew Dragon’s SuperDraco engines, when the spacecraft inexplicably exploded within the final 10 seconds of the countdown.

In its official statement released on Saturday, SpaceX describes the accident as an “anomaly,” and states: “Earlier today, SpaceX conducted a series of engine tests on a Crew Dragon test vehicle on our test stand at Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The initial tests completed successfully but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand. Ensuring that our systems meet rigorous safety standards and detecting anomalies like this prior to flight are the main reasons why we test. Our teams are investigating and working closely with our NASA partners.”

On NASA’s end, administrator Jim Bridenstine issued the following statement: “The NASA and SpaceX teams are assessing the anomaly that occurred today during a part of the Dragon SuperDraco Static Fire Test at SpaceX Landing Zone 1 in Florida. This is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward with our Commercial Crew Program.”

It’s still not clear what exactly caused the explosion and the extent of the damage the Crew Dragon received, but it’s almost certainly destroyed beyond reasonable or swift repair. The destruction of the capsule is bad news for the company’s plans to conduct its summer launch abort test. It will either need to use another Crew Dragon vehicle for the test (which were likely built for actual crewed missions, and not to be expended on a single test), or create some kind of stripped-down substitute capsule capable of demonstrating the SuperDraco thrusters.

The latter is not out of the question, but we’re talking about a vehicle that’s supposed to send NASA astronauts into space. Safety is of utmost importance for the public agency, and it won’t tolerate any kind of testing that does not meet its safety standards for sending human beings into orbit.. The hope was to have the vehicle prepared for its first crewed flight in July, but now that schedule is likely to change.

SpaceX is certainly no stranger to explosive setbacks. The company’s most recent high-profile accident occurred in September 2016, when a launchpad fire engulfed a Falcon 9 rocket (destroying a Facebook satellite in the process). The resulting loss in hardware, delays in launch schedules, and at least one customer withdrawal cost the company an estimated $740 million in lost revenue.

The new setback likely won’t cost SpaceX nearly as much money, and the investigation into what happened this time around should be fairly swift. But it does put NASA in a stressful (if familiar) situation: Its options for carrying its astronauts into space are once again grim. Eight years after the Space Shuttle program was shuttered, NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz missions to take people to the ISS. September was supposed to be the last time American astronauts were to fly to the space station from foreign soil. If the first crewed Crew Dragon mission slips, it might very well force NASA to procure even more Soyuz mission seats, which last time around cost $75 million apiece. Earlier this year, NASA announced it would likely purchase additional future Soyuz seats to guarantee a U.S. presence on the space station through September 2020. That’s almost a certainty at this point.

The explosion might create consequences felt further down the road as well. The last few months have been filled with chatter resulting from the White House’s new deadline for NASA to return humans to the moon by 2024, and SpaceX has been seen as a potential launch provider through its Falcon Heavy rocket (which just completed a very successful second ever mission). The launchpad explosion might very well cause some to get skittish and rethink whether its wise to entrust such a young company with such important missions, sophisticated hardware, and the safety of NASA astronauts.

Still, this is all early talk. “We do not know yet what actually happened, so it is premature to speculate on the length of delay for SpaceX or its severity,” says John Logsdon, the founder and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He’s especially skeptical of reading into what this accident might do for future Falcon Heavy plans, saying its too early to postulate until there’s more information.

Logsdon points out that accidents are par for the course when it comes to spaceflight, and while the public might be surprised to hear of such events, few within the space community feel the same way. “During Apollo there was the Apollo 1 fire, which delayed the program with beneficial results, and also multiple problems on the second Saturn V test launch, which were quickly remedied. During Space Shuttle development there were multiple engine problems and problems with the tiles, putting the program well behind schedule. So this incident has many precedents.”

And lastly, it’s worth remembering there’s another company contracted by NASA under the Commercial Crew Program: Boeing, which is still in the process of preparing its CST-100 Starliner vehicle for an uncrewed flight to the ISS in August, followed by a crewed flight before the end of 2019. “This incident should have no impact on Boeing’s schedule,” says Logsdon.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see what the investigation behind the explosion tells us, and whether SpaceX can mitigate the effects this will have on its own—and NASA’s—human exploration plans in the near future.

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