SpaceX targeting Nov. 18 for next Starship launch | 'What's Starlink?' Trump talks Musk, Starship and SpaceX | Night sky for tonight: Visible planets, stars and more
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SpaceX's Starship megarocket will fly for the sixth time ever less than two weeks from now, if all goes according to plan. Elon Musk's company announced today (Nov. 6) that it's targeting Nov. 18 for the next Starship test flight, which will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.
President-elect Donald Trump had high words of praise for Elon Musk and SpaceX during his election night victory speech. In his remarks broadcast on Tuesday night (Nov. 5), Trump recalled watching the most recent and fifth flight test of SpaceX's Starship rocket as well as his conversations with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about the use of the company's Starlink satellites in North Carolina following the deadly impacts of Hurricane Helene.
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Look southwest after dark; you'll see a bright 37%-illuminated waxing crescent moon approaching two shining points of light due south. The upper point will be the ringed planet Saturn, and below it will be Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish, and just 25 light-years distant. At magnitude +1, it's one of the brightest stars in the night sky.
A tiny puncture discovered in the solar panel of a small satellite orbiting Earth highlights the seriousness of the orbital clutter problem. Lithuania-based satellite manufacturer NanoAvionics discovered the 0.24-inch-wide (6-millimeter) hole in footage captured by an on-board camera of its MP42 satellite, which has been orbiting the planet since April 2022. The satellite captured the image on Oct 24, and NanoAvionics released it on X on Wednesday, Oct 30.
We're about to learn more about the solar wind, thanks to NASA's newly launched Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX). CODEX is a solar coronagraph that arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday (Nov. 5) aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. A coronagraph is an instrument that blocks out harsh light from the sun, to better expose regions around the sun - such as its outer atmosphere, known as the corona - for direct observation.
SpaceX will boost the space station for the first time Friday (Nov. 8), as the company prepares to eventually kill the orbiting complex. A Dragon cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS) will fire its engines for 12.5 minutes on Friday (Nov. 8), NASA officials said at a press conference Monday (Nov. 4). Other spacecraft have done this before, but it will be a first for a SpaceX capsule -- and an important precursor to a bigger Dragon vehicle that will one day drive the ISS to its demise.
Christopher Nolan's sweeping outer space saga "Interstellar" turns 10 next month, and, unless your name is Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox, you might still be slightly puzzled by all the quantum entanglement plot points and time displacement narrative devices presented in that mindbending 2014 film. Nobody can argue that the movie's scope, visual effects and understanding of exoplanets and black holes made for a compelling, if not ungraspable, story of humanity's search for a habitable home after our Earth becomes barren.
