An American flag is seen as SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken lifts off during NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. on Saturday. SpaceX Falcon 9 made history as the first spaceflight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nine years.
-reuters-
NASA's Christina Koch returned to Earth safely on Thursday after shattering the spaceflight record for female astronauts with a stay of almost 11 months aboard the International Space Station.
Koch touched down at 0912 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency.
Koch was shown seated and smiling broadly after being extracted from the Soyuz descent module in the Roscosmos space agency's video footage from the landing site.
"I am so overwhelmed and happy right now," said Koch, who blasted off on March 14 last year.
Parmitano pumped his fists in the air after being lifted into his chair while Skvortsov was shown eating an apple.
Local Kazakhs on horseback were among those to witness the capsule landing in the snow-covered steppe as support crews gathered around the three astronauts, NASA commentator Rob Navias said.
"I've never seen this," Navias exclaimed, reporting that the men stopped to chat with engineering personnel.
Koch, a 41-year-old Michigan-born engineer, on December 28 last year beat the previous record for a single spaceflight by a woman of 289 days, set by NASA veteran Peggy Whitson in 2016-17.
Koch called three-time flyer Whitson, now 60, "a heroine of mine" and a "mentor" in the space program after she surpassed the record.
She also spoke of her desire to "inspire the next generation of explorers."
Koch also made history as one half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk along with NASA counterpart Jessica Meir -- her classmate from NASA training -- in October last year.
The spacewalk was initially postponed because the space station did not have two suits of the right size for women, leading to allegations of sexism.
Ahead of the three-and-a-half-hour journey back to Earth, Koch told NBC on Tuesday that she would "miss microgravity".
"It's really fun to be in a place where you can just bounce around between the ceiling and the floor whenever you want," she said, smiling as she twisted her body around the ISS.
She will now head to NASA headquarters in Houston, via the Kazakh city of Karaganda and Cologne in Germany, where she will undergo medical testing.
Koch's medical data will be especially valuable to NASA scientists as the agency draws up plans for a long-duration manned mission to Mars.
'Make space for women'
Koch's return comes after an advert for a skincare brand ran during an intermission in the American football Super Bowl with a call to "make space for women".
The advert featured NASA astronaut Nicole Stott and saw the company promise to donate up to $500,000 to the non-profit Women Who Code, which works with young women seeking careers in tech and scientific fields.
The first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova whose spaceflight in 1963 is still the only solo mission carried out by a woman.
Russia has sent only one woman to the ISS since expeditions began in 2000 -- Yelena Serova whose mission launched in 2014.
Both Tereshkova and Serova are now lawmakers in the Russian parliament, where they represent the ruling United Russia party.
Unlike Koch, whose ISS stay was extended, Parmitano and Skvortsov were rounding off regular half-year missions.
Parmitano handed over command of the ISS to Roscosmos's Oleg Skripochka on Tuesday.
The 43-year-old Italian posted regular shots of the Earth while aboard, highlighting the plight of the Amazon rainforest and describing the Alps as "like a spinal column, never bending to time".
Four male cosmonauts have spent a year or longer in space as part of a single mission with Russian Valery Polyakov's 437 days the overall record.
Scott Kelly holds the record for a NASA astronaut, posting 340 days at the ISS before he returned home in 2016.
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WASHINGTON - Boeing is all set to launch its Starliner spacecraft for the first time to the International Space Station at the end of this week, a key mission as NASA looks to resume crewed flight by 2020.
This time around its sole passenger will be bandana-clad dummy Rosie, named after Rosie the Riveter, a campaign icon used to recruit women to munitions factory jobs during World War II.
"If we're blessed with great weather, I look forward to a mission early Friday morning, and then coming to the International Space Station on Saturday," Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"The spacecraft is in really good shape," added John Mulholland, vice president and program manager of the Boeing Commercial Crew Program.
The US has relied on Russia to transport its crews to the ISS since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, but in 2014 hired Boeing and SpaceX under multi-billion dollar contracts, with the two companies already two years behind schedule.
NASA is now targeting next year to start the flights, as long as the tests are completed without a hitch.
The mission that starts Friday will last eight days and serves as a dress rehearsal.
The CST-100 Starliner, to give it its full name, will launch from Cape Canaveral at 6:36 am local time (1136 GMT) on an Atlas V rocket built by the United Launch Alliance, and will reach the station 25 hours later.
Starliner will then remain docked for seven days before detaching and returning home. It will land following a four-hour rapid descent in the New Mexico desert on December 28 at 3:46 am local time (1047 GMT).
SpaceX's capsule, known as Crew Dragon, undertook the same type of mission successfully last March. The main difference is that Crew Dragon lands in the ocean instead of dry land -- but both rely on parachutes to slow their descent.
