Nasa chief Sean Duffy confirms 1969 landing was indeed real after US celebrity on TV show says ‘I think it was fake’
Nasa has rejected comments made by Kim Kardashian about the 1969 moon landing and confirmed that it did, in fact, happen.
During Thursday’s episode of The Kardashians, the Skims founder questioned whether the space mission ever took place while noting her interest in conspiracy theories.
Continue reading...SpaceX owner said Sean Duffy was ‘trying to kill Nasa’ after acting head said agency would reopen contracts for Artemis mission
Elon Musk attacked Sean Duffy, the US secretary of transportation, on Tuesday in a series of posts on X, accusing him of trying to “kill NASA”, suggesting he should be fired and calling him “Sean Dummy”. The posts intensified a long-running feud between Duffy, who is also the acting head of Nasa, and Musk, whose company SpaceX is central to the US space program.
Musk’s tirade against Duffy followed a statement from the transportation secretary on Tuesday that Nasa would reopen contracts for the agency’s Artemis mission to land humans on the moon, which SpaceX had previously secured. Duffy said that SpaceX had fallen behind on its timelines. Duffy suggested the contract might go to another billionaire’s rocket company, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
Continue reading...Maj Gen Paul Tedman says Moscow trying to disrupt UK’s military activities on ‘weekly’ basis and closely monitoring space assets
Russia is attempting to jam UK military satellites on a regular basis, according to the head of the UK Space Command.
Speaking to the BBC, Maj Gen Paul Tedman said Russian forces were actively trying to disrupt UK-based military activities “weekly” and were closely monitoring the country’s space assets.
Continue reading...The satellite will turn deep red as the Earth passes between the sun and the moon at about 7.30pm on Sunday
A rare total lunar eclipse “blood moon” will be visible from the UK on Sunday night for the first time since 2022.
The moon is expected to turn a deep, dark red as the Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting its shadow across the lunar surface.
Continue reading...Test flight comes after explosive failures raised doubts over founder Elon Musk’s goals to reach Mars and moon
Third time was the charm on Tuesday for the launch of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket after the launch had been scrubbed two times in as many days. The success of this 10th flight proved the spacecraft had overcome its past failures key to the Mars rocket’s reusable design.
The stainless steel behemoth, 403ft (123 meters) tall, lifted off from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas at 6.30pm local time (2330 GMT), to loud cheers from engineering teams, a webcast showed. This mission was to be a test of the ship’s new heat shield tiles and satellite deployment abilities, among hundreds of other upgrades from past iterations.
Continue reading...Flash of light visible for hundreds of miles was an exceptionally bright meteor, say experts
A huge fireball dashed across the skies of western Japan, shocking residents and dazzling stargazers, though experts said it was a natural phenomenon and not an alien invasion.
Videos and photos emerged online of the extremely bright ball of light visible for hundreds of miles shortly after 11.00pm local time (1400 BST) on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Chef with 10 Michelin stars has designed meals for Sophie Adenot’s trip to International Space Station next year
When the French astronaut Sophie Adenot travels to the International Space Station (ISS) next year, she will be heading for the stars – not quite in celestial but certainly in gastronomic terms.
Adenot will dine on not just freeze-dried space food staples but also French classics such as lobster bisque, foie gras and onion soup prepared specially for her by a chef with 10 Michelin stars, the European Space Agency (Esa) announced on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades delayed indefinitely
A chartered spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary’s first astronauts in decades has been delayed indefinitely because of leak concerns at the International Space Station.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) said Thursday that it had postponed the Axiom Mission 4 to the ISS to monitor the cabin pressure on the Russian side of the orbiting lab before accepting visitors. Officials stressed that the seven astronauts currently at the space station are safe and that other operations up there would not be affected.
Continue reading...Shubhanshu Shukla will be first Indian to reach orbit in more than 40 years as country works to join global space race
The first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station is due to blast off as part of an effort by the world’s most populous nation to catch up with the US, Russia and China in human space flight missions.
Shubhanshu Shukla, a 39-year-old air force fighter pilot, is one of a four-person mission launching on Tuesday from the US with the private company Axiom Space, which is using a SpaceX capsule.
Continue reading...A billionaire’s vendetta has threatened to cut off the US from the ISS and complicate national defense
After a year of effusive praise and expressions of love for each other, Elon Musk and Donald Trump exploded their political partnership in dramatic fashion this week. The highly public split included, among other highlights, the world’s richest person accusing the president of the United States of associating with a notorious sex offender. Trump said Musk had “lost his mind”.
