Space

While airlines are paying aviation excise taxes that go towards the necessary air traffic controls during takeoff, commercial space companies like SpaceX — which require similar airspace safety measures around launches — are exempt.

According to Reuters, the White House has asked NASA to develop a plan for establishing a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) standard by the end of 2026.

The 3,200-megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera will help researchers address cosmology’s biggest questions, including the nature of dark matter and our solar system, by photographing the southern sky for 10 years.

That’s what Alejandro Otero’s about to find out now that NASA has collected an object that tore through his roof and two floors of his home. The incident happened at about the same time that depleted batteries ejected from the International Space Station were supposed to burn up in the atmosphere.

Scientists for the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration say the magnetic structure of the Milky Way’s central Sagittarius A* black hole is “strikingly similar” to the bigger singularity in the middle of the galaxy M87, writes Phys.org.

Weather services are reporting that people in northern Britain and as far south as the midwest in the US may see the aurora borealis on Monday night, as geomagnetic storms on the sun’s surface send particle streams toward Earth.

The mission will launch “hopefully the first of May,” according to Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, who was joined by fellow astronaut Suni Williams during a NASA press conference yesterday.

BurstCube is aboard SpaceX’s Dragon resupply spacecraft, which launched on the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Thursday. After it arrives and is unpacked, the shoebox-sized CubeSat will be released into orbit, where it will locate and study gamma-ray bursts linked to the gravitational waves that were first detected in 2016.

SpaceX already filed one lawsuit claiming the agency’s actions o (on a complaint about workers who say they were fired illegally for criticizing Elon Musk) are unconstitutional and now there’s this complaint issued Wednesday night.

Two diplomats (presumably Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, and Freekey Zekey were not all available) tell Politico that with the Ariane 6 delayed and Russia’s Soyuz unavailable, the European Space Agency (ESA) is using SpaceX to launch satellites for its Galileo global navigation system and have set up a special security deal to make it happen.

Leaked documents viewed by TechCrunch say SpaceX can prevent former or current employees from selling shares during a tender offer if they engaged in “an act of dishonesty against the company” or violated policies.

The Starship was reported “lost” before it could splash down after reentry as planned. but for a better look at the takeoff, the folks at NASASpaceflight put together a few different camera angles from this morning’s events.

Before the SpaceX broadcast ended, SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said, “the team has made the call that the ship has been lost, so no splashdown today.”

There’s no word on the status of Starship as the live video feed from the vehicle has ended for the moment, but you can see part of the reentry process in this clip posted by SpaceX.

As Starship reenters Earth’s atmosphere, the external cameras are capturing the heat and plasma field generated.

We’ve skipped over one planned element of this test flight, as the Starship 28 prototype continues on its way toward a planned splashdown.

SpaceX finished another test for this Starship flight and ended internal views from the flight. As the live broadcast continues, it has gone in and out as the vehicle continues to barrel roll in space on its way to a planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The next milestone for this flight test is a planned in-space relight of the Raptor engines, which is scheduled for 40:46 into the flight, or a about 18 minutes from now.

On the stream, we watched the return of the Super Heavy booster rocket after separation, which seemed to have partial success on some of its planned maneuvers as it came back to Earth. The commentators noted it “feel a little short,” of the plan, but didn’t go into detail.

The vehicle took off successfully and is now heading toward the “Hot-staging (Starship Raptor ignition and stage separation).”

As we wait to see if the Starship will launch, SpaceX posted this clip showing what the splashdown could be like.

The countdown just crossed T-10 minutes and counting.

If everything works out as planned, the Starship will attempt an in-space relight of its Raptor engines and eventually splash down in the Indian Ocean, as shown in this animation.

After the first two Starship tests went up in flames, SpaceX says it’s now attempting “a number of ambitious objectives” for today’s targeted 9:25AM ET launch, including:

If SpaceX attempts another Starship launch this morning, it now says the launch could happen about an hour and a half into the planned 110-minute launch window that started at 8AM ET.

The solid-fueled “Kairos” rocket carrying an experimental government satellite exploded just seconds after launching on Wednesday. The Space One startup had hoped to become the first private Japanese company to put a satellite into orbit.

Space.com points out this recent announcement that China and Russia are considering putting a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2035, linked to their plans for a joint lunar outpost.

This is the first successful powered flight of its reusable Talon-A TA-1 autonomous hypersonic plane, which it announced yesterday “reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5” during the test.

The Washington Post reports that Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia sent a letter to SpaceX on Wednesday night, expressing concern that the company “may not have appropriate guardrails and policies in place” to prevent Russia from illegally acquiring Starlink terminals.