Unlike in the past, NASA is paying companies for their services rather than owning the hardware, a move decided under former president Barack Obama and meant to save the taxpayer money.
As of May 2019, Boeing and SpaceX's contracts were valued at $4.3 billion and $2.5 billion, with each company awarded six round-trip missions to the ISS.
Assuming four astronauts per flight, NASA's auditor estimated the average cost per seat at $90 million for Boeing and $55 million for SpaceX, compared to the $80 million paid to Russia for the same service.
Since neither company is confirmed as being ready for 2020, NASA has begun negotiating the purchase of another seat with Russia for the fall of 2020, said Joel Montalbano, the agency's deputy ISS program manager. The last confirmed seat for an American on a Russian ship is for April 2020.
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WASHINGTON - A NASA satellite orbiting the Moon has found India's Vikram lander which crashed on the lunar surface in September, the US space agency said Monday.
NASA released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft's impact (September 6 in India and September 7 in the US) and associated debris field, with parts scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers.
In a statement, NASA said it released a mosaic image of the site on September 26, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander.
It added that a person named Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris -- with the first piece found about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site.
Blasting off in July, emerging Asian giant India had hoped with its Chandrayaan-2 ("Moon Vehicle 2") mission to become just the fourth country after the United States, Russia and regional rival China to make a successful Moon landing, and the first on the lunar south pole.
The main spacecraft, which remains in orbit around the Moon, dropped the unmanned lander Vikram for a descent that would take five days, but the probe went silent just 2.1 kilometers above the surface.
Days after the failed landing, the Indian Space Research Organization said it had located the lander, but hadn't been able to establish communication.
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TBILISI, Georgia - Tired of your ordinary earthly vacations? Some day soon you might be able to board a rocket and get a room with a view - of the whole planet - from a hotel in space.
At least, that is the sales pitch of several companies racing to become the first to host guests in orbit on purpose-built space stations.
"It sounds kind of crazy to us today because it is not a reality yet," said Frank Bunger, founder of US aerospace firm Orion Span, one of the companies vying to take travelers out of this world.
"But that's the nature of these things, it sounds crazy until it is normal."
US multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the world's first paying space tourist in 2001, traveling to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for a reported $20 million. A few others have followed.
Since then, companies like Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been working on ways to bring the stars into reach for more people - opening up a new business frontier for would-be space hoteliers.
US space agency NASA announced in June that it plans to allow two private citizens a year to stay at the ISS at a cost of about $35,000 per night for up to a month. The first mission could be as early as 2020.
But the growing movement has raised questions about the adequacy of current space laws, which mainly deal with exploration and keeping space free of weapons, not hotels and holidaymakers.
"It is difficult now to want to do things in space and get a clear answer from (space law)," said Christopher Johnson, a space law adviser at the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group.
"For something as advanced as hotels in space there is no clear guidance."
ORBITAL HOLIDAY
Orion Span plans to host the first guests on its Aurora Station - a capsule-shaped spacecraft roughly the size of a private jet - by 2024, said Bunger.
Accompanied by a crew member, up to five travelers at a time would fly up to the station for a 12-day stay costing at least $9.5 million per head, he said.
In orbit, guests would take part in scientific experiments, enjoy some 16 sunrises and sunsets a day and play table tennis in zero gravity, he said, adding about 30 people had already put down a $80,000 deposit to save a seat.
"We haven't seen this kind of excitement about space since the Apollo era," Bunger told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Californian company the Gateway Foundation is hoping to build a massive space station able to sleep more than 400 people - including tourists, researchers, doctors and housekeepers.
Solar-powered and shaped like a wheel, the station would spin around its core to create artificial gravity on its perimeter, equal to about one-sixth of that on earth, said its architect Tim Alatorre.
"The problem is that you can only spin so fast before you start feeling sick," he said. "We could easily create earth gravity on the station by spinning it faster but you wouldn't be very comfortable."
The group aims to complete the station, named after Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who later worked on the US Apollo program, by 2028.
Without disclosing how much a space holiday would cost, Alatorre said the goal was to make the station "accessible to the everyday person".
"So somebody can save up and go on a vacation to the United States or they can save up and go on a vacation to space," he said.
Yet that could take time to become a reality, said Lucy Berthoud, a space engineering professor at Britain's University of Bristol.
"The launch cost is the bottleneck for anyone who is doing this kind of enterprise," she said.
For example, NASA is expected to pay more than $50 million per seat to launch astronauts into space with Boeing and SpaceX rockets.
"It will take an increase in competition between launchers and a jump in technology to significantly lower costs," said Berthoud.
