Lou Dobbs, Space.com founder, dies at 78 | Space Quiz! What threatens the potential for complex organic molecules to persist on the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus? | This Week In Space: Apollo 11 and Looking Ahead
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Lou Dobbs, the distinguished political pundit, bestselling author, radio host and popular broadcast fixture on CNN and Fox Business News has died at the age of 78. Dobbs helped launch Space.com in 1999, served as Space.com's first CEO and one of its majority shareholders until 2001 when he stepped down from his post and returned to CNN.
On Episode 120 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik dive into the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, discussing the mission's highlights, challenges, and historical significance. They also cover recent space news, including Elon Musk's plans to move SpaceX's headquarters to Texas, the Falcon 9 upper stage failure, and the cancellation of NASA's VIPER rover mission. Looking ahead, the hosts speculate on the future of the Artemis program and the political landscape's influence on space exploration.
From a close encounter between Saturn and the moon to the Southern Delta-Aquariids and a good view of the Northern Crown, there is much to see this week (July 22 to July 28) using just your naked eye.
NASA says its next spacewalk will be delayed indefinitely until engineers understand more about what caused a coolant leak on June 24. Tracy Dyson, a NASA astronaut, had a brief spacesuit leak a month ago while still in the hatch of the International Space Station (ISS). She and Mike Barrett had just opened the door for a 6.5-hour spacewalk for maintenance activities, when showers of ice particles erupted from a spacesuit connection to the ISS. The spacewalk was suspended, but the astronauts were never in any danger, NASA has emphasized.
NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft may have dramatically ended its 20-year mission to explore Saturn's neighborhood seven years ago, when it plunged to into the gas giant, but it is still delivering the scientific goods.
SpaceX's privately-funded crewed mission, Polaris Dawn, is moving toward a launch sometime this summer. The four-person crew, which includes the mission's funder, billionaire philanthropist Jared Isaacman, recently completed acceptance testing for SpaceX's new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits, which they will wear as they become the first private citizens to perform a spacewalk on orbit.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC BY 3.0)
Scientists have long theorized that both Enceladus, one of Saturn's 146 known moons, and Europa, one of Jupiter's four large Galilean moons among its total 95 moons, could host vast liquid water oceans that harbor life. If this is the case, then complex organic molecules like amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of life as we know it, could serve as "biosignatures" of life on the worlds.
New York Times bestselling novelist Greg Cox is a household name within the Trekkie literary community who’s penned dozens of "Star Trek" universe novels and short stories over the years. Now he's back with "Star Trek: The Original Series: Lost to Eternity," a new 400-page trifecta of "Star Trek" movie-era tales arriving July 23, 2024, tied together with the common theme of an ancient extraterrestrial civilization and the reappearance of a fan favorite character from "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."
Where will we be in space in 2049? A look the next 25 years | Amazon Prime Day deals 2024: What to expect this year | Artemis backup astronaut Andre Douglas tries on sapcesuit
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The next quarter-century promises to be action-packed, with humanity taking ever-greater leaps into the final frontier - perhaps all the way to the moon and Mars. Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but let's do so anyway. Here's a look at a few of the big-picture spaceflight trends that seem set to unfold between now and 2049.
NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, recently named backup for the Artemis 2 round-the-moon flight scheduled for 2025, finished a standard spacesuit fit check in the agency's orange outfit. Douglas was named to the mission last month following a career in the U.S. Coast Guard and also the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL), where he served on spacecraft missions such as the asteroid-slamming Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021 and passed his basic training in March 2024. Weeks later, Douglas performed moonwalking simulations using spacesuit prototypes at the San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona.
The next El Niño Southern Oscillation can be predicted more than two years in advance, according to a new study that looked at thousands of years of past climate data.
NASA will perform its own re-authorization of SpaceX's Falcon 9 before the rocket launches its next astronaut crew or cargo mission, the agency confirmed Wednesday (July 17).
On July 13, which is Sol 1208 on Mars, the Perseverance rover's Right Mastcam-Z camera spotted an area with several rock formations during its daily investigation of the Red Planet's surface. It dutifully delivered a photo to Earth. If you look closely, as we did here at Space.com, you might notice that in the bottom left corner of the photo, there's a stack of rocks that resembles a baby snowman!
Summertime is usually a season where a cool dip in the water is a soothing affair, but after watching this new "Alien: Romulus" final launch trailer that just arrived from 20th Century Studios you might want to rethink sticking your toes into any sort of opaque liquid substance!