Around the World

Amazon to use rival SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets to deploy the first batch of its space-based internet satellites; SpaceX operates competitor Starlink, which already provides near-global coverage (More)

Israeli forces push south into Gaza amid US pressure to protect civilians; Palestinian death toll surpasses 15,000, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry (More)

Atmospheric river expected to drop month-worth of rain in Pacific Northwest over next few days; flood watches issued for portions of Washington state (More)

SpaceX to Launch 2nd Starship

SpaceX's next Starship test launch could lift off as early as Nov. 17, pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies.

The potential launch from SpaceX's Starbase test site at Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas will mark the company's second test flight of an orbital class Starship and Super Heavy booster — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX launched its first Starship test flight in April, but it exploded shortly after liftoff.

"Starship preparing to launch as early as November 17, pending final regulatory approval," SpaceX wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, late Friday (Nov. 10).  READ MORE...

NASA, SpaceX Sending Humans to an Asteroid

Recently, NASA developed a plan to send a crew of astronauts to an Earth-approaching asteroid, called Prospects for Future Human Space Flight Missions to Near-Earth Asteroids. The plan has its origins in a speech delivered by President Obama at the Kennedy Space Center in 2010.

Obama’s remarks were meant to quell a firestorm he created when he canceled the Constellation Program, the last attempt to go back to the moon. As a consolation prize, he proposed sending a crew of astronauts to an Earth-approaching asteroid before launching a crewed expedition to Mars. The new proposal, not yet funded, is an updated version of the Obama plan, using the SpaceX Starship instead of an Orion launched from a Space Launch System rocket.

The Obama proposal was not a serious one. It quickly devolved into something called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which envisioned diverting a small asteroid or maybe a boulder from an asteroid into lunar orbit, where it would be visited by an Orion with a crew. No one took the idea seriously.

Dr. Richard Binzel of MIT, one of the world’s leading experts in small, celestial bodies such as asteroids and comets, was especially scornful. Instead, he suggested a survey of Earth-approaching asteroids, some of which might prove to be a threat to Earth.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission died a quick and unlamented death when President Trump assumed office and started the Artemis program that redirected NASA to send astronauts back to the moon before sending crewed expeditions to Mars. Unlike previous attempts to return to the moon, Artemis has met with considerable technical and political success. Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission around the moon, succeeded brilliantly.

President Biden, soon after assuming office, made Artemis his own. A crew has been selected for the Artemis II circumlunar mission to take place no earlier than late 2024.  READ MORE...

Earth's Atmosphere Has a Hole

A space physicist has said it's "quite possible" that a SpaceX rocket launched earlier this month made a hole in the Earth's ionosphere.

The ionosphere is where Earth's atmosphere meets space and stretches roughly 50 to 400 miles above Earth's surface, Nasa said.

Jeff Baumgardner, a senior research scientist from Boston University, made the comments to Spaceweather. Ionospheric holes have become more common as record numbers of rockets are launched, the report said. The holes are temporary as reionization occurs when the sun rises.

A picture of the incident was captured by photographer Jeremy Perez on July 19 after SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from a base in California. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is a reusable, two-stage rocket designed to reliably transport people and cargo into orbit.  READ MORE...

China's Place in Space

China has claimed to outpace the US-based SpaceX by successfully launching the world’s first methane-liquid oxygen rocket into orbit on July 12.

A commercial Chinese firm, LandSpace, launched its Zhuque-2 rocket late Tuesday and made history as the first company to send a methane-fueled launcher into orbit.

According to state media reports, the Zhuque-2 carrier rocket, developed by LandSpace, took off from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 9 a.m. and successfully completed its planned flight.

The launch of the Zhuque-2 rocket by LandSpace marked the second attempt by the Beijing-based company following an unsuccessful first launch in December.

Nonetheless, the rocket successfully deployed a test payload into a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), becoming the world’s first to execute this remarkable feat.

Furthermore, this accomplishment propelled China ahead of its US competitors, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, in the race to develop carrier vehicles powered by methane.

Methane is considered a cleaner, safer, and more cost-effective propellant for reusable rockets, enhancing China’s position in the field.

Early this year, the Terran 1 rocket by Relativity Space in the US and SpaceX’s Starship experienced unsuccessful maiden launches in their endeavors to reach orbit using liquid oxygen methane propulsion.

LandSpace’s achievement also marks the second instance of a private Chinese company launching a liquid-propellant rocket, with Beijing Tianbing Technology successfully launching a kerosene-oxygen rocket in April.   READ MORE...

Google Starlink Partnership

Rumors that Elon Musk has bought Google persist, and are no more true now than they were a month ago, but it is certainly worth keeping up to date with SpaceX and Starlink’s partnership with the company’s cloud computing services.

In 2015, Google and Fidelity together invested $1 billion in SpaceX, meaning the partnership Elon Musk enjoys with the search engine and cloud computing giant has history.

The investment meant the Google and Fidelity together owned just under 10% of SpaceX.

“It’s no surprise that Alphabet is interested in space,” The Motley Fool wrote shortly afterwards. But what is at the root of Google’s partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink companies, and what could it mean for the future of the Internet?

WHAT DOES THE PARTNERSHIP LINKING ELON MUSK, SPACEX, STARLINK AND GOOGLE ACTUALLY MEAN?

In a nutshell, one of the key ideas behind the partnership is to affordably bring a fast and secure Internet connection to that part of the world’s population that can’t currently get online. That’s roughly 2.9 billion. When running, data will travel from Google cloud services to Starlink satellites and then to end users, bypassing the need for expensive cell towers and dramatically increasing coverage.