In recent years, several companies - including Spain's Galactic Suite and Russia's Orbital Technologies - have failed to live up to their pledges to host guests on orbiting hotels by now.
LEGAL HURDLES
The law is another hurdle for space hotels to lift off.
The rush of speculation in space has revealed gaps in international laws and treaties governing its use and sparked calls for greater oversight.
Life far from earth is mainly regulated by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans countries from claiming space and celestial bodies for themselves but allows for their use for peaceful purposes - opening the door to business exploitation.
But firms would need authorization from a state, normally the one where they are incorporated, to launch a hotel in space, said Tanja Masson-Zwaan, space law professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Authorizing governments would also have to continuously supervise each space station's activities, she said.
And all states involved in the creation and launch of a space station are liable in perpetuity for any damage the station might cause - if it were to crash into a satellite, for example.
That responsibility could make governments wary of supporting such ventures in the first place, said Masson-Zwaan.
"I don't think there will be many states that will accept to authorize and supervise this kind of activity as long as it is not super-safe," she said.
The regulations that do exist are outdated and problematic to potential space hoteliers, noted Bunger of Orion Span, pointing to the Aurora Station project as an example.
Because the station will have some thrust capability to help it stay in orbit, it falls under a 40-year-old US set of rules on defense goods conceived mainly to prevent sensitive arms technology being sold to countries deemed to be a risk, he said.
Those rules have requirements on transparency and disclosure that have more to do with ballistic missiles than space holidays, Bunger said.
"Clearly this is not a weapon," he said of the station.
"There is not one government in the world that has caught up to the reality that tourists are trying to go into space," he said.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
This still image from video issued by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows Mercury as it passes between Earth and the sun on Monday. The solar system's smallest, innermost planet resembles a tiny black dot during the transit, which began at 7:35 a.m. EST (1205 UTC).
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WASHINGTON - The first-ever spacewalk with an all-female team began Friday, footage broadcast by NASA showed.
US astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir's mission to replace a power controller outside the International Space Station officially began at 1138 GMT.
"Christina, you may egress the airlock," spacecraft communicator Stephanie Wilson told the two.
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MOSCOW - Alexei Leonov, who became the first human to walk in space in 1965, died on Friday at the age of 85 after a long illness, Russia's TASS news agency reported.
Though less well known internationally than Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, Leonov was a household name in his native Russia and will be remembered in particular for his role in the 1965 Voskhod-2 mission.
During that flight, one of two he made into space in his career, Leonov became the first human to conduct a spacewalk, an episode that lasted 12 minutes and 9 seconds.
The outing was stressful for Leonov whose spacesuit filled with air to the point where he struggled to get back into his spacecraft.
Leonov flew into space again in 1975, commanding the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first US–Soviet space flight. It occurred at a time when Russia and the United States, which spent part of the Cold War locked in a space race, were pursuing a policy of detente.
Leonov trained as a military pilot before becoming a cosmonaut. He received a 'Hero of the Soviet Union' medal - one of the Russian state's most prestigious awards - twice and has a small crater on the Moon named after him.
Leonov helped train other cosmonauts before retiring in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union collapsed. He devoted himself to private business and his twin passions of art and writing in later life.
Russian President Vladimir Putin knew Leonov well and had great respect for his courage, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, TASS reported.
NASA said in a statement on Twitter it was saddened by Leonov's death.
"His venture into the vacuum of space began the history of extravehicular activity that makes today’s Space Station maintenance possible," it said.
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BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan – An Emirati has made history as the first Arab to reach the International Space Station, after blasting off from Kazakhstan.
The Russian spacecraft carrying Hazzaa al-Mansoori of the United Arab Emirates, who was accompanied by Russia's Oleg Skripochka and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, docked Wednesday after a six-hour trip.
The three "entered the orbiting lab and joined six of their station crewmates for a joyful crew greeting ceremony today," NASA tweeted.
A video shows the new arrivals entering head first through a hatch to join their grinning colleagues, who welcomed them with floating hugs.
Mansoori, 35, received support from around the world ahead of what he described as his "dream" mission.
In Dubai, a crowd gathered at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre to watch the launch, erupting in cheers and dubbing Mansoori a national hero. Some carried UAE flags.
Dubai's iconic Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest skyscraper, lit up the moment of blast-off.
'GLORY AND AWE'
Mansoori will spend eight days on the ISS and will be the first Emirati and the first Arab on the orbiting laboratory, but not the first Muslim.
Writing on Twitter before the launch at Baikonur space centre, the former pilot in the UAE armed forces said he was "filled with this indescribable feeling of glory and awe".
"Today I carry the dreams and ambition of my country to a whole new dimension. May Allah grant me success in this mission," he said.
