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We could be just a month away from the first-ever Starship orbital launch attempt.

SpaceX will try to send its huge Starship rocket to Earth orbit for the first time in March, provided the vehicle checks a few more boxes successfully, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said over the weekend.

A science instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been switched off and on again by NASA engineers after the spacecraft was struck by galactic rays, according to the space agency.

A blog post reveals that on Jan. 15 the telescope’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument was impacted by high-energy radiation from outside our solar system, disrupting its communications equipment.

NIRISS is crucial to JWST because it can analyze the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. So far it’s helped find carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a hot gas-giant orbiting a Sun-like star about 700 light-years from Earth.

Elon Musk lost his claim as having the most powerful space-worthy rocket when NASA blasted its own mega rocket to the moon in November.

But the SpaceX founder could win back the title with his company’s next big project. Starship, SpaceX’s skyscraping rocket and spacecraft, will launch on its first mission soon. During the test flight, the colossal booster will separate about three minutes after liftoff and land in the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal filings (Opens in a new window). The ship will fly in space around Earth at an altitude of over 150 miles, then splash down off the Hawaiian coast (Opens in a new window).

Continue reading “Get ready: SpaceX Starship’s first launch is for real” »

Last year, space fans witnessed the long-awaited first test flight of NASA’s moon-bound Space Launch System rocket, but this year could see even more action at the launch pad, as a slate of new rockets look to make their debut.

“There’s a lot to look forward to,” said Colleen Anderson, a historian of technology at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “It’s going to be an interesting time with first flights for a lot of new launch vehicles.”

Continue reading “Bigger, faster, farther: A batch of new rockets is set to blast into space this year” »

Probably not but who knows in a million years?

Whether other universes are membranes floating in space, or a quirk of quantum mechanics, this is how physicists think we’ll traverse the multiverse.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V8cPdjO3a_U

Find out what the world will be like a million years from now, as well as what kind of technology we’ll have available.
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Timestamps:
0:00 No Physical Bodies.
1:51 Wormhole Creation.
2:44 Travel At Speed Of Light.
3:21 Type 3 Civilization.
4:52 Gravitational Waves.
5:46 Computers the Size of Planets.
6:56 Computronium.

Continue reading “Future World: A Million Years Later — Artificial Intelligence Tech That Will Change The Universe” »

It is “designed to use an inherently safe and extremely robust fuel form.”

The future of deep space exploration is near. Rolls-Royce revealed a new image of a micro-reactor for space that it says is “designed to use an inherently safe and extremely robust fuel form.”

The iconic engineering firm recently tweeted the image alongside a caption. It is designing the nuclear fission system as part of an agreement it penned with the UK Space Agency in 2021.

Continue reading “Rolls-Royce’s new micro-reactor design could send humans to Mars” »

New concepts funded by NASA may seem like science fiction, but they could change how we explore space. Some ideas include a space plane on a Saturn moon, self-growing bricks on Mars and telescopes that reveal invisible aspects of the universe.

An asteroid mining startup called AstroForge is preparing to launch two missions to space this year, Bloomberg reports — inaugural, albeit early attempts to extract valuable resources from space rocks.

AstroForge isn’t looking to actually land on an asteroid and start extracting materials just yet. Its first mission to space, slated to launch aboard a SpaceX rideshare in April, will involve testing out ways of refining platinum from asteroid-like materials in space.