As Musk and Trump traded insults, each on his own social network, they also issued threats with tangible consequences. Trump suggested that he could cancel all of Musk’s government contracts and subsidies – “the best way to save money”, he posted – a move that would have devastating consequences not only on the tech billionaire’s companies but also on the federal agencies that have come to depend on them. Musk responded by announcing that he would begin decommissioning the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that Nasa relies on for transport missions, although he later reversed the decision.
Continue reading...Resilience would have made history as the first non-US commercial lander to make a successful touchdown
An attempt to land a commercially built spacecraft on the surface of the moon looked to have ended in failure on Thursday, two years after its predecessor, launched by the same Japanese company, crashed following an uncontrolled descent.
Resilience, an un-crewed vehicle from the Tokyo company ispace, would have made history as the first non-US commercial lander to make a successful touchdown, scheduled for 3.17pm ET Thursday (4.17am JST Friday) at Mare Frigoris (the Sea of Cold) in the far north of the moon.
Continue reading...The planet will reach its maximum western elongation from the sun, making it visible in the early hours
Venus will reach maximum western elongation from the sun on 31 May. Maximum elongation means that it appears as far from the sun as it can, making it the most easily visible. The fact that it is to the sun’s west means that it is visible in the morning sky.
From the UK, Venus rises at about 03.15 BST, giving an observing window of about an hour from 03.30 BST. The sun rises at about 04.45 BST, and no observations should be undertaken once the sun is in the sky because permanent eye damage can occur from looking at its fiery surface.
Continue reading...Gen Michael Guetlein of Space Force will be in charge of defense system that could cost $540bn over 20 years
Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration will move forward with developing the so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system that he envisions will protect the United States from possible foreign strikes using ground and space-based weapons.
Flanked by the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, in the Oval Office, Trump also said that he wanted the project to be operational before he left office. He added that Republicans had agreed to allocate $25bn in initial funding and Canada had expressed an interest in taking part.
Continue reading...Residents – most of them SpaceX workers – in remote Texas community approve plan to create new city
Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted on Saturday to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.
A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica decided to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that will grant them the authority to pass city ordinances.
Continue reading...Kosmos 482, weighing 500kg, was meant to land on Venus in the 1970s but it never made it out of orbit because of a rocket malfunction
A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth.
It’s too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts.
Continue reading...Astrophysics team say observation of chemical compounds may be ‘tipping point’ in search for extraterrestrial life
A giant planet 124 light years from Earth has yielded the strongest evidence yet that extraterrestrial life may be thriving beyond our solar system, astronomers claim.
Observations by the James Webb space telescope of a planet called K2-18 b appear to reveal the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life.
Continue reading...Amy Schumer, Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn are among the famous names calling out the much-publicised space trip
The all-female Blue Origin rocket launch may have received plenty of glowing media coverage – but not everyone is impressed.
The stunt has drawn criticism from a number of female celebrities who were not keen on the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin NS-31 mission, which included Katy Perry, Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn and, in a twist straight out of Apple TV’s The Morning Show, CBS Mornings host Gayle King.
Continue reading...All-female crew led by Jeff Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sánchez lands in Texas after reaching the edge of outer space
Six women – including the pop star Katy Perry and morning TV host Gayle King – safely completed a trip to the edge of outer space and back from a private Texas ranch on Monday morning on a rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and commercial space flight entrepreneur.
The women, who also included Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, made the trip to the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space – to float about, weightlessly, in the rocket’s capsule for three minutes before returning to Earth.
Continue reading...Critics say Nasa faces ‘extinction-level event’ with budget plan, with climate research funding also to be slashed
Donald Trump shows no signs of easing his assault on climate science as plans of more sweeping cuts to key US research centers surfaced on Friday.
The administration is planning to slash budgets at both the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), according to internal budget documents, taking aim specifically at programs used to study impacts from the climate crisis.
Continue reading...Revolutionary scanner to be fired into Earth orbit this month to measure effects of deforestation
Scientists are about to take part in a revolutionary mission aimed at creating detailed 3D maps of the world’s remotest, densest and darkest tropical forests – from outer space. The feat will be achieved using a special radar scanner that has been fitted to a probe, named Biomass, that will be fired into the Earth’s orbit later this month.
For the next five years, the 1.25-tonne spacecraft will sweep over the tropical rainforests of Africa, Asia and South America and peer through their dense 40m-high canopies to study the vegetation that lies beneath. The data collected by Biomass will then be used to create unique 3D maps of forests normally hidden from human sight.
Continue reading...