Tag: Space
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As leaks on the space station worsen, there’s no clear plan to deal with them
NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, still have not solved a long-running and worsening problem with leaks on the International Space Station. The microscopic structural cracks are located inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. After the…
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The Hubble Space Telescope has lost a majority of its gyroscopes
The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is running out of gyroscopes, and when none are left, the instrument will cease to conduct meaningful science. To preserve the telescope, which has been operating in space for nearly three and a half decades, NASA announced Tuesday that it will reduce the Hubble’s operations such that it will function…
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Here’s why a Japanese billionaire just canceled his lunar flight on Starship
On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other ‘crew members’ on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled. “It is unfortunate to be announcing that ‘dearMoon’, the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled,” the mission’s official account on the social media site X said.…
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Our only mission at Venus may have just gone dark
JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed Wednesday that it has lost communication with its Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around Venus. In its update, the space agency said it failed to establish communications in late April after the spacecraft had difficulty maintaining its attitude. This likely means there is some sort of thruster issue on the…
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SpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time
SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday. The highly anticipated test flight—the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft…
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Rocket Report: SpaceX focused on Starship reentry; Firefly may be for sale
Welcome to Edition 6.45 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting news in launch this week, to me, is that Firefly is potentially up for sale. That makes two of the handful of US companies with operational rockets, Firefly and United Launch Alliance, actively on offer. I’ll be fascinated to see what the valuations of…
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Daily Telescope: The initial results from Europe’s Euclid telescope are dazzling
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a…
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Daily Telescope: Black holes have been merging for a long, long time
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a…
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How Seattle science-fiction pioneer Vonda N. McIntyre blazed a trail for diversity
Seattle author Vonda N. McIntyre’s science fiction reflected an imaginative view of other worlds. (Illustration: SFWA / Microsoft Copilot / Media.io) Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects. “In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the…
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Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network sets up logistics site and training program
Students at Lake Washington Institute of Technology get hands-on lab training. (LWIT Photo) Amazon says it’s establishing a logistics facility in Everett, Wash., and partnering with a technical college in Kirkland, Wash., to boost the supply chain and workforce pipeline for its Project Kuiper satellite broadband network. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s $10 billion effort to…