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Stratolaunch lifts veil on mammoth airplane

This view of Stratolaunch Systems’ hangar at Mojave Air and Space Port in California shows the massive airplane’s left-side fuselage and scaffolding. (Credit: Vulcan Inc.)

MOJAVE, Calif. – When you walk into the place where Seattle software billionaire Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems is building the world’s biggest airplane, it feels as if you’re stepping into the Starship Enterprise’s construction zone.

“It’s jaw-dropping when you walk into that hangar,” said Chuck Beames, Stratolaunch’s executive director and president of Vulcan Aerospace, during a rare tour last week.

The plane’s wing, taking shape inside a 103,000-square-foot hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port, stands three stories off the ground and measures 385 feet from tip to tip. That’s three times longer than the distance of the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in 1903. If the Enterprise is ever built to its “Star Trek” TV dimensions, now or in the 23rd century, the starship would be only a few dozen feet wider.

It doesn’t take long for the numbers – and the view – to boggle the mind. But there’s another side to the Stratolaunch saga: What’s Paul Allen up to? Stratolaunch is designed to serve as a flying platform for sending satellites into orbit, but who will provide the air-launched rockets? What niche will Stratolaunch fill alongside SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and other space companies?

Like the plane, Paul Allen’s vision isn’t quite ready for its full reveal. But five years after its founding, Stratolaunch Systems is providing glimpses behind the veil.

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Blue Origin live-streams test flight to space

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship rises from its launch pad. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Something went wrong during today’s test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, and the world was able to watch how it was handled online.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture intentionally disabled one of the three parachutes on the New Shepard capsule, and also introduced some added challenges for the vertical landing of the rocket-powered booster stage after separation. It’s all part of Bezos’ plan to test the safety systems thoroughly before putting people aboard.

Liftoff took place at 7:35 a.m. PT (9:35 a.m. CT) from Blue Origin’s Texas launch complex. “Beautiful launch of our New Shepard rocket here from West Texas,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said during Blue Origin’s live video coverage. The video stream was provided via BlueOrigin.com and YouTube. At its peak, more than 15,000 viewers were tuning in.

The test flight lasted about 10 minutes, sending the capsule to an altitude of 331,501 feet (62.8 miles, or 101 kilometers), Cornell said. The capsule separated from the booster as planned. Then the booster made a successful landing, and the two-parachute system brought the capsule down safely, just as hoped.

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Picture-perfect homecoming for space crew

A Russian Soyuz craft descends through the clouds toward its landing in Kazakhstan, bringing a U.S.-Russian-British crew back down to Earth. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

Three spacefliers from the International Space Station made a photogenic return to Earth today, touching down in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The landing marked the end of a 186-day tour of duty for NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, Britain’s Tim Peake and Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko. The homeward journey began when the trio’s Russian Soyuz capsule undocked from the station at 10:52 p.m. PT Friday, leading up to the parachute-assisted descent through partly cloudy skies a little more than three hours later.

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls and the European Space Agency’s Stephane Corvaja captured some classic scenes of the homecoming from a Russian recovery helicopter, and later from the ground.

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Blue Origin gets set for Father’s Day spaceflight

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says it’s all systems go for a live-streamed Father’s Day launch of Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard suborbital spaceship, after a postponement due to a leaky O-ring seal.

Blue Origin, the space venture that Bezos founded in 2000, is due to send New Shepard into space from its West Texas launch facility at 7:15 a.m. PT (10:15 a.m. ET) Sunday, Bezos said in a series of tweets. Each of the tweets included a reference to Blue Origin’s motto, “Gradatim Ferociter” (“Step by step, ferociously”).

The test flight had originally been scheduled for today, but on Thursday, Bezos said the faulty O-ring forced a delay.

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LIGO witnesses another black hole crash

An artist’s conception shows gravitational waves emanating like ripples in space time as two black holes approach each other in their orbits. (Credit: T. Pyle / LIGO)

t looks as if gravitational-wave watchers are in for a bumpy, beautiful ride. Scientists using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, have confirmed the detection of another merger involving two faraway black holes.

The observations, which were made last Christmas and reported today in a paper published by Physical Review Letters, support the idea that LIGO could open up a whole new branch of astronomy focusing on gravitational disturbances and black holes.

“It is a promising start to mapping the populations of black holes in our universe,” Gabriela Gonzalez, a Louisiana State University astrophysicist who serves as the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, said in a news release.

