SpaceX's all-civilian Inspiration4 mission launches today! | NASA awards $146 million for human moon lander development | NASA astronaut gets extended stay in space for record-breaking 353-day mission
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SpaceX will launch theInspiration4crew, a team of four private citizens, on a veteranFalcon 9rocket from Kennedy Space Center here Florida tonight (Sept. 15) during a five-hour window that opens at 8:02 p.m. EDT (0002 Sept. 16 GMT). You can watch the launch live hereand on the Space.com homepage starting at 3:45 p.m. EDT (1945 GMT), courtesy of SpaceX. Netflix will also stream a live webcast of the launch countdown on YouTube beginning one hour before liftoff, andyou can watch that live here.
NASA is awarding a total of $146 million to five American companies to support the development of crewed moon landers, agency officials announced Tuesday (Sept. 14). The fixed-price, milestone-based contracts, awarded via NASA's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program, will fund work over the next 15 months.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will remain on the International Space Station until March, giving him a record-setting spaceflight. The mission extension, which was predicted before Vande Hei's abrupt launch in April, will see the veteran astronaut spend about 353 days living and working on the orbiting laboratory, according to a tweet the astronaut posted on Tuesday (Sept. 14). That will break the existing record for longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut: 340 days, currently held by Scott Kelly.
Today (Sept. 15) the Inspiration4 mission will launch into space. On board the custom-built, privately operated SpaceX Dragon capsule will be an all-civilian crew of culturally and socially blended people on a mission funded by a billionaire, designed to raise awareness and support for St. Jude Children's Hospital. Without a doubt, they are going to have the peak experience of their lives. None of them will be tourists.
With an increasing cadence, humans from multiple nations are rocketing into Earth orbit, and soon some will head outward to the moon. Given the boost in commercial and governmental flights, the chances of a stranded crew requiring an in-space rescue are on the rise.
Climate change on Earth — and the brutal repercussions it causes — might interfere with the search for life far beyond our own planet. The SETI Institute's The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in northern California is a vital tool for scientists monitoring for so-called "technosignatures," or the hoped-for signals of a technologically advanced civilization beyond Earth. Last week, on Sept. 9, the massive Dixie Fire came within 8 miles (13 kilometers) of the observatory, threatening its 42 antennas. Now, the fire seems to have stabilized and personnel hope that the radio array will be back to work within a month or so.
A six-year search of space beyond the orbit of Neptune has netted 461 newly discovered objects. These objects include four that are more than 230 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 149.6 million kilometers). These extraordinarily distant objects might shed light on Planet Nine, a theoretical, never-observed body that might be hiding in deep space, its gravity affecting the orbits of some of the rocky objects at the solar system's edge.
Hayley Arceneaux is about to become the first person with a prosthetic body part to enter space. She will be the youngest American to orbit Earth. And she may be the first astronaut to have shopped on Etsy to find some of her personal space gear.
The crew of the first-ever all-civilian orbital spaceflight is looking forward to conducting medical experiments during the flight that will help researchers better understand spaceflight's effects on the human body.
The first all-civilian mission to orbit Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to launch today (Sept. 15), and you can follow all the action live here.
Jupiter got whacked again. Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash on the solar system's largest planet Monday night (Sept. 13), memorializing the fiery death of a space rock high in the Jovian atmosphere.
The solar system's outermost planet, Neptune, is at opposition this week — here's how you can catch a glimpse of the distant gas giant. Planet Neptune reached opposition on Sept. 14 at about 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT), when Earth passed directly between the sun and Neptune, according to EarthSky.org. Opposition occurs when two astronomical objects — in this case, the sun and Neptune — are on opposite sides of the sky as seen from Earth. As a result of this cosmic alignment, Neptune will appear bigger and brighter in the sky than at any other time of the year (though you’ll still need a pair of binoculars or a small telescope to see it.)
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