Category: Space

Kenneth Chang has the bad news at The New York Times (Gift Link):

NASA’s high-risk, high-reward attempt to save one of its space telescopes before it falls out of orbit has failed.

On Wednesday, NASA announced that a rescue spacecraft that was meant to grab onto the space agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and push it into a higher altitude will not proceed. With the rescue mission called off, Swift, which has observed distant, powerful explosions in the cosmos since 2004, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere later this year.

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This NASA document from 1979 is a wild look at how the space shuttle was pitched:

An unlikely looking flying machine stands on its tail above the watery, thicketed Florida sandscape. The time is the mid-1980s, and the Space Shuttle preparing for launch is one of a fleet of four that now plies routinely, about one round trip a week, between the United States and Earth orbit.

On average, the shuttle would fly once every three months or so, if you count the five years where it grounded for accident investigations after the Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003.

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A few days after a New Glenn rocket exploded on the launch pad, the damage left behind is coming to light, as Loren Grush writes at Bloomberg:

Photos of the blast’s aftermath reveal that the accident caused significant damage to the launchpad infrastructure in Cape Canaveral, Florida, destroying a key apparatus used to support and transport the rocket for flights and causing one of two lightning towers to collapse. Other hardware nearby also appeared considerably scorched. The explosion was so destructive that it generated seismic waves.

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Last night, the sky lit up over Florida’s Space Coast as Blue Origin’s big rocket — named New Glenn — exploded during an uncrewed static fire test at Launch Complex 36.

These tests are designed to test the rocket’s fuel system and motors by firing them when the rocket is clamped down to the launchpad. Thankfully, it seems that no one was hurt.

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Logan Kugler, writing in early April:

The computer system aboard the current Artemis II lunar space mission is from a different world that the one from the Apollo era. Apollo astronauts navigated to the lunar surface using a computer with a 1-MHz processor and roughly 4 kilobytes of erasable memory, supported by a larger store of fixed “rope” memory. While it was a marvel of 1960s engineering, the Apollo Guidance Computer’s functional scope was focused and not in the control loop for every system. Critical environmental and power controls were managed through manual or electromechanical means, such as switches and relays.

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Hank Green has made something really cool. Called the Artemis II Photo Timeline, it’s an interactive way to scroll through photos from NASA’s recent crewed mission to cislunar space — but pinned to NASA’s official schedule of the mission.

Nick Heer has more:

It is also a tribute to publicly available data. Though the timeline includes some videos published to Instagram and YouTube, the vast majority are images from Flickr. NASA usually uploads them with EXIF data intact, and Flickr preserves it. NASA also provided the mission schedule and, even better, has a public API for the position of the Orion spacecraft at any given time. Which means Green was also able to correlate the photos with where they were taken along the craft’s trajectory.

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Eric Berger:

The Artemis era well and truly began Friday evening when a shiny spacecraft that had traveled 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century.

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Tim Cook on X (gross), about iPhones being used on the Artemis II mission:

Congratulations to Artemis II on a successful mission! You captured the wonders of space and our planet beautifully, taking iPhone photography to new heights, and we’re grateful you shared it with the world. Your work continues to inspire us all to think different. Welcome home!

Joz chimed in on X (gross) as well:

Welcome home to the Artemis II crew! Honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone. One giant leap for space selfies.

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Stephen Clark at Ars:

Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule built up to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

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NASA is uploading a bunch of Artemis II photos to Flickr. This one, named Earthset, is a throwback to Apollo 8 in the best possible way:

Don’t miss this image of the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. We live in an amazing universe.

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Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY:

Before etching their names in spaceflight history, the four Artemis II astronauts received some posthumous words of encouragement from one of NASA’s greats.

Jim Lovell, who flew on two Apollo-era missions in 1968 and 1970, recorded a message for the astronauts before his death in 2025. They heard it before they became the first humans to fly near the moon in more than 50 years.

On Monday, April 6, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover of NASA, as well as Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, flew by the moon in a mission similar to the Apollo 8 flyby, of which Lovell was a part. And in a bit of serendipity, it wasn’t long before a nearly seven-hour period of lunar observations began that the Artemis II crew broke one of Lovell’s own records: surpassing the distance from Earth that the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission reached under Lovell’s command.

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What a contrast to what someone else said.

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