On the heels of a predecessor saying otherwise, acting NASA administrator and The Real World alumni Sean Duffy says NASA will beat China to the moon, according to Julia Jester and Denise Chow at NBC News:
During an internal employee town hall Thursday, Duffy warned of “letting safety be the enemy of progress” when it comes to winning the new space race, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by NBC News.
When Jim Bridenstine was named NASA Administrator during Trump’s first time in office, many folks (including me) were worried that a Congressional representative from Oklahoma was a bad choice, but by the time he was out of office, I think most people thought he had done a pretty good job at shepherding NASA through a couple of rocky years.
In the years since, he’s been working in the private space sector, and was recently questioned on Capitol Hill about where NASA is in its slow motion return to the moon.
Richard Goldstein at The New York Times with some sad news for fans of the early space program or amazing stories in general:
James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of the three-man Apollo 13 spacecraft that survived a near catastrophic explosion as it approached the moon in April 1970, before safely returning to Earth in an extraordinary rescue operation, died on Thursday in Lake Forest, Ill. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Darice Lovell. He lived in Lake Forest.
I had lost track of this launch, but Stephen Clark has the details:
Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country’s first homegrown launch vehicle.
The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) Tuesday. Liftoff occurred at 8:35 am local time Wednesday at Bowen Orbital Spaceport, the Eris rocket’s launch site in the Australian state of Queensland.
If you’ve seen Tom Hanks’ Apollo 13, you surely remember the scene where a group of guys dump a bunch of junk onto a table to figure out how to adapt air-scrubbing canisters meant for the command module to work in the lunar module that was keeping the crew alive.
Ed Smylie lead the work that solved the problem, giving the crew enough air to breathe to make it home. His contraption was literally held together with duct tape:
On September 1, 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded while on the launchpad, leading the loss of an Israeli communications satellite:
In the weeks after the failure, it was reported that some at SpaceX (including Elon Musk) thought the accident could have been caused by a sniper firing at the rocket from the roof of a United Launch Alliance building a mile away. Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Eric Berger, we know just how hard the company pushed this theory with the government:
NASA’s new moon rocket uses a lot of components from the shuttle program, including the venerable RS-25 engine. Three were mounted to the shuttle itself, and the core stage of the SLS is powered by four of them. The next rocket — slated to take astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen to the far side of the moon — has seen a change of plans when it comes to those engines, as Stephen Clark reports:
I’m pretty content with my Apple Watch, but MY WORD LOOK AT THIS THING.
For all the crappy things that 2020 brought, the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory continues to sting. Since its demise, the failure has been under investigation, and a recent report sheds new light on what happened:
Long-term zinc creep-induced failure in the 57-year-old telescope’s cable spelter sockets was the root cause of the telescope’s collapse, the report says. Sockets filled with zinc held in place a set of cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. Gradually the zinc lost its hold on the cables and allowed several of them to pull out, leading to the collapse of the platform into the reflector.
SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts successfully performed a spacewalk, marking the first done by a private company. After depressurizing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the billionaire funding the mission, Jared Isaacman, emerged from the spacecraft early Thursday morning.
With his torso and head fully sticking outside the capsule, Isaacman performed tests on SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which are designed for increased mobility. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said during the spacewalk. “But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”
Boeing has a ghost in the machine.
Following weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: Two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in June will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.
“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the outset of a news conference on Saturday afternoon at Johnson Space Center.