Boeing's Starliner astronauts could return on SpaceX capsule in Feb 2025, NASA says

WASHINGTON - NASA officials said on Wednesday the twoastronauts delivered to the International Space Station in June by Boeing's Starliner could return on SpaceX's Crew Dragon in February 2025 if Starliner is still deemed unsafe to return to Earth.

The U.S. space agency has been discussing potential plans with SpaceX to leave two seats empty on an upcoming Crew Dragon launch for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first crew to fly Boeing's Starliner capsule.

The astronauts' test mission, initially expected to last about eight days on the station, has been drawn out by issues on Starliner's propulsion system that have increasingly called into question the spacecraft's ability to safely return them to Earth as planned.

A Boeing spokesperson said if NASA decides to change Starliner's mission, the company "will take the actions necessary to configure Starliner for an uncrewed return."

Thruster failures during Starliner's initial approach to the ISS in June and several leaks of helium - used to pressurize those thrusters - have set Boeing off on a testing campaign to understand the cause and propose fixes to NASA, which has the final say. Recent results have unearthed new information, causing greater alarm about a safe return.

The latest test data have stirred disagreements and debate within NASA about whether to accept the risk of a Starliner return to Earth, or make the call to use Crew Dragon instead.

Using a SpaceX craft to return astronauts that Boeing had planned to bring back on Starliner would be a major blow to an aerospace giant that has struggled for years to compete with SpaceX and its more experienced Crew Dragon.

Starliner has been docked to the ISS for 63 of the maximum 90 days it can stay, and it is parked at the same port that Crew Dragon will have to use to deliver the upcoming astronaut crew.

Early Tuesday morning, NASA, using a SpaceX rocket and a Northrop Grumman NOC.N capsule, delivered a routine shipment of food and supplies to the station, including extra clothes for Wilmore and Williams.

Starliner's high-stakes mission is a final test required before NASA can certify the spacecraft for routine astronaut flights to and from the ISS. Crew Dragon received NASA approval for astronaut flights in 2020.

Starliner development has been set back by management issues and numerous engineering problems. It has cost Boeing $1.6 billion since 2016, including $125 million from Starliner's current test mission, securities filings show.

CONCERNS AT NASA

A meeting this week of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which oversees Starliner, ended with some officials disagreeing with a plan to accept Boeing's testing data and use Starliner to bring the astronauts home, officials said during a news conference.

"We didn't poll in a way that led to a conclusion," Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich said.

"We heard from a lot of folks that had concerns, and the decision was not clear," Ken Bowersox, NASA's space operations chief, added.

A Boeing executive was not at the Wednesday press conference.

While no decision has been made on using Starliner or Crew Dragon, NASA has been buying Boeing more time to do more testing and gather more data to build a better case to trust Starliner. Sometime next week is when NASA expects to decide, officials said.

The agency on Tuesday delayed by more than a month SpaceX's upcoming Crew Dragon mission, a routine flight called Crew-9, that is expected to send three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut to the ISS.

NASA's ISS program chief said the agency has not yet decided which astronauts they would pull off the mission for Wilmore and Williams if needed.

Boeing's testing so far has shown that four of Starliner's jets had failed in June because they overheated and automatically turned off, while other thrusters re-fired during tests appeared weaker than normal because of some restriction to their propellant.

Ground tests in late July at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico have helped reveal that the thrusters' overheating causes a teflon seal to warp, choking propellant tubes for the thrusters and thereby weakening their thrust.

"That, I would say, upped the level of discomfort, and not having a total understanding of the physics of what's happening," Stich said, describing why NASA now appears more willing to discuss a Crew Dragon contingency after previously downplaying such a prospect to reporters.

NASA astronauts voice confidence that Boeing Starliner will bring them home Read full story

FACTBOX-Who are the first astronauts to fly aboard Boeing's Starliner? Read full story

NASA to push back moon mission timelines amid spacecraft delays - sources Read full story

Boeing Starliner's return from space to hinge on weeks of more testing Read full story

EXPLAINER-How Boeing's Starliner can bring its astronauts back to Earth Read full story

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Chris Sanders)

-reuters

NASA investigating first crime committed in space: report

WASHINGTON, United States — US space agency NASA is investigating what may be the first crime committed in outer space, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Astronaut Anne McClain is accused of identity theft and improperly accessing her estranged wife's private financial records while on a sixth-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Times said.

The astronaut's spouse Summer Worden filed a complaint earlier this year with the Federal Trade Commission after learning McClain had accessed her bank account without permission, while Worden's family filed another with NASA's Office of Inspector General, according to the newspaper.

