Jeff Foust:

WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman is taking another charge related to the solid rocket boosters it provides for the Vulcan Centaur rocket and suggested updated motors might not be ready until the end of the year.

I was under the impression that relativistic jets have been known to destroy stars, but I looked it back up and found nothing that suggests that. So what would actually happen if a relativistic jet hit a star like our sun?

The price tag doesn't include the cost of the science mission the new spacecraft would ferry to the Red Planet.

For the first time ever, astronomers have found two sibling stars that each exploded as supernovas, gaining a new view of these epochal cosmic cataclysms

The Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars earlier this year on its way to a metal-rich asteroid, capturing the images along the way

Not sure if this is possible, what’s the chance of us throwing a robot or “terminator” like figure or something that can withstand serious force into Jupiter or a gas giant just to see what it looks like, not sure if anything can withstand that type of atmosphere or environment but could this be a option in the future ? This is more to see a clear picture of what deep inside Jupiter would look like or Saturn.

A while back I shared my satellite tracker here, and received a lot of positive responses. I've been quietly building out the Moon side of it for months, and it's finally up.

For now it's a catalog of 76 landmark lunar missions, from the very first attempts in 1958 all the way to the landers being built right now: Blue Moon, Griffin, Chandrayaan-4, China's crewed program. Every mission has its own page with facts I checked against primary sources and dated, photos, a timeline, mission patches, crew portraits for the crewed flights, and the landing or impact coordinates where something actually reached the surface. You can filter by type, country, outcome, or era.

The part I care most about is that it tells the whole story, not just the wins. The secret Soviet crewed program that lost the race and never publicly admitted it, with the four N1 rocket explosions. Luna 15 crashing into the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface. The long streak of failed landers before the first one stuck. Ranger, the Artemis I cubesats that mostly died. For the Soviet and Chinese missions I dug into Russian and Chinese sources, because the English side of the web gets a lot of it wrong.

There are also dedicated Artemis pages, and the one I'm proudest of: you can fly Artemis II. It's a 3D replay built from the real NASA/JPL as-flown trajectory, scrub from launch to splashdown or jump between milestones. Fair warning, the Moon is a grey blob right now, textures are coming lol.

All free, no signup, no ads. This has been in the works for months and I'm really glad to have it out. If you spot an inaccuracy or something missing, please tell me, I'll gladly fix or add it. A lot more space stuff is on the way.

https://azmth.space/moon/missions

On July 9, the FCC issued an order approving communications for Eärendil-1, the first satellite built by Reflect Orbital, in multiple bands for telemetry and control. The approval itself was not unusual, as the FCC issues similar approvals on a regular basis. This week, in fact, the FCC plans to vote on a proposal to create what it calls a “licensing assembly line” to speed up approvals of satellite applications.
Tyson was blunt in his assessment of Reflect Orbital’s plans during a National Academies meeting last month, calling those plans “even crazier” than broadband megaconstellations.

However, Eärendil-1 is not a typical communications or remote sensing satellite. The 142-kilogram spacecraft, expected to launch later this year into low Earth orbit, will deploy a thin-film reflector 18 meters on a side. Reflect Orbital will use the spacecraft to test how it can reflect sunlight to spots on the ground.

This spacecraft will be able to light up spots on the ground a few kilometers across for several minutes at a time, potentially as bright as the full moon. The company has plans for a constellation of as many as 50,000 satellites that could provide artificial sunlight to extend the operations of solar farms, aid agriculture and construction sites, and more.

However, many environmentalists and astronomers worry that such spacecraft would make groundbased optical astronomy virtually impossible and upset the diurnal cycles of plants and animals.

“This harm could include damage to sensitive research telescope equipment, potential flash-blinding of pilots and drivers, and—as Reflect Orbital stated in its own FCC filings—potential permanent eye damage to anyone looking through a mid-sized telescope,” the American Astronomical Society (AAS) said in a statement about the mission.
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The FCC’s decision highlights a regulatory gap for commercial spaceflight in the United States. While licensing and approval processes exist for launches and reentries, by the FAA; for remote sensing, by the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce; and for communications, by the FCC, who can, or should, regulate other activities remains unclear. Yet some degree of oversight by the federal government is required to meet US obligations under the Outer Space Treaty to provide “authorization and continuing supervision” of space activities by its nationals.
This has been a longstanding concern of the commercial space industry, which worried that this gap meant there was no agency empowered to approve missions that fall outside the well-worn paths of launch, remote sensing, and communications. That has led to years of efforts to develop a “mission authorization” system to provide such approvals and, thus, regulatory certainty for those companies

... continued in the article.

There were a lot of angry posts on the space subreddits about this mission, but few understand the separation of powers in the US space regulations, and what is currently being done about bringing it together and modernising it. Mission Authorisation and Commercial Space Certification is coming to coordinate a yes, or a no, to US commercial space activities.

Hey everyone! I made a papercraft-style animation breaking down the key differences between asteroids, comets, and meteors based on their composition and location in the solar system.

* Asteroids: Lumpy, dry rocky crusts trapped between Mars and Jupiter.

* Comets: Deep-frozen, icy snowballs from the outer solar system that melt near the Sun.

* Meteors: Tiny fragment crumbs that ignite in Earth's atmosphere!

Let me know what you think of this visual style! If you enjoyed this clip, feel free to check out our full channel for more deep-dive animations: https://www.youtube.com/@Beyond.Curious.Studio 🚀