2.9 billion is a big number and represents a lot of people. The UN’s ICT arm published a report in late 2021 claiming that more than a third of the world’s population have “still never used the Internet.”

In May 2021, Google said it had signed a partnership deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX that would enable it to use the space company’s growing network of satellites, known as Starlink.

The deal will allow Starlink customers to use Google’s cloud computing capabilities while enabling Google to use Starlink’s fast Internet speeds for its cloud customers.  READ MORE..

Starlink and Hawaiian Airlines

Under the terms of the agreement, Hawaiian Airlines will offer SpaceX's high-speed, low-latency broadband internet service to its guests free of charge onboard flights between the islands and the continental U.S, Asia and Oceania. (Hawaiian Airlines)

Under the terms of the agreement, Hawaiian Airlines will become the first major airline to offer Starlink's high-speed, low-latency broadband internet service to its guests free of charge onboard flights between the islands and the continental United States, Asia and Oceania.


Hawaiian Airlines offers approximately 130 daily flights within the Hawaiian Islands, daily nonstop flights between Hawaii and 16 U.S. gateway cities, and service connecting Honolulu and American Samoa, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Tahiti.


Hawaii’s largest and longest-serving carrier will equip its Airbus A330 and A321neo aircraft, as well as an incoming fleet of Boeing 787-9s, with Starlink's service. Hawaiian does not currently plan to deploy Starlink on its Boeing 717 aircraft that operate short flights between the Hawaiian Islands.


Hawaiian and Starlink are in the initial stages of implementation and expect to begin installing the service on select aircraft next year.  READ MORE...

Trying to Buy Twitter

Tesla boss Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter, saying he is the right person to "unlock" the social media platform's "extraordinary potential".

In a surprise announcement, Mr Musk said he would pay $54.20 a share for Twitter, valuing it at about $40bn.  It recently emerged that Mr Musk was Twitter's biggest shareholder after he built up a large stake in the firm.  He said that if his offer was not accepted: "I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder".

Twitter's share price rose by 5.3% to $48.32 in early trading.

A filing with the US financial regulator appeared to show text and/or voice messages from Mr Musk to Twitter's board, showing that he had raised the idea at the weekend that the business should go private.

Mr Musk had been invited to join the board, but Twitter announced on Sunday he had decided against it.

In the messages published in the filing, Mr Musk said he was not "playing the back-and-forth game" and said of his offer: "It's a high price and your shareholders will love it."  He said he would have to sell his shares if the deal did not go through.  "This is not a threat, it's simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made," he added.

Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor, said: "This is a deeply hostile move from Elon Musk who has threatened to 'reconsider' his 9.2% stake in the company if his 100% acquisition offer is rejected."  In his filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr Musk said he had invested in Twitter because "I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.

"However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company."  He added: "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it."

Twitter said its board "will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the company and all Twitter stockholders".

Mr Musk is the world's richest man, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of $219bn mostly due to his shareholding in electric vehicle maker Tesla. He also leads the aerospace firm SpaceX.   READ MORE...

Back on Earth

A Russian film crew are back on Earth after wrapping up scenes for the first movie shot in space.

Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild left the International Space Station and landed in Kazakhstan - to be met by a crew filming touchdown scenes.

The ISS shooting was not without drama - suitable for a film called Challenge.

On Friday the ISS unexpectedly tilted after a glitch in its thrusters, pausing filming. It was not thought to be part of the script.

In a farewell tweet from the ISS, Peresild showed off a weightless hairdo likely to thwart any conspiracy theorists who think it was all shot on Earth:

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.View original tweet on Twitter

The movie has been in its own kind of space race - with Tom Cruise. He is apparently part of a Hollywood filming-in-space project involving Nasa and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The module carrying Peresild and Shipenko, along with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, parachuted down to Earth at about lunchtime on Sunday in the Kazakhstan steppe.

Their departure was not delayed by Friday's glitch, which resulted in lost positioning control for about half an hour.  READ MORE...

SEX in SPACE

Houston, we have a problem! Love and sex need to happen in space if we hope to travel long distances and become an interplanetary species, but space organizations are not ready.

National agencies and private space companies — such as NASA and SpaceX — aim to colonize Mars and send humans into space for long-term missions, but they have yet to address the intimate and sexual needs of astronauts or future space inhabitants.

This situation is untenable and needs to change if we hope to settle new worlds and continue our expansion in the cosmos — we’ll need to learn how to safely reproduce and build pleasurable intimate lives in space. To succeed, however, we also need space organizations to adopt a new perspective on space exploration: one that considers humans as whole beings with needs and desires.

As researchers exploring the psychology of human sexuality and studying the psychosocial aspects of human factors in space, we propose that it is high time for space programs to embrace a new discipline: space sexology, the comprehensive scientific study of extraterrestrial intimacy and sexuality.

The final, intimate frontier
Love and sex are central to human life. Despite this, national and private space organizations are moving forward with long-term missions to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon and Mars without any concrete research and plans to address human eroticism in space. It’s one thing to land rovers on another planet or launch billionaires into orbit — it’s another to send humans to live in space for extended periods of time.

In practice, rocket science may take us to outer space, but it will be human relations that determine if we survive and thrive as a spacefaring civilization. In that regard, we argue that limiting intimacy in space could jeopardize the mental and sexual health of astronauts, along with crew performance and mission success. On the other hand, enabling space eroticism could help humans adapt to space life and enhance the well-being of future space inhabitants.  READ MORE...

NOTE:
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Simon Dubé, PhD candidate, Psychology of Human Sexuality, Erobotics & Space Sexology, Concordia University

Dave Anctil, Chercheur affilié à l'Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA), Université Laval

Judith Lapierre, Professor, Faculty of Nursing Science, Université Laval