Lifeboat Foundation

It is the first in a series of private launches that will culminate in the first crewed Starship spaceflight.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission will include the first-ever commercial spacewalk. The mission, funded and commanded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is part of the Polaris Program, a series of launches that will include the first-ever crewed Starship spaceflight.

The first of these, Polaris Dawn, was originally slated for late 2022. As is often the case with rocket launches, several factors have come into play, pushing the mission back to no earlier than March 2023, as per an update to the Polaris Program’s website first reported by Space.com.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s private Polaris Dawn mission could launch” »

Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

Continue reading “NASA telescope takes 12-year time-lapse movie of entire sky” »

Crew-5 includes a Russian astronaut and the first Native American woman in space.

SpaceX’s latest crewed launch has reached the International Space Station (ISS).

The Crew-5 astronaut mission launched at noon local time on Wednesday, October 5, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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The first spacecraft to explore the space beyond Earth orbit was Pioneer 4 in 1959. Twenty-five years later, in 1984, astronomers Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter…

In a breathless press release, NASA emphasized that their detectors all over the planet picked up on this, including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft.

Gamma-ray bursts are some of the most powerful releases of energy in the universe. Their causes may vary slightly, but typically relate to black holes. Some may be caused when merging neutron stars create a black hole, or when a neutron star and a black hole merge. Because they are so energetic, even a gamma-ray burst that originates on the other side of the universe will often be detectable by astronomers on Earth.

I recently wrote about how viscoelastic fluids can be used in liquid body armor to stop bullets. While spacetime isn’t a fluid in the traditional sense, it has many of the same properties. In particular, it deforms when a massive body or any energy at all passes through it. The spacetime manifold resists deformation and seeks to return to flatness whenever a massive body passes on. This property is elasticity.