Science

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected Blue Origin to develop a lunar lander to transport astronauts on Artemis missions starting at the end of the decade. At an event at NASA Headquarters May 19, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency chose a team led by Blue Origin, with participation from Boeing, Draper and Lockheed

WASHINGTON — Spanish launch startup PLD Space plans to conduct a suborbital launch before the end of the month to test technologies for its small orbital launch vehicle. PLD Space said May 18 that it conducted a static-fire test a day earlier of its Miura 1 rocket on the pad at El Arenosillo, a site

Winning big: Cerca Magnetics wearable magnetoencephalography scanner. (Courtesy: Cerca Magnetics) Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the first day of the Economist’s Commercialising Quantum Global conference in London. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience to be out and about again, rubbing shoulders with people interested in all things quantum. The conference was

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force announced May 17 it has delivered the second of two payloads to be hosted on Japanese satellites under an agreement the United States signed with Japan in 2020.  The two U.S. payloads are optical sensors developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratories. They will be hosted on Japan’s geostationary Quasi-Zenith Satellite

TAMPA, Fla. — Climate data startup Amini has raised $2 million for a satellite constellation to gather more Africa-focused environmental information. European climate technology fund Pale Blue Dot led the pre-seed funding round, Amini announced May 18, supporting a six-month-old venture currently using public satellite data to provide intelligence for smallholder farmers on the continent.

Mechanical nanosurgery: artistic rendering of a new approach, developed by SickKids and University of Toronto researchers, that targets cancer cells from inside the tumour, sparing healthy tissue in the process. (Courtesy: Created by The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) research team using Midjourney) A new nanosurgery technique could help treat glioblastoma, one of the most

WASHINGTON — Republican senators used a hearing on NASA’s fiscal year 2024 budget proposal to criticize the agency’s role in topics like climate change and social issues they argued were a distraction to its efforts to return humans to the moon. During the 90-minute hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee May 16, senators raised few

WASHINGTON — For the third consecutive year, bipartisan legislation will be moving through the House and Senate aiming to establish a Space National Guard as a reserve component of the U.S. Space Force.  The legislative push, led by lawmakers from Colorado, California and Florida, has encountered stern opposition from the White House Office of Management

White stripes: The brilliant white colouring seen on the Pacific cleaner shrimp. (Courtesy: PilarMeca, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18884803) Researchers in Israel have uncovered the unique optical nanostructure that gives an ocean-going scavenger its brilliant white colouring. Using a range of imaging techniques, a team led by Benjamin Palmer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel,

Douglas Ligor is a senior behavioral/social scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and a member of RAND’s space enterprise initiative. Josh Becker is an adjunct policy researcher at RAND. If you pay a company like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or Boeing to go into space, perhaps even perform your own spacewalk, should those

ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Space Force sees growing support from Congress for its plans to build large constellations in low Earth orbit and other priorities the service laid out in its 2024 budget request, the vice chief of space operations said May 15. “We just finished defending our budget on the Hill and it’s

Surprising observation: evidence for lambda baryons and the involvement of diquarks in their production has been spotted in data taken at Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer. (Courtesy: DOE/Jefferson Lab) Extensive analysis of data gathered almost 20 years ago has led to a surprising discovery: that strange matter can be formed when a single photon

Adam Routh is a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London preparing to defend his research exploring international governance of emerging space activities. The space ecosystem has been undergoing considerable change in recent decades except for one crucial area — the international governance of space. The space industry is growing rapidly, as are space domain challenges

WASHINGTON — Intuitive Machines says its first lunar lander mission has slipped into the third quarter of this year as pursues a wider range of business opportunities. In a May 11 earnings call, the first for the company since it went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger in February, Chief Executive Steve

Quantum collaboration: Elham Kashefi (left), director of the new Quantum Software Lab and chief scientist of the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), listens to a talk at the lab’s launch event with Michael Cuthbert, the NQCC’s director. Also in the picture are (foreground) Sir Peter Knight of Imperial College London and (background) Iain Gordon, head

WASHINGTON — Two companies have disclosed details about how they could raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA evaluates that and other concepts offered to the agency. Astroscale and Momentus said May 9 that they submitted a response to a NASA request for information (RFI) issued in December 2022 seeking concepts from