Lifeboat Foundation

BERLIN — As SpaceX prepares for its next Starship test flight, a NASA official said that the use of that vehicle for Artemis lunar landings will require “in the high teens” of launches, a much higher number than what the company’s leadership has previously claimed.

In a presentation at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee Nov. 17, Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator in NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, said the company will have to perform Starship launches from both its current pad in Texas and one it is constructing at the Kennedy Space Center in order send a lander to the moon for Artemis 3.

SpaceX’s concept of operations for the Starship lunar lander it is developing for the Human Landing System (HLS) program requires multiple launches of the Starship/Super Heavy system. One launch will place a propellant depot into orbit, followed by multiple other launches of tanker versions of Starship, transferring methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the depot. That will be followed by the lander version of Starship, which will rendezvous with the depot and fill its tanks before going to the moon.

Sierra Space, one of the sector’s most valuable private companies, laid off several hundred employees and contractors this week, CNBC has learned.

A Sierra Space spokesperson confirmed the company let go of about 165 employees on Thursday, but declined to specify the number of contractors affected. Former Sierra Space employees told CNBC that the layoffs included a significant number of contractors, with the cuts including hundreds of personnel in total.

The laid-off employees received two weeks of paid non-working notice, plus four weeks of severance pay and health care benefits through the end of the year. Sierra Space had about 2,000 employees before reducing its workforce, the company spokesperson said.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket system is on the launchpad once again, preparing for its second test flight after a fiery explosion ended its first attempt in April.

United Launch Alliance has its missing rocket piece in hand at Cape Canaveral and all systems are go for a Christmas Eve launch to mark the debut of its Vulcan Centaur rocket.

A new Centaur upper stage arrived by barge to the Space Coast on Monday, a replacement for the stage ULA originally planned to fly on the Certification-1 mission this past May. That initial flight, already delayed for nearly two years, was again put on hold after an issue with a test version of the Centaur stage was destroyed amid a massive fireball in the spring, requiring design changes to ensure a repeat didn’t happen during actual liftoff.

“The path to flight 1 is clear,” said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno. “All we need to do is integrate the stage onto the vehicle. We do all kinds of system testing anytime we touch it, so we’ll have to pass all of that, get through the [wet dress rehearsal] and then integrate the payload, and off to space,”

SpaceX delayed its second test flight of a Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster to no earlier than Saturday (Nov. 18), to replace a rocket part.

The blue hue of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is seen inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland during recent thruster qualification testing. This 12-kilowatt Hall thruster is the most powerful electric propulsion thruster in production, and it will be critical to future science and exploration missions at the Moon and beyond.

The blue plume is a steady stream of ionized xenon gas ejected to produce low, highly efficient thrust. These electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds over time using only a fraction of the fuel chemical propulsion systems require, making electric propulsion an excellent choice for deep-space exploration and science missions.

Three AEPS thrusters will be mounted on the Power and Propulsion Element, a foundational component of Gateway. The small lunar space station is critical to the agency’s Artemis missions that will help prepare for human missions to Mars. The Power and Propulsion Element will provide Gateway with power, high-rate communications, and allow it to maintain its unique orbit around the Moon.

A robotic AI-Chemist@USTC makes useful Oxygen generation catalyst with Martian meteorites. (Image by AI-Chemist Group at USTC)

Immigration and living on Mars have long been depicted in science fiction works. But before dream turns into reality, there is a hurdle man has to overcome — the lack of essential chemicals such as oxygen for long-term survival on the planet. However, hope looms up thanks to recent discovery of water activity on Mars. Scientists are now exploring the possibility of decomposing water to produce oxygen through electrochemical water oxidation driven by solar power with the help of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. The challenge is to find a way to synthesize these catalysts in situ using materials on Mars, instead of transporting them from the Earth, which is of high cost.

To tackle this problem, a team led by Prof. LUO Yi, Prof. JIANG Jun, and Prof. SHANG Weiwei from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), recently made it possible to synthesize and optimize OER catalysts automatically from Martian meteorites with their robotic artificial intelligence (AI)-chemist.

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From the very beginning, warp drive has been a major part of Paramount’s Star Trek franchise for the simple reason that it explains how our characters can traverse the galaxy faster than the speed of light. Warp drive has changed a lot over the years, so we decided to see which ship would get from Earth to Jupiter quicker: the Enterprise NX-01 captained by Jonathan Archer, the Enterprise NCC-1701 captained by James T. Kirk, or the Enterprise 1701-D captained by Jean-Luc Picard. The answer is simple: Picard’s ship is the clear winner.

“JWST is revolutionizing exoplanet characterization, providing unprecedented insights at remarkable speed,” said Dr. Leen Decin.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful telescope ever built, continues to dazzle with its scientific findings both within and outside our solar system. Most recently, an international team of researchers used JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to analyze the atmosphere of WASP-107b, a Neptune-like exoplanet located approximately 211 light-years from Earth and orbits its parent star in just 5.7 days.

Using MIRI, the team identified water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and silicate sand clouds swirling around in the atmosphere of WASP-107b, which is considered a “fluffy” exoplanet since its mass is close to Neptune’s, but its overall size is closer to Jupiter, making it unique compared to the gas giants of our solar system. The findings were published today in the journal Nature.

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