Copernical Team
SpaceX has given up trying to catch rocket fairings—fishing them out of the ocean is fine
If there is one driving force in the commercial space industry it is economics. The whole concept of reusable booster rocket emphasizes the importance of getting launch costs down. SpaceX, the company leading the charge in trying to bring launch costs down, doesn't just recover booster rockets however. It also recovers the rocket fairings that hold the payload during launch. SpaceX's original plan was to capture the fairings as they fell back to Earth using specially equipped ships with nets to catch them before they landed in the ocean. Now, however, the company has transitioned to simply fishing fairings out of the ocean after they splash down, and that seems to be working just fine.
The economic motivation for attempting a fairing capture is simple. Salt water is corrosive, so if a fairing lands in the ocean it must be refurbished at a cost. Catching it before it hits the water would eliminate the need to refurbish it, thereby lowering the cost of reusing the fairing.
To attempt this capture, SpaceX commissioned two ships, named with their usual whimsical style: Ms.
Can a new type of glacier on Mars aid future astronauts?
On April 21, 1908, near Earth's North Pole, the Arctic explorer Frederick Albert Cook scrawled in his diary a memorable phrase: "We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice." These words may soon take on new significance for humankind in another dead world of hidden ice, submerged beneath the red sand of its frigid deserts. This dead world is Mars, and the desert is the planet's mid-latitude region known as Arcadia Planitia.
Pre-launch media Q+A with astronaut Thomas Pesquet
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ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is set to go back to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on 22 April 2021.
Watch the replay of the media Q+A session held on 19 April with Thomas (in English and French) to learn more about his upcoming Alpha mission to the ISS.
NASA spacecraft leaves its mark after grabbing asteroid Bennu samples
How space science is combating climate change
If you have been following International Space Station news, you know that hundreds of scientific experiments are performed in low-Earth orbit and the pace is only increasing. This is great news for scientists, especially those that have been preparing for years to send their experiment to the orbital outpost, but what does it mean for people on Earth?
If you are not into plasma nanoparticles, subjective time measurement in microgravity or traveling to Mars in the future, what benefit does space science have for you?
Potentially a lot. Experiments performed on the International Space Station could in fact help
Ingenuity helicopter successfully flew on Mars: NASA
NASA successfully flew the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars on Monday, according to data and images sent back to Earth.
"Altimeter data confirms that Ingenuity has performed its first flight - the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet," announced an engineer in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the control room cheered.
A short clip sent back by the Perseverance rover showed 
Celebrate Earth Day with ESA
At ESA, every day is Earth Day. As we humans continue to subject our home planet to increasing pressures, we are better placed than ever to understand and monitor the consequences of what we inflict. Astronauts onboard the International Space Station give us the human perspective of how beautiful Earth is, while satellites orbiting above return systematic measures to take the pulse of our planet 24 hours a day.
These measurements allow us to understand how Earth works as a system and how human activity is changing natural processes, leading to climate change. This information is fundamental to global climate
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Alpha poster How much autonomy can we give satellites?