The day before the launch, he said he would record his prayer routine on the ISS and broadcast it to people on Earth.
"As a fighter pilot I already prayed in my aircraft," he said, explaining that he had experience of prayers at high speed.
Mansoori plans to conduct experiments and said he would take Emirati food with him to share with the crew, who for a brief of time will number nine at the ISS.
At a pre-flight conference, Meir, 42, said the crew communicated by using "Runglish" - a mixture of Russian and English.
"We still need to work on our Arabic," she joked.
Russian Orthodox priests blessed the spacecraft ahead of the launch, in a traditional prayer service often held before Russian rocket launches.
The spacecraft was the last to blast off from the launch pad where Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went off into space onboard the Vostok 1, becoming the first man in space in 1961.
Mansoori is set to return to Earth with NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin on October 3. Skripochka and Meir are set to remain on the ISS until the spring of 2020.
The first Arab in outer space was Saudi Arabia's Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud, who flew on a US shuttle mission in 1985.
Two years later, Syrian air force pilot Muhammed Faris spent a week aboard the Soviet Union's Mir space station.
As part of its space plans, the UAE has also announced its aim to become the first Arab country to send an unmanned probe to orbit Mars by 2021, naming it "Hope".
The International Space Station -- a rare example of cooperation between Russia and the West -- has been orbiting Earth at about 28,000 kilometers (17,000 miles) per hour since 1998.
Russia is resolved to keep its position as a leader of the space industry, particularly for manned space flights.
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HOUSTON -- "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind": it was with these words that Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the Moon 50 years ago, an occasion celebrated by space enthusiasts globally Saturday.
The era-defining event was watched by more than half a billion people around the world, and represented one of humanity's greatest achievements.
In the US, its 50th anniversary has revived public enthusiasm for crewed space flight, as NASA charts out new missions to the Moon and on to Mars.
At 4:18 p.m. ET on July 20, 1969, the lunar module carrying Armstrong and crewmate Buzz Aldrin touched down on the Sea of Tranquility, following a four-day journey.
NASA replayed the original CBS footage online.
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," Armstrong said.
A little over six hours later, at 10:56 p.m. ET, Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface and uttered his immortal words -- which he later said he thought about during the flight and prior to exiting Eagle.
Aldrin followed about 20 minutes later, exclaiming: "Magnificent desolation."
The pair spent about two-and-a-half hours on the surface, carrying out scientific experiments and collecting samples.
"We had the problem of the five-year-old boy in a candy store," Armstrong would later go on to say. "There are just too many interesting things to do."
In Houston on Saturday night, thousands of space enthusiasts descended upon the visitor area of the NASA Johnson Space Center for a countdown to the "Moonversary," and watched a giant screen that replayed the iconic moments, before fireworks lit up the sky.
NASA has been in overdrive for several weeks to mark the anniversary, with exhibits and events around the country, including projecting the giant Saturn V rocket and clips from the mission on the Washington Monument.
"Looking back, landing on the moon wasn't just our job, it was a historic opportunity to prove to the world America's can-do spirit," Aldrin, 89, tweeted.
Earlier in the day, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech from Cape Canaveral, from where Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins, the third crew member, took off.
All three men were born in 1930, and Armstrong died in 2012.
"Apollo 11 is the only event in the 20th century that stands a chance of being widely remembered in the 30th century," Pence said.
NASA has declared its intention to return to the Moon by 2024 under the Artemis program -- the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology -- and this time place the first woman on its surface.
It plans to establish a lunar orbiting platform, called a "Gateway," studying how living organisms react to the radiation and microgravity of a deep space environment over a long period, as it looks ahead to a crewed Mars mission in the 2030s.
Experts doubt that the space agency can meet its current goals on time. None of the key elements -- the rocket, crew capsule, lander, or orbital station -- are yet ready.
Pence used the occasion to announce that the Orion crew capsule had now been assembled, "a critical milestone."
According to a release by maker Lockheed Martin, it needs several months more of testing before it is delivered for launch processing in early 2020.
'I've been there!'
In an interview with Fox News, Aldrin lamented the lack of progress in human space exploration since the Apollo program, which ended in 1972.
He also called for global cooperation to achieve humanity's next steps on the Moon and Mars.
"It would not be at all helpful to be competing for the Moon or Mars, that's very wasteful," he said.
Collins too is keen for crewed missions sooner rather than later, and has advocated for the US to go "direct to Mars" rather than returning to the Moon first.
Asked on Saturday if he thinks much about the events of 50 years ago, he told Fox News: "Not very often."
"I lead a quiet life. I'll be walking along down my street at night, when it's starting to get dark and I sense something over my right shoulder and I look up and see that little silver sliver up there and think, 'Oh that's the Moon! I've been there!'"