She and her colleagues say this smash-up was smaller than the first black-hole merger, which was observed in September and reported by the LIGO team in February. That clash involved black holes that were 29 and 36 times as massive as the sun. This one brought together black holes that were eight and 14 times the sun’s mass.

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Mirror molecules found in interstellar space

The propylene oxide molecules were detected in a massive star-forming region known as Sagitttarius B2, which is close to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy (noted as Sgr A* in this image). The white features in this composite image are bright radio sources. The background image is from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (Credit: B. Saxton / NRAO / AUi / NSF / NRL / SDSS)

Researchers say they’ve found the first evidence of mirror-image molecules in interstellar space – a discovery that relates to the chemistry that gave rise to life here on Earth.

The molecules of propylene oxide were detected in a huge cloud known as Sagittarius B2 North, about 28,000 light-years from Earth, during a scan that used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

Mirror-image molecules are notable because they come in left-handed or right-handed molecular orientations, like the molecules that serve as the building blocks for life on Earth. That “handedness” is known as chirality.

“This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life,” Brett McGuire, a chemist with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in a news release.

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Blue Origin will start live-streaming spaceflights

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lifts off for a test in January. (Credit: Blue Origin)

For his next trick, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos plans to have his Blue Origin space venture send its New Shepard rocket ship into outer space and back with one bum parachute on Friday – and live-stream the whole thing.

Allowing live video of a rocket launch and landing is old hat for the likes of rival billionaire Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, but Blue Origin has never done it before. Bezos’ announcement indicates that the once-secretive company is becoming more comfortable sharing its accomplishments with the public as they happen.

Friday will mark the fourth go-around for this particular New Shepard suborbital vehicle at Blue Origin’s West Texas testing ground. The first suborbital flight test was done last November, followed by similarly successful outings in January and April. Each time, a booster powered by Blue Origin’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 rocket engine sent an uncrewed space capsule to a height beyond 62 miles, the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

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Have aliens ever existed? Chances are set high

Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) listens for alien signals in the movie “Contact.” (Credit: Warner Bros.)

Are we alone? Fifty-five years ago, astronomer Frank Drake came up with an equation that weighed the odds for aliens, and now two astronomers have tweaked the formula to come up with a slightly different spin.

Their bottom line? There’s an astronomically high chance that other civilizations have arisen elsewhere in the universe at some point in its 13.8 billion-year history.

The University of Washington’s Woody Sullivan and the University of Rochester’s Adam Frank published their assessment in the May issue of Astrobiology, and Frank is following up with an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times.

“While we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history,” Frank writes.

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Elon Musk teases SpaceX plan to colonize Mars

An animation shows a lander separating from the rest of the Mars Colonial Transporter. Later concepts suggest that the entire MCT would land as a unit. (Credit: Michel Lamontagne / ESA via YouTube)

SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, is providing increasingly detailed previews of his plan to send colonists to Mars starting in 2024, more than a decade in advance of NASA’s Red Planet timetable. But there’s one part of the plan that’s not yet clear: how to bring people back.

“It’s dangerous and probably people will die – and they’ll know that,” Musk told The Washington Post this week. “And then they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will be very comfortable. But that will be many years in the future.”

The journey starts getting real in September, when Musk is due to lay out his detailed Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. “This is going to be mind-blowing,” he said. “Mind-blowing. It’s going to be really great.” (Careful, Elon … you’re starting to sound a little Trumpish there.)

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Atlas shows where you’ll miss the Milky Way

A Google Earth visualization shows the effect of light pollution on night-sky viewing in North America. Darker colors indicate lower light pollution, while warmer colors indicate higher levels. (Credit: Falchi et al., Science Advances; Jakob Grothe / NPS; Matthew Price / CU-Boulder)

Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from where they live, according to a new analysis of light pollution’s effect on the night sky. The global dark sky atlas, produced by an international team of researchers, suggests there’s only one spot in Washington state that’s untouched by the effect of artificial light.

“I hope that this atlas will finally open the eyes of people to light pollution,” Fabio Falchi of Italy’s Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute said in a news release. Falchi is the lead author of the analysis, published today by Science Advances.

The atlas is based on readings from the Suomi NPP satellite, which was launched in 2011 and is managed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suomi’s main purpose is to provide weather data, but it’s equipped with imagers that can pick up low-light readings at night.

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