McClain's lawyer said the astronaut had done nothing wrong and accessed the bank records while aboard the ISS in order to monitor the couple's combined finances -- something she had done over the course of their relationship, the Times reported.

NASA investigators have contacted both women, according to the newspaper.

McClain, who returned to Earth in June, gained fame for being one of two women picked for a historic all-female spacewalk, but NASA scrapped the planned walk in March due to a lack of well-fitting spacesuits, sparking accusations of sexism.

Worden said the FTC has not responded to the identity theft report, but that an investigator specializing in criminal cases with NASA's Office of Inspector General has been looking into the accusation, according to the Times.

source: philstar.com

Did we really land on the moon?

It’s a telling sign of our times that you can sit with your laptop and bounce around between opposing documentaries on the same subject. Take the July 1969 US lunar landing mission known as Apollo 11. One visits Netflix, and the series Conspiracies flashes in your face. One episode features the click-bait tease, “Was the moon landing a fake?”

Of course, this has been a standard conspiracy theory trope since, well, men first landed on the moon, and the Conspiracies episode does its darnedest to sow confusion and doubt about the very elaborate, expensive and meticulously planned moon mission known as Apollo 11. We’ve already seen the documentary Room 237, which amassed fringe fan theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, one of which is that the director was hired by NASA to fake the moon landing on a film set located in Area 51. The theory goes that Kubrick was later forced to keep his participation a secret, so he passively-aggressively dropped all kinds of clues in The Shining, such as Danny Torrance wearing a lumpy Apollo 11 sweater in one scene.

Nailed it!

For conspiracy theorists, all it takes is a set of adjacent facts for causality to exist. The sheer mass of evidence showing otherwise is no match for the paper-chain links that seem to suggest a government conspiracy lurks behind every shady door. The Conspiracies episode points out that astronaut Gus Grissom died in a fire inside a capsule during a NASA preflight testing, along with two other astronauts, and notes that he’d been “critical” of the moon mission just days before that.

Silenced!


Of course, more extensive research shows that the Apollo program was riddled with costly mistakes — test rockets blowing up on launch pads, jet test flights ending in disaster. Many astronauts died. Why NASA saw the need to kill off one mouthy astronaut, rather than simply cut him from the program, is something only conspiracy theorists can truly grasp.

Of course, we live in a world where truth is under fire every day. We have competing narratives huffing and puffing on our screens, attacking us with exclamation points and explosive comment threads. Navigating “the truth” is a head-spinning enterprise in the best of times, because “the truth” only exists in itself; our impression of every event passes through a subjective lens, and we are more than willing to seek assistance from outside sources when interpreting those events. Thus, we look for perspectives from shows like Conspiracies. (The uncanny is fertile ground for the conspiracy-minded. One episode looks at the “Black Dahlia” murder case, and wonders why an aspiring actress was left dead, surgically severed at the waist, in a Hollywood park in 1947. Uncanny! Creepy! Was it the work of police covering up for Hollywood moguls? Was it the mob? Was it an evil doctor afraid of blackmail? That’s the theory posited in Conspiracies, and — surprise! — there’s even a connection to the Philippines: Hollywood surgeon George Hodel, who was investigated for the murder, fled the US in 1950 to live in the Philippines until his death in 1990; his son still maintains his dad was the killer. The “Black Dahlia” remains a legitimate murder mystery, still unsolved after 70 years. Which makes it a wonderful vacuum for conspiracies.)

Most uncanny for moon landing doubters are those crisp images of astronauts, cavorting around on the lunar surface. They say it looks too real — “like a movie set.” Why is it so bright? (Sunlight hits and reflects off the moon’s surface, illuminating its every crater, as we can see very plainly every night when we gaze upward from earth.) And why didn’t the Russians ever make it to the moon? (They tried. They failed. They did send an unmanned probe that landed on the surface in 1959.)

One crystal-clear document of the moon mission comes in a new documentary released for the 50th anniversary. Apollo 11 gathers, with very little narration (save Walter Cronkite, NASA engineers and three space-bound astronauts), archival film and images from hundreds of hours of 70mm footage, some of it in hyper-real detail, gathered by NASA to record the historic launch. The film is moving, almost heart-pounding, even if you know the ending. The astronauts sit in a tiny capsule above a massive rocket, ascend into the skies as a million Floridians watch from the Cape Canaveral banks (and millions more live on television). Rooms full of engineers monitor the progress of the flight — eminently convincing, unless you believe they’re all actors or in on the conspiracy. We see the Apollo 11 capsule circle the moon and the lunar module descend on the Sea of Tranquility. We watch as Neil Armstrong steps down a ladder to touch the moon’s surface — this time in strikingly clear footage taken from inside the lunar module, not those fuzzy, high-contrast TV images sent across 186,000 miles of space through a Unified S-band and downloaded onto an FM subcarrier back on earth. The photos taken by “Buzz” Aldrin during the astronauts’ several hours of moonwalking are riveting, otherworldly — which they, indeed, spectacularly, are. (Uncanny!) They capture a location that no other human had ever managed to take a selfie on before July 20, 1969. (And only a handful since. Another conspiracy query goes: “Why didn’t the Americans go back to the moon?” They did, on five other missions during the 1970s. Remember those moon rovers, the ones designed by Pinoy mechanical engineer Eduardo San Juan? They’re still up there, as are five of the six planted US flags, according to high-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2012.)