Uncertain future
The White House, meanwhile, issued a statement announcing it was "committed to reestablishing our Nation's dominance and leadership in space for centuries to come."
Both presidents George HW Bush and his son George W. Bush made similar promises but financial constraints stopped their vision from being realized.
The future of Artemis rests therefore on the willingness of Congress to substantially increase NASA's current budget of $21 billion -- and possibly on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- Capping a week of celebrations over the historic Apollo 11 mission, Vice President Mike Pence joined astronaut Buzz Aldrin on Saturday at the launch pad in Florida that sent the moonwalker and his two crew mates to space for humankind's first steps on the lunar surface 50 years ago.
Pence joined NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon behind his fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center for a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing that enthralled people around the world in 1969.
"If Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins are not heroes, then there are no heroes," Pence told a crowd of dozens of space industry executives and NASA staff in the Operations and Checkout building, the 58-foot-tall chamber that once housed the Apollo 11 command module for testing. "We honor these men today, and America will always honor our Apollo astronauts."
Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died in 2012 at age 82. Collins, the command module pilot who stayed in lunar orbit while Aldrin and Armstrong hopped around the lunar surface collecting samples, did not attend the ceremony. Aldrin is 89 and Collins 88.
"Apollo 11 is the only event in the 20th century that stands a chance of being widely remembered in the 30th century," Pence said.
The building is now home to NASA's Orion crew capsule, the spacecraft designed to carry astronauts back to the moon by 2024 in what Bridenstine calls the Artemis program, named after the Greek goddess and twin sister of Apollo. The capsule on deck for the program's first operational mission in 2022 was sitting beside the stage.
"The Orion is in the same cell as where Apollo was stacked 50 years ago. So we've come full circle," said Glenn Chin, deputy manager at the Orion productions operations office.
Pence, chairing the White House's National Space Council, announced in March an accelerated schedule for NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, halving the U.S. space agency's previous timeline to get there by 2028 and requesting from Congress a $1.6 billion boost to NASA's fiscal 2020 budget request.
"The American space program is coming back. It's coming back with a vengeance," Bridenstine said at Saturday's ceremony. "We all love Apollo. But in the Artemis program we go to the moon sustainably, and this time we have a very diverse, highly qualified astronaut corps that includes women."
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday indicated he was not interested in a mission going back to the moon, despite his administration's plans for it. Trump instead repeated his interest in a NASA mission that would take astronauts directly to Mars, a vastly more challenging and costly endeavor.
"To get to Mars, you have to land on the moon, they say. Any way of going directly without landing on the moon? Is that a possibility?" the Republican president asked Bridenstine during an event in the White House Oval Office.
Bridenstine responded, "Well, we need to use the moon as a proving ground, because when we go to Mars, we're going to have to be there for a long period of time, so we need to learn how to live and work on another world." But Collins, attending the event, said he favored going directly to Mars.
The Artemis program's objective is to conduct a series of manned and unmanned missions to the moon, using its surface as a proving ground for technologies that could lay the ground work for the longer and more complex missions to Mars as soon as 2033, Bridenstine has said.
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US President Donald Trump on Friday criticized NASA for aiming to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024 and urged the space agency to focus instead on "much bigger" initiatives like going to Mars, undercutting his previous support for the lunar initiative.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago," the president wrote on Twitter. "They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!"
Trump's statement, tweeted from Air Force One as he returned from Europe, appeared at odds with his administration's recent push to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024 "by any means necessary," five years sooner than the previous goal of 2028.
NASA plans to build a space outpost in lunar orbit that can relay astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, part of a broader initiative to use the moon as a staging ground for eventual missions to Mars.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Trump was only reaffirming NASA's space plan.
"As @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!,” he said on Friday in a tweet referring to the President of the United States.
The accelerated timetable to land humans on the moon by 2024 ran into early trouble when the Trump administration asked a skeptical Congress in May to increase NASA's 2020 budget proposal by $1.6 billion as a “down payment” to accommodate the accelerated goal.
The accelerated timetable for going to the moon was a key recommendation in March of the new National Space Council led by Vice President Mike Pence.
'SUSTAINABLE HUMAN PRESENCE'
NASA's website on Friday said the Artemis program would send "the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024 and develop a sustainable human presence on the Moon by 2028." The program takes its name from the twin sister of Apollo and the goddess of the moon in Greek mythology.
NASA's Apollo program landed the first men on the moon 50 years ago on July 20.
The NASA website also provided details on the space agency's plans for making the moon a jumping off point for future missions to Mars and a place to test equipment and technology for other forays out into the solar system.
Trump's comments about the U.S. manned space program reflect his desire to champion a bold new national objective as he mounts a re-election bid, while also seeking to counter the potential space weaponry capabilities of Russia and China.
