NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor is carried to a medical tent shortly after she, Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev landed in their Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft near the town of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls)
NASA’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev touched down in the snowy steppes of Kazakhstan at 11:02 a.m. local time Dec. 20 (9:02 p.m. PT Dec. 19), leaving three crewmates on the orbital outpost.
The homeward-bound trio rode the same Soyuz they took up to the station in June. It’s the same Soyuz that experienced an air leak in August, causing consternation in space as well as back down on Earth.
Rocket fans in California may have been disappointed by tonight’s scrub of a Delta 4 Heavy launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, but they received a nice consolation prize: a fireball that left what looked like a contrail hanging in sunset skies.
The bright squiggle in the sky may have mystified some, but savvy folks who spotted the flash recognized it as the signature of an exploding meteor, also known as a bolide.
It was pure coincidence that the fireball flashed at 5:34 p.m. PT, just before United Launch Alliance called off the launch of a classified spy satellite known as NROL-71 for the National Reconnaissance Office, due to elevated hydrogen levels that were detected during the countdown.
Video views captured from cars traveling in locales including Sacramento, Stockton and the San Francisco Bay Area helped solve the celestial mystery.
NASA’s computer servers include the Pleiades supercomputer network. (NASA Photo)
NASA says it is reviewing its network security processes and procedures after a computer break-in exposed Social Security numbers and other personal information about the space agency’s current and past employees.
The breach was discovered in October, and its full extent and impact has yet to be determined. NASA says it will provide identity protection services to all those who have potentially been affected.
NASA Watch, an independent website founded by former NASA employee Keith Cowing, first brought the incident to light in a posting on Dec. 18 that quoted an internal NASA memo. The memo suggests that agency employees who were hired, transferred or left NASA between July 2006 and October 2018 may be affected.
An artist’s conception shows the Amazonia-1 satellite. (INPE Illustration)
Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s struck one of its biggest deals for a satellite launch with Brazil’s space research institute, focusing on putting the Amazonia-1 satellite into low Earth orbit in mid-2020.
The contract was awarded on Dec. 18 during a ceremony in São José dos Campos, attended by Brazilian space officials as well as Melissa Wuerl, Spaceflight’s vice president of business development.
Amazonia-1 is designed to make observations of Brazilian territory, with a special focus on the Amazon region, for the National Institute for Space Research, known in Portuguese as the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais or INPE.
It’s the first Earth observation satellite to be completely designed, integrated, tested and operated by Brazil.
A Tesla Model X electric car with retractable wheel gear sits inside the Boring Company’s test tunnel. The company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, says the apparatus turns the car into a “rail-guided train.” (Elon Musk via Twitter)
The Boring Company’s hole in the ground in Hawthorne, Calif., got a Hollywood-style debut tonight courtesy of the company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk.
Musk stood just outside a 1.14-mile-long test tunnel, illuminated in blue light, and spoke glowingly to a VIP crowd about how tunnels could turn the “soul-crushing” gridlock of urban traffic into a sci-fi experience.
“They’re sort of like wormholes,” he said. “You’re driving around, you think, ugh, I need to get to the other side of L.A., New York, whatever. Drop down the wormhole, pshew, pop out the other side and you just drive normally. I think this is, like, really a panacea.”
Tonight’s first tours served as a curtain-raiser for Musk’s Loop concept, which involves building a 3-D network of tunnels, elevators and ramps — and then sending autonomous electric cars equipped with retractable guide wheels zipping through those tunnels at speeds of up to 150 mph.
That’s a departure from Musk’s previous idea of using custom-built “skates” to carry cars and people.
Color-coded Doppler radar imagery shows where a tornado apparently touched down near Port Orchard, Wash. (NWS via @MorganKIRO7 / Twitter)
The Pacific Northwest is typically in the “bush league” when it comes to tornadoes, but the National Weather Service says a twister hit a grand slam today south of Port Orchard on Washington state’s Kitsap Peninsula.
Aerial views from Seattle television stations showed roofs ripped off houses, debris flying in the air and trees uprooted.
In a series of tweets, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office said the storm caused “catastrophic damage in the Port Orchard area.”
Vice President Mike Pence delivers remarks at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. (White House via YouTube)
President Donald Trump today authorized the Pentagon to set up the U.S. Space Command as its own combatant command, in preparation for creating a Space Force as a separate branch of the military.
The authorization for the Space Command came in the form of a memorandum that doesn’t require congressional approval. Creating the Space Force, however, is dependent on action in Congress — and with Democrats taking charge of the House, there’s a chance that the force may take a form different from what the White House originally envisioned.
Cost estimates for setting up a Space Force as the first branch of the military to be created since the Air Force’s birth in 1947 range from a few billion dollars to as much as $13 billion. Some policymakers favor less expensive alternatives — such as a Space Corps that would be created within Air Force, just as the Marine Corps was created under the Navy’s administrative aegis.
The funding round sets the California-based space company’s valuation at $30.5 billion, the Journal quoted unnamed sources as saying.
One source familiar with the terms of the round told the Journal that SpaceX and investors have agreed on the financing terms, but the money hasn’t yet been sent to the company. The investors are said to include existing shareholders as well as Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment firm that is the third-largest shareholder in Tesla, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s other big business concern.
Today’s report about the investment round came just weeks after SpaceX took out a $250 million high-yield leveraged loan, in a private deal reportedly managed by Bank of America. At the time, sources suggested that cash would go toward development of Starlink as well as Starship, the super-heavy-lift launch system formerly known as the Big Falcon Rocket or BFR.
An artist’s conception shows the distant object known as 2018 VG18 or “Farout.” (Carnegie Institution for Science Illustration / Roberto Molar Candanosa)
Astronomers say they’ve discovered the most distant body ever observed in our solar system, a potential dwarf planet that’s about 11 billion miles from the sun.
Its nickname? “Farout.”
The far-out object — which is also known by its more official but less colorful designation, 2018 VG18 — was detected with Japan’s 8-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii during a campaign to look for extremely distant solar system objects, including a hypothetical Planet X or Planet Nine.
Further observations to confirm Farout’s distance and determine its brightness and color were made with the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. The observations were reported today in a circular distributed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
Boeing’s board of directors has approved an increase in the company’s quarterly dividend. (GeekWire Photo)
Boeing Co. reported today that its board of directors approved a 20 percent increase in the company’s quarterly dividend, to a level of $2.055 per share.
The board also boosted its authorization for share repurchases from $18 billion to $20 billion.
The increases reflect Boeing’s optimistic outlook as the company gets ready to close the books on 2018 with a traditional year’s-end rush. As of Nov. 30, Boeing’s tally of commercial airplane deliveries came to 704, closing in on last year’s record of 763 deliveries. The 11-month tally for net orders stood at 690, compared with 912 for all of last year.
