Science

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson claims proposed spending reductions for fiscal year 2024 could have “devastating and potentially unrecoverable” effects on NASA programs, delaying or canceling many missions. In a March 19 letter to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Nelson outlined the effects on NASA of two budget-cutting

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean rocket startup Innospace successfully launched a suborbital rocket from Brazil over the weekend, demonstrating a hybrid motor it plans to scale up into a small orbital launch vehicle.  The launch of Innospace’s HANBIT-TLV suborbital rocket took place March 19 from the Alcântara Space Center, and the company called the

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force plans to use startup Varda Space Industries’ reentry capsules as hypersonic flight test platforms, the company’s cofounder Delian Asparouhov told SpaceNews. Varda has been raising venture funds to send to orbit 120-kilogram “factory” satellites to make products in zero-gravity and return them to Earth in a reentry capsule. The

ALTA, Utah — Frontier Aerospace raised $10 million in Series A funding from AEI HorizonX, the venture capital fund formed by AE Industrial Parters and Boeing. “This latest funding round will accelerate Frontier’s engine development activities, support major expansion of manufacturing and vacuum test facilities,” Frontier Aerospace president Jim McKinnon said in a statement. “In

WASHINGTON — Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital is planning another expansion of its factory in Southern California to accommodate an anticipated increase in government and commercial orders. During a March 21 earnings call, Marc Bell, chief executive of Terran Orbital, said the company would lease an additional 8,700 square meters of manufacturing space in Irvine, California.

From the time she was a child, Anna-Sophia Boguraev has had her eye on space. When she was 4, she built a cardboard rocket ship. She asked a lot of questions, loved looking at the stars and was set on getting a PhD long before most kids knew what that meant. The daughter of two

WASHINGTON — A small set of Virgin Orbit employees will return to work after a week-long furlough as the company attempts to raise money to remain solvent. In a brief filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission early March 22, the company announced an “incremental resumption” of operations effective March 23. Most company employees, though,

WASHINGTON — The National Reconnaissance Office has signed five-year agreements with six commercial providers of hyperspectral satellite imagery, the agency announced March 22. The selected companies — BlackSky Technology, HyperSat, Orbital Sidekick, Pixxel, Planet and Xplore — are a mix of established remote-sensing industry firms and startups. Under these agreements, the NRO will first assess

WASHINGTON — Avio is moving ahead with efforts to develop a larger methane-fueled rocket engine and a prototype small launch vehicle with more than $300 million in funding from the Italian government. Avio announced March 13 it formally signed contracts with the Italian government, working through the European Space Agency, for a combined 285.3 million

WASHINGTON — The first set of larger second-generation Starlink satellites is experiencing problems that could require SpaceX to deorbit at least some of them. In a March 22 tweet, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said there were “some issues” with the set of Starlink satellites launched Feb. 27, confirming industry speculation over the last several

WASHINGTON — Relativity Space’s first Terran 1 rocket successfully got off the launch pad March 22 but failed to reach orbit because of an upper stage malfunction. The Terran 1 rocket lifted off at 11:25 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight dubbed “Good

Fullerene switch: artist’s rendering of a fullerene switch with incoming electron and red laser light pulses. (Courtesy: ©2023 Yanagisawa et al.) Light-induced electron emissions from fullerene, a carbon-based molecule, can be used to make an ultrafast switch. The new device, developed by a team headed up at the University of Tokyo, Japan, has a switching

In January crowds gathered at Newquay Airport in the hope of witnessing history in the making. The mission “Start Me Up” was set to launch the first satellites from UK soil, via a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket, shuttled into the atmosphere by a modified Boeing 747-400. Although the mission was ultimately unsuccessful – with the

Soon to be ringing: artist’s impression of two black holes that are about to merge. (Courtesy: NASA) Two independent teams have shown that gravitational waves emanating from the distorted remnants of black-hole mergers should interact with themselves. By including these nonlinear effects in their models, one team, led by Keefe Mitman at Caltech, found it

Having spent more than 40 years working in optical communications, Michael Robertson is one of the world’s longest-serving experts in the field of fibre-optics. To mark his retirement, he talks to Anita Chandran about cross-disciplinary research, the breakthroughs he made and the good and bad sides of fibre optics in the UK The ability to simply

Daydreaming brain A rat engaged in self-referential processing. The image also shows the default mode network as revealed by fMRI. (Courtesy: CC BY 4.0/Shih Lab, Long-Evans rat image provided by Tzu-Hao Harry Chao) When was the last time you daydreamt? Paying no particular attention to the outside world, engaged in introspection or memory recall, your

The rapid rise of transformative agreements between publishers and research consortia is providing extra impetus to the Electrochemical Society’s long-standing ambition to “Free the Science” Into the open: During The Electrochemical Society’s Free the Science Week, which this year runs on 2–9 April, more than 180,000 articles across its entire digital library will be free

Cait Cullen reviews The Milky Way: an Autobiography of our Galaxy by Moiya McTier Me, myself, Milky Way Our galaxy as imagined by artist AnnaMarie Salai. (Courtesy: AnnaMarie Salai) Like almost every astronomer, I have looked to the stars and dreamt of objects far larger than I can realistically comprehend. But never in my deepest