Private companies are also joining the race to the moon.
Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos last month unveiled a mock-up of a lunar lander being built by his Blue Origin rocket company and touted his moon goals as part of a strategy aimed at capitalizing on the Trump administration’s push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.
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WASHINGTON -- NASA's next mission to the Moon will be called Artemis, the US space agency announced Monday, though it's still looking for the money to make the journey happen by its accelerated 2024 deadline.
In March, US President Donald Trump's administration moved the date for the next American lunar mission up by four years from its original goal of 2028 while pledging to get a female astronaut to the Moon's surface for the first time.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters the agency would need an additional $1.6 billion to pay for the new ground and space vehicles needed to meet the deadline.
"This additional investment, I want to be clear, is a downpayment on NASA's efforts to land humans on the Moon by 2024," he said.
Bridenstine said the mission was named Artemis after the Greek mythological goddess of the Moon and twin sister to Apollo, namesake of the program that sent 12 American astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.
NASA's total annual budget is approximately $21.5 billion, and in the 2019 fiscal year, the agency spent about $4.5 billion on developing the Orion spacecraft, the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy rocket and a new lunar orbital mini-station, three elements essential to the Artemis mission.
But many experts and lawmakers are concerned that NASA cannot meet the accelerated deadline, especially given the major delays in development of the SLS, which is being built by aerospace giant Boeing.
Asked how much the new mission would cost in total, Bridenstine demurred, telling a reporter: "I would love to tell you that."
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COLORADO SPRINGS - At tens of thousands of kilometers above the Earth, a Russian satellite slowly approached the French-Italian satellite Athena-Fidus in October 2017, a move France later denounced as "an act of espionage."
What is less widely known is that just a few days before that, the same Russian satellite -- known as Luch or Olymp-K -- had been approached by an American military satellite named GSSAP, which came to within 10 kilometers (six miles) of it.
Since 2010, China has also demonstrated an ability to pilot satellites to approach designated targets.
These discreet maneuvers are just the most real sign of the militarization of space, several US experts told AFP.
The United States, Russia and China are certainly capable of destroying enemy satellites using missiles, and probably by deliberate collision too. They may also be developing lasers to blind or damage satellites.
But none of these types of attacks have ever happened in the six decades that humans have been venturing into space.
The real space war is about jamming, hacking and cyber means, rather than blowing things up in orbit.
"It's not an immediate collision threat," said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at Secure World Foundation, who has written a report on the movements of those satellites and other space threats.
"My sense is that all of that stuff is being done for intelligence and surveillance purposes, that those close approaches are being done to take pictures of those satellites to figure out what they're doing, or to listen in on what signals are being broadcast up to them."
JAMMING
One only had to see the number of US and allied uniforms this week at the 35th Space Symposium, the big get-together of the space industry in Colorado Springs, to get a sense of how much interest military leaders now have in space.
When Marty Whelan started working on military activities in space in 1984, "we put things in orbit, the hardest part was getting there. If you could get there, you were fine."
The Gulf War in 1991 was the first time the US military really integrated space tech into ground operations, mostly using GPS to guide its "smart bombs."
The first vulnerabilities in the system were exposed in the Iraq war more than a decade later, when Iran tried jamming US satellite signals, Whelan told AFP.
In recent years, Russia jammed GPS signals around the Baltic Sea and elsewhere, forcing the US and its allies to develop counter-jamming technology.
"People called it some kind of a protected space," said Whelan, who served for 33 years in the Air Force and is today vice president of The Aerospace Corporation.
"If you blew up metal in space, no person will die, no mother would lose their son. But if their son or daughter was on a battlefield and now could not communicate, they could lose their son or daughter."
"Space is just an enabler to the fight back on planet Earth," added the retired Air Force major general.
"We're at an inflection point," he said. "We can't do things the way we used to, everything we do must change."
SURVEILLING THE SATELLITES
The whole space sector, both civilian and military, has started adapting to protect itself from jamming and cyber attacks.
"It would be short-sighted of us to sit here today and in 2019 and say that, we have every single threat covered, we know how to address it and mitigate it," said Mark Knapp, director of National Security Programs at the Norwegian company KSAT, which operates more than 200 satellite communication antennae in ground stations around the world.
"There's always new threats surfacing," he said.
On the military side, the Pentagon is in the midst of a major reorganization to set up the Space Force pushed by President Donald Trump, which is still awaiting congressional approval.
The Space Force will comprise some 20,000 personnel and be a co-equal branch of the military, alongside the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. Monitoring space will be one of its top priorities.
