Fifty-eight days ago, on a nearly windless morning on the Ross Ice Shelf, a stadium-size balloon took flight above Antarctica, carrying with it far infrared technology from the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory in search of clues about the stellar life cycle in our galaxy and beyond.

GUSTO—short for the Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory—has now broken the record as NASA's longest-flying heavy-lift balloon mission, which previously stood at 55 days, 1 hour and 34 minutes. Currently, the enormous zero-pressure balloon is riding stratospheric air currents 120,000 feet above the Antarctic continent, collecting far infrared radio emissions from the matter between stars. GUSTO surpassed the previous record at 10:22 a.m. Saturday Tucson time.

The faint terahertz signals that GUSTO seeks—with frequencies up to a million times higher than the waves emitted by an FM radio—are easily absorbed by water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere before they can reach ground-based telescopes.

On Wednesday, February 21st, at 01:40 p.m. PST (04:40 p.m. EST), an interesting package returned to Earth from space. This was the capsule from the W-1 mission, an orbital platform manufactured by California-based Varda Space Industries, which landed at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). Even more interesting was the payload, which consisted of antiviral drugs grown in the microgravity environment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The mission is part of the company's goal to develop the infrastructure to make LEO more accessible to commercial industries.

Founded in 2020 by former SpaceX employees and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Varda is part of a burgeoning space industry (aka NewSpace) that is taking advantage of the declining cost of sending payloads to space. In particular, the company's vision is to develop pharmaceuticals and other products in space and return them to Earth via their proprietary reentry capsules.

Think of meticulously handcrafted objects and certain things come immediately to mind: fine art, exotic cars, luxury timepieces.

But Pasadena native Steve Barajas spends his days building a bespoke item that's on another level entirely: NASA's Europa Clipper.

The 13,000-pound behemoth, with a solar-array wingspan the length of a basketball court, is one of the agency's most ambitious efforts. It's on an October countdown to launch to Jupiter and its moon Europa, atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, to find out if life exists in the deep ocean believed to lie beneath Europa's icy exterior.

The central body of the $5-billion Europa Clipper arrived in June 2022 at the Pasadena campus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the painstaking final assembly of components shipped from across the U.S. and Europe. That's where Barajas comes in.

Barajas, 35, is a mechanical engineer leading a team that, in coordination with other JPL specialists, installs crucial hardware for the ambitious mission. Barajas describes some high points with a parental flair: There's the magnetometer that could confirm whether an ocean exists beneath the Europa ice; the mass spectrometer that will analyze gases in Europa's atmosphere; the infrared cameras that will map the moon's surface composition, temperature and roughness; and the solar panels that will help power the spacecraft instruments.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has announced it will dispose of 100 Starlink satellites over the next six months, after it discovered a design flaw that may cause them to fail. Rather than risk posing a threat to other spacecraft, SpaceX will "de-orbit" these satellites to burn up in the atmosphere.

But atmospheric scientists are increasingly concerned that this sort of apparent fly-tipping by the space sector will cause further climate change down on Earth. One team recently, and unexpectedly, found potential ozone-depleting metals from spacecraft in the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer where the ozone layer is formed.

The relative "low earth orbit" where satellites monitoring Earth's ecosystems are found is increasingly congested—Starlink alone has more than 5,000 spacecraft in orbit. Clearing debris is therefore a priority for the space sector. Newly launched spacecraft must also be removed from orbit within 25 years (the US recently implemented a stricter five-year rule) either by moving upwards to a so-called "graveyard orbit" or down into the Earth's atmosphere.

Lower orbiting satellites are usually designed to use any remaining fuel and the pull of the Earth's gravity to re-enter the atmosphere.