VAN HORN, Texas — Blue Origin performed its first crewed New Shepard launch July 20, sending company founder Jeff Bezos and three other people on a suborbital flight. New Shepard lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:12 a.m. Eastern on the NS-16 mission. The crew capsule, called RSS First
Science
By: Hannah Pell “If we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are still as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us,” wrote James Clerk Maxwell in his Theory of Heat (1871).
TAMPA, Fla. — Lynk aims to launch multiple operational satellites on a SpaceX ride-share mission in December, ahead of plans to provide connectivity services with the constellation directly to unmodified cellphones next year. The Virginia-based startup booked a place on a SpaceX transporter mission through ride-share service provider Spaceflight, Lynk CEO Charles Miller told SpaceNews.
Better by design: this new image (right) of the jet from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Centaurus A galaxy, which was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope, has a 16-fold higher resolution the previous best image using the TANAMI VLBI array (Courtesy: Nature Astronomy). Astronomers have followed up their seminal 2019
The DSX mission was launched June 25, 2019. It ended on May 31, 2021 WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory announced July 19 it has completed a two-year experiment that will help better understand the effects of radiation on space hardware in medium Earth orbit. Known as the Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX)
WASHINGTON — Blue Origin is on track to perform the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle July 20, carrying company founder Jeff Bezos and three others on a suborbital spaceflight. At a July 18 news conference, company officials said they had successfully completed a flight readiness review for the NS-16 mission that will
Researchers report on the unexpected observation of thermal waves in germanium for the first time. Courtesy: ICMAB/UAB Researchers in Spain and Italy have observed “second sound” in a room-temperature semiconductor for the first time. This phenomenon, which occurs when distinct waves of temperature pass through a material, had previously only been observed in exotic superfluids
TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operator SES is leading a consortium to design a system for guarding communications in Luxembourg against cyberattacks, which could feed into Europe’s broader plan for a network that is also protected by quantum technology. The consortium will devise a satellite and terrestrial network for Luxembourg’s Quantum Communications Infrastructure (LuxQCI) project, which
Hunter, director of the defense industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, would be the Department of the Air Force’s senior acquisition executive. WASHINGTON — The White House announced July 16 that President Biden intends to nominate defense procurement expert Andrew Hunter to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for
A view into one of the two vacuum chambers used in the experiments. Credit: Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics For the first time, physicists have succeeded in measuring the same photon at two different locations within an optical fibre – all without destroying the photon. The new non-destructive technique, which was developed by researchers at the
Considering how much space junk is in orbit, the need to maintain and monitor cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon) is becoming an increasingly important issue. To do so effectively may require spacecraft that can propel for longer durations than currently available, and nuclear reactors may offer a solution. Recent news of
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope returned to science operations July 17 after a hiatus of more than a month as controllers successfully switched the orbiting observatory to a backup payload computer. NASA said the instruments of the 31-year-old telescope are now operational nearly five weeks after a payload computer, which commands those instruments, malfunctioned.
TAMPA, Fla. — Malaysian operator Measat has likely lost control of an aging satellite that has been drifting westward in geostationary orbit for nearly a month, according to analysts at space tracking company ExoAnalytic Solutions. The ExoAnalytic space tracking system detected an anomaly for Measat-3 on June 21, after which it started drifting out of
The 12 m-long bridge took over four years to design and contains a network of sensors. (Courtesy: Adriaan De Groot) The world’s first 3D-printed steel footbridge has been unveiled in the centre of Amsterdam. Developed by Imperial College London and the Alan Turing Institute, the 12 m-long bridge took over four years to design and
HELSINKI — China conducted a clandestine first test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle Friday as a part of development of a reusable space transportation system. The vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Friday and later landed at an airport just over 800 kilometers away at Alxa League in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region,
WASHINGTON — An 18-year-old Dutch man will fly on Blue Origin’s first crewed New Shepard suborbital flight, taking the place of the unidentified winner of an auction last month for the seat. Blue Origin announced July 15 that Oliver Daemen will be the fourth and final member of the crew of the New Shepard flight
Branched cracks in a single crystal of 2D hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). Image courtesy: J. Lou/Rice University Fracture tests carried out on hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) show that this 2D material has an intrinsic toughening mechanism, contradicting its reputation for brittleness. This unexpected behaviour, which was observed by Jun Lou, Huajian Gao and colleagues at
TAMPA, Fla. — Astranis has started building four very small geostationary orbit satellites as it gears up to produce dozens and later hundreds of them simultaneously. “This is the beginning of a ramp-up of our production rate,” Astranis CEO John Gedmark said. The San Francisco-based company has placed orders worth more than $30 million with