Fred Kennedy, selected to head the Defense Department's new Space Development Agency, on Tuesday unveiled his plans for a constellation of hundreds of small military satellites, built in conjunction with the private sector, to monitor in real time tens of thousands of objects around the world.
"Everything between here and the moon," he told reporters at the Colorado Springs gathering.
As for the new generation of French military satellites, the Syracuse 4, they will be kitted out with cameras to see if anything is getting too close to them.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON- NASA has captured unprecedented photos of the interaction of shockwaves from two supersonic aircraft, part of its research into developing planes that can fly faster than sound without thunderous "sonic booms."
When an aircraft crosses that threshold -- around 1,225 kilometers per hour at sea level -- it produces waves from the pressure it puts on the air around it, which merge to cause the ear-splitting sound.
In an intricate maneuver by "rock star" pilots at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, two supersonic T-38 jets flew just 9 meters apart below another plane waiting to photograph them with an advanced, high-speed camera, the agency said.
The rendezvous -- at an altitude of around 30,000 feet or about 9,144 meters -- yielded mesmerizing images of the shockwaves emanating from both planes.
With one jet flying just behind the other, "the shocks are going to be shaped differently," said Neal Smith of AerospaceComputing Inc., an engineering firm that works with NASA, in a post on the agency's website.
"This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact."
Sonic booms can be a major nuisance, capable of not just startling people on the ground but also causing damage -- like shattered windows -- and this has led to strong restrictions on supersonic flight over land in jurisdictions like the United States.
The ability to capture such detailed images of shockwaves will be "crucial" to NASA's development of the X-59, the agency said, an experimental supersonic plane it hopes will be able to break the sound barrier with just a rumble instead of a sonic boom.
A breakthrough like that could lead to the loosening of flight restrictions and the return of commercial supersonic planes for the first time since Concorde was retired in 2003.
Some countries and cities banned the Franco-British airliner from their airspace because of its sonic booms.
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WASHINGTON - Four billion miles from the sun floats Ultima Thule, an icy celestial body that NASA scientists announced Wednesday is aptly shaped like a giant snowman.
The first detailed images beamed back from the US agency's New Horizons mission allowed scientists to confidently determine the body was formed when two spheres, or "lobes," slowly gravitated towards each other until they stuck together -- a major scientific discovery.
The New Horizons spacecraft on Tuesday flew past Ultima Thule, which was discovered via telescope in 2014 and is the farthest and potentially oldest cosmic body ever observed by a spacecraft.
Before that flyby, the only image scientists had was a blurry one showing Ultima Thule's oblong shape, resembling something like a bowling pin or a peanut.
"That image is so 2018... Meet Ultima Thule!" said lead investigator Alan Stern, doing little to hide his joy as he revealed a new sharper image of the cosmic body, taken at a distance as close as 17,000 miles (about 27,000 kilometers) with a resolution of 140 meters per pixel.
"That bowling pin is gone -- it's a snowman if anything at all," Stern said during a NASA briefing.
"What this spacecraft and this team accomplished is unprecedented."
Ultima Thule's surface reflects light about as much as "garden variety dirt," he said, as the sun's rays are 1,600 times fainter there than on Earth.
The body is roughly 19 miles long and completes its own rotation in about 15 hours. NASA dubbed the larger lobe Ultima, and the other, which is about 3 times smaller, Thule.
Carly Howett, another researcher of the mission, noted that "we can definitely say that Ultima Thule is red," perhaps due to irradiation of ice.
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TAMPA, Florida -- A SpaceX rocket on Sunday blasted off a powerful GPS satellite for the US Air Force, marking its 21st and final launch for the year.
A SpaceX mission control operator counted down to liftoff as the white Falcon 9 rocket took off under sunny, blue skies at 8:51 a.m. from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The launch sent the Global Positioning System III space vehicle (SV) satellite into space to join the Air Force's constellation of 31 operational GPS satellites.
It promises "three times better accuracy" and an extended 15-year operational life, said a SpaceX statement.
Billions of people worldwide depend on GPS to support financial, transportation, and agricultural infrastructure.
SpaceX said the rocket was a "rare, expendable" version of the Falcon 9 since it would not attempt to re-land the booster after launch, needing to reserve all the rocket fuel to propel the satellite to its distant orbit.
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Astronomers think a particular sentiment by one of the most popular athletes in the world was out of bounds.
Following Kyrie Irving's out-of-this-world claim that the Earth is flat, which Irving has since apologized for, Steph Curry appears to be coming from an alternate universe as well when the Golden State Warriors playmaker suggested man never set foot on the moon.
Curry was on the "Winging It" podcast produced by the Ringer website when he made his thoughts known.
“We ever been to the moon?” he asked, to which others on the show agreed that the lunar landing never happened.