And finally, presented with the best available evidence — crystal-clear documentary footage — the conspiracy theorists will still shrug and say, “Well, sure, it’s easier now for NASA to fake even better footage to back up the 1969 hoax. Just look at CGI!” What can you do in the face of this kind of skepticism? Just hire a boat and live on an island somewhere, away from all the digital battles? Maybe.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dismiss all conspiracy theories. Governments lie, lie, lie. Political leaders lie, lie, lie. But I’m selective about my conspiracies: I cherry-pick them. I won’t take every crackpot theory as equal on its face.

The real danger of conspiracy theories is not just their seductiveness (everyone loves a mystery), but their corrosiveness. You have to ask yourself who benefits, say, when a US president contends — all available evidence to the contrary — that Russia never meddled in US elections in 2016 or that climate change isn’t happening or that the previous US president wasn’t born in America. Consider the provenance of the conspiracy peddler. Consider the motive.

But if you start from the notion that truth simply doesn’t exist — as a smug young lawyer, now working for the Duterte administration, tried to convince me during dinner one night — then all that is left is competing piles of facts. And even those facts are constantly under fire. We all become not just armchair pundits, but armchair Pontius Pilates, shrugging at every mystery: Quid est veritas? What is truth?

No wonder the truth is an endangered species.

source: philstar.com

NIGHT DELIGHT | 'Supermoon' to grace Earth's skies

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - The largest, brightest full moon in nearly seven decades will be on display in the coming days, promising Earth-bound sky-watchers a celestial "supermoon" spectacle.

The full moon will come nearer to Earth than at any time since 1948, astronomers said. At closest approach, which occurs at 6:23 a.m. EST on Monday, the moon will pass within 216,486 miles (348,400 km) of Earth's surface, about 22,000 miles (35,400 km) closer than average, they added.

The moon's distance from Earth varies because it is in an egg-shaped, not circular, orbit around the planet.

If skies are clear, the upcoming full moon will appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than usual, making it what is called a supermoon, according to NASA.

A supermoon occurs when the timing of a full moon overlaps with the point in the moon's 28-day orbit that is closest to Earth.

About every 14th full moon is a supermoon, said University of Wisconsin astronomer Jim Lattis.

The next time a full moon comes as close to Earth will be in 2034.

"If you could stack up full moons next to each other, there is clearly a difference," Lattis said, but to a casual observer it is going to look very similar to a regular full moon.

Weather permitting, sky-watchers in North America and locations east of the International Dateline will have a better view on Sunday night since the moon will set less than three hours after closest approach on Monday.

"The difference in distance from one night to the next will be very subtle, so if it's cloudy on Sunday, go out on Monday. Any time after sunset should be fine," Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, said in a statement.

source: interaksyon.com

NASA to grow turnips on the Moon by 2015

WASHINGTON -- NASA is planning to grow plants and vegetables - such as turnip and basil - on the Moon, by 2015, to understand whether humans can live and work on the Earth's natural satellite.

The US space agency will deposit plants, on-board a commercial lunar lander, on the Moon's surface within the next two years, NASA said.

The initiative is being driven by the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team.

source: interaksyon.com

Quiet Sun prompts questions about impact on Earth

WASHINGTON DC - The surface of the sun has been surprisingly calm of late -- with fewer sunspots than anytime in in the last century -- prompting curious scientists to wonder just what it might mean here on Earth.

Sunspots have been observed for millennia -- first by Chinese astronomers and then, for the first time with a telescope, by Galileo in 1610.

The sunspots appear in roughly 11-year cycles -- increasing to a daily flurry and then subsiding drastically, before amping up again.


But this cycle -- dubbed cycle 24 -- has surprised scientists with its sluggishness.

The number of spots counted since it kicked off in December 2008 is well below the average observed over the last 250 years. In fact, it's less than half.

"It is the weakest cycle the sun has been in for all the space age, for 50 years," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association physicist Doug Biesecker told AFP.