“They’re going to come get us,” the 2-time NBA MVP replied. “Sorry, I don’t want to start conspiracies.”
For NASA, that assertion is one giant leap into the absurd.
A spokesman for the US space program and research agency said Curry is welcome to visit NASA headquarters to prove to arguably the league's best shooter that he was off-target.
“We’d love for Mr. Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets,” spokesman Allard Beutel said.
“We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we’re doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay.”
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NASA on Sunday blasted off a $1.5-billion spacecraft toward the Sun on a historic mission to protect the Earth by unveiling the mysteries of dangerous solar storms.
"Three, two, one, and liftoff!" said a NASA commentator as the Parker Solar Probe lit up the dark night sky aboard a Delta IV-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 3:31 a.m.
The unmanned spacecraft aims to get closer than any human-made object in history to the center of our solar system.
The probe is designed to plunge into the Sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, during a seven-year mission.
It is protected by an ultra-powerful heat shield that can endure unprecedented levels of heat, and radiation 500 times that experienced on Earth.
Strange veil
NASA has billed the mission as the first spacecraft to "touch the Sun."
In reality, it should come within 6.16 million kilometers of the Sun's surface, close enough to study the curious phenomenon of the solar wind and the Sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, which is 300 times hotter than its surface.
The car-sized probe is designed to give scientists a better understanding of solar wind and geomagnetic storms that risk wreaking chaos on Earth by knocking out the power grid.
These solar outbursts are poorly understood, but pack the potential to wipe out power to millions of people.
A worst-case scenario could cost up to $2 trillion in the first year alone and take a decade to fully recover from, experts have warned.
"The Parker Solar Probe will help us do a much better job of predicting when a disturbance in the solar wind could hit Earth," said Justin Kasper, a project scientist and professor at the University of Michigan.
Knowing more about the solar wind and space storms will also help protect future deep space explorers as they journey toward the Moon or Mars.
Heat shield
The probe is guarded by an ultra-powerful heat shield that is just 4.5 inches thick, enabling the spacecraft to survive its close shave with the fiery star.
Even in a region where temperatures can reach more than a million degrees Fahrenheit, the sunlight is expected to heat the shield to just around 1,371 degrees Celsius.
If all works as planned, the inside of the spacecraft should stay at just 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
The goal for the Parker Solar Probe is to make 24 passes through the corona during its seven-year mission.
"The sun is full of mysteries," said Nicky Fox, project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
"We are ready. We have the perfect payload. We know the questions we want to answer."
91-year-old namesake
The spacecraft is the only NASA probe in history to be named after a living person -- in this case, 91-year-old solar physicist Eugene Parker, who first described the solar wind in 1958.
Parker said last week that he was "impressed" by the Parker Solar Probe, calling it "a very complex machine."
NASA chief of the science mission directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Saturday that Parker is an "incredible hero of our scientific community," and called the probe one of NASA most "strategically important" missions.
Scientists have wanted to build a spacecraft like this for more than 60 years, but only in recent years did the heat shield technology advance enough to be capable of protecting sensitive instruments.
Tools on board will measure high-energy particles associated with flares and coronal mass ejections, as well as the changing magnetic field around the Sun.
A white light imager will take images of the atmosphere right in front of the Sun.
When it nears the Sun, the probe will travel rapidly enough to go from New York to Tokyo in one minute -- some 430,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest human-made object.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Friday named 9 astronauts for the first manned space launches from US soil since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
The announcement signals a milestone in the US space program, with its shift to the private sector for ferrying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.
Since the space shuttle program was shut down, the US space agency has had to rely on Russia to fly astronauts to the space station, a $100-billion orbital research laboratory that flies about 402 kilometers above Earth.
The astronauts named on Friday will be carried aboard a spacecraft developed by entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX and Boeing Co, crewing first the test flights, and then missions involving both Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
The first flight is expected sometime next year.
"Space has transformed the American way of life," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "For the first time since 2011, we are on the brink of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil."
President Donald Trump tweeted about the announcement: "We have the greatest facilities in the world and we are now letting the private sector pay to use them. Exciting things happening."
The commercial crew program will allow expanded use of the space station. NASA officials have said it is critical to understanding the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and necessary for a sustainable presence on the Moon and for deep-space missions, including to Mars.
In 2014, SpaceX and Boeing received contracts for $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively, to develop so-called space taxis that can ferry astronauts to and from the space station.
Of the 9 astronauts tapped to serve as crew members, all but 3 are space flight veterans. Additional crew members will be assigned by NASA's international partners in the space station at a later date, the agency said.
The Government Accountability Office said last month that launch plans could be delayed due to incomplete safety measures and accountability issues in NASA's commercial crew program.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