The intense electromagnetic energy from sunspots has a significant impact on the sun's ultraviolet and X-ray emissions as well as on solar storms.

Solar storms can interrupt telecommunications and electronic networks on Earth. Sunspot activity can also have an impact on the Earth's climate.

Cycle 23 hit its maximum in April 2000 with an average of 120 solar spots a day. The cycle then wound down, hitting bottom around December 2008, the point at which scientists marked the start of the current cycle.

The minimal solar activity at the end of cycle 23 led astronomers to predict a slow cycle 24. But the reality fell even below expectations.

In the first year of the cycle, during which solar activity should have risen, astronomers counted 266 days without a single sun spot.

"The forecast peak was 90 sunspots," Biesecker said, noting that even though the activity has risen over the past year, "it's very clear it is not going to be close to 90."

"The sunspots number peaked last year at 67, almost half a typical cycle," he added.

The last time a sunspot cycle was this slow was in February 1906, the peak of cycle 14, with just 64 spots a day.

The "very long minimum: three years, three times more than the previous three cycles of the space age" was a major surprise, said University of Montana physicist Andres Munoz-Jamillio.

A magnetic switch

Cycle 24 has also diverged from the norm in another surprising way.

Typically, around the end of each 11-year sunspot cycle, the sun's magnetic fields switch direction. The northern and southern hemispheres change polarity, usually simultaneously.

During the swap, the strength of the magnetic fields drops to near zero and reappears when the polarity is reversed, scientists explain.

But this time, something different seems to be happening. The north pole already reversed its polarity several months ago -- and so it's now the same polarity as the south pole.

According to the most recent satellite measurements, "the south hemisphere should flip on the near future," said Todd Hoeksema, director of the Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University.

He didn't seem concerned about the phenomenon.

But scientists are watching the sun carefully to see whether cycle 24 is going to be an aberration -- or if this solar calmness is going to stretch through the next cycle as well.

"We won't know that for another good three or four years," said Biesecker.

Some researchers speculate this could be the start of a prolonged period of weak solar activity.

The last time that happened, during the so-called "Maunder Minimum" between 1650 and 1715, almost no sunspots were observed. During the same period, temperatures dropped sharply on Earth, sparking what is called the "Little Ice Age" in Europe and North America.

As the sunspot numbers continue to stay low, it's possible the Earth's climate is being affected again.

But thanks to global warming, we're unlikely to see another ice age. "Things have not started to cooling, they just have not risen as quickly," Biesecker said.

source: interaksyon.com

Scientists find farthest galaxy so far

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy yet, a discovery that pushes back scientists' view of the universe to about 700 million years after it is thought to have come into existence.

Light from the galaxy, designated by scientists as z8_GND_5296, took about 13.1 billion years to reach the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, both of which detected the galaxy in infrared light.

"We are learning so much about a region so far back in time it's hard to comprehend. This galaxy we're seeing is almost 13.1 billion years ago and so this was something like 8 billion years before our sun was even born and of course much longer after that until life came around," said lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor with the University of Texas at Austin.

Surprisingly, out of a pool of 43 candidate distant galaxies, z8_GND_5296 was the only one that revealed the key chemical evidence needed to confirm its distance.

That left Finkelstein and colleagues wondering if they had uncovered a clue to a bigger mystery: How soon did light from the universe's first stars and galaxies pierce an obscuring veil of hydrogen gas that existed early in its history?

Scientists believe that at some point, high-energy ultraviolet radiation from exploded stars split the intergalactic hydrogen atoms into electrons and protons. Once ionized, the hydrogen would be electrically conductive and no longer scatter light.

That may have happened about the time of z8_GND_5296's existence.

The galaxy, which is about a billion times as massive as the sun, has two unusual characteristics, which may be a factor in why it is visible, while potential sister galaxies are not.

First, z8_GND_5296 is forming stars at a very fast pace, pumping out about 100 times more stars than the Milky Way galaxy, so it may be brighter than the other candidate galaxies.

Second, it contains a surprisingly high percentage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Those elements are forged by nuclear fusion inside stars, so either the galaxy contains the exploded remains of lots of massive stars or it formed in a region of space that had been previously seeded with the remnants of a prior generation of stars, scientists said.

"It could be that this one galaxy lives in an over-dense region of (ionized hydrogen) so we can see it ... but that's a little bit of conjecture. For all we know these other galaxies have just a lot more hydrogen gas within the galaxies themselves and that's why we can't see them," Finkelstein said.

He and colleagues hope to conduct a wider survey for ancient galaxies with Hubble, but more details about z8_GND_5296 will likely have to wait until NASA launches its successor observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, targeted for launch in 2018.

The research appears this week in the journal Nature.

source: interaksyon.com

Asteroid to pass close to earth but no impact expected

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A small asteroid will pass closer to Earth next week than the TV satellites that ring the planet, but there is no chance of an impact, NASA said Thursday.

The celestial visitor, known as 2012 DA14, was discovered last year by a group of amateur astronomers in Spain.

The asteroid is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool at 150 feet (46 m) in diameter and is projected to come as close as 17,100 miles (27,520 km) from Earth during its Feb. 15 approach.

That would make it the closest encounter since scientists began routinely monitoring asteroids about 15 years ago.

Television, weather and communications satellites fly about 500 miles (800 km) higher. The moon is 14 times farther away.

Even so, "no Earth impact is possible," astronomer Donald Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters during a conference call.

The time of the asteroid's closest approach will be 2:24 p.m. EST (1924 GMT), daylight in the United States, but dark in Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia where professional and amateur astronomers will be standing by with telescopes and binoculars to catch a view.

DA14 will soar through the sky at about 8 miles (13 km) per second. At that speed, an object of similar size on a collision course with Earth would strike with the force of about 2.4 million tons of dynamite. The last time that happened was in 1908 when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over 830 square miles (2,150 sq. km).

"Although they wouldn't (cause) a global catastrophe if they impact the Earth, they still do a lot of regional destruction," said Lindley Johnson, who oversees the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

NASA has been on a mission to find and track all near-Earth objects that are .62 miles (1 km) in diameter or larger. The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.

About 66 million years ago, a 6-mile diameter (10 km) object smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico leading to the demise of the dinosaurs as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

The planet is regularly pelted with objects from space, adding up to about 100 tons of material per day, Yeomans said.

"Basketball-sized objects come in daily. Volkswagen-sized objects come in every couple of weeks. As you get to larger and larger sizes the number of objects out there is less and less, so the frequency of hits goes down," Yeomans said.

Something the size of DA14 can be expected to strike Earth about every 1,200 years.

"For objects of this size, this is the closest predicted encounter that we're aware of," Yeomans said.

source: interaksyon.com

NASA: Mars Curiosity Beams First High-Res Pic

In an almost giddy late-night press conference, the NASA Mars laboratory Science team celebrated the Curiosity Rover’s successful landing on a “nice, flat spot — beautiful, really beautiful” on Mars. It’s a patch of dusty land that’s since been immortalized in a couple of low-resolution thumbnails that arrived at mission control moments after Curiosity touched down. Now there’s a new pic — and Curiosity’s new home is coming into focus.

The image arrived early this morning, around the same time that the MLS team sat down for their first post-landing press conference. According to the NASA.gov web site, the image was captured with Curiosity’s fish eye lens (part of a pair of lenses) and is actually half of its full resolution capabilities. The camera lens was protected by a dust cover during landing, which has since sprung open. “The cameras are looking directly into the sun, so the top of the image is saturated. Looking straight into the sun does not harm the cameras. The lines across the top are an artifact called ‘blooming’ that occurs in the camera’s detector because of the saturation,” said NASA.

The landing “looked extremely clean,” said Dr. Adam Steltzner, Mechanical Systems Lead, who has been with the mission since its inception almost a decade ago. Steltzner’s been mostly unknown to the public, but in recent days the scientist has been thrust into the spotlight. He joined Twitter less than a week ago and has been tweeting a mission play-by-play and amassing followers ever since. This was his last tweet before finally grabbing some shut-eye:

John Holdren, the President’s science advisor and the director of Office of Science and Technology Policy, called the effort, “The most challenging mission ever attempted in the history of robotics space exploration.”

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden cheered the Curiosity landing, explaining that “new technologies never invented or attempted before were created for this journey,” and that the odds for success were actually just 40%.

“Curiosity, the most sophisticated Rover ever built is now on the surface of the red planet,” said Bolden, “where it will seek to answer age old questions about whether or not life ever existed there on Mars or if the planet can sustain life in the future.”

NASA, which recently shuttered its Space Shuttle program and has outsourced manned space flight to a consortium of private companies, including SpaceX, spent a reported $2.5 billion on the Curiosity mission. NASA funding has long been a point of contention for space program critics, and Bolden may have been addressing them when he added this impromptu comment during the press conference:

“Tonight, I’m probably not going to include the counties, at least 4 countries — and I won’t name them– who are on Mars, and they’re on Mars because they went with the United States. I know this may sound a little strange in this international environment, but I want everyone to understand what I say and what I mean when I say: Our leadership is gonna make this world better”

source: mashable.com