The unstoppable force of SpaceX’s recent surge in development of its Starship vehicle for its first orbital flight is in danger of colliding with an immovable object: an ongoing environment review that has no clear end date.

A new additional radar called Amazonie-I installed at Pariacabo, a high point in Kourou, French Guiana, was tested during the recent Ariane 5 launch from Europe’s Spaceport.

Washington DC (UPI) Aug 3, 2021
The International Space Station spun around 1 1/2 times on its main axis last week when a new Russian segment of the orbiting platform malfunctioned, a NASA spokesman said, as new details emerged about the incident. "Mission control got alerts on the ground at the same time astronauts got an alert that the attitude [position] of the space station was changing," Dan Huot, a NASA public a

Ann Arbor MI (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
The rise of oxygen levels early in Earth's history paved the way for the spectacular diversity of animal life. But for decades, scientists have struggled to explain the factors that controlled this gradual and stepwise process, which unfolded over nearly 2 billion years. Now an international research team is proposing that increasing day length on the early Earth-the spinning of the young

McLean VA (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Iridium Communications reports that Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has approved regulatory amendments necessary to allow for Japanese adoption of Iridium Certus broadband, Iridium Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) and other aeronautical services for aviation and Iridium's Global Maritime Distress and Safety System service (GMDSS). Over the pas

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Rocket engines contain confined combustion systems, which are, essentially, combustion chambers. In these chambers, nonlinear interactions among turbulent fuel and oxidizer flows, sound waves, and heat produced from chemical reactions, cause an unstable phenomenon called 'combustion oscillations.' The force of these oscillations on the body of the combustion chamber-the mechanical stress o

Washington DC (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science announced a plan to provide $100 million over the next four years for university-based research on a range of high energy physics topics through a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA). The objective of this funding is to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. "High energy physics play

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
NASA's first spacecraft to explore the Trojan asteroids arrived Friday, July 30, at the agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. It is now in a cleanroom at nearby Astrotech, ready to begin final preparations for its October launch. The mission has a 23-day launch period beginning on October 16. Lucy will undergo final testing and fueling prior to being moved to its launch pad at Ca

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jul 30, 2021
Under normal conditions, pure water is an almost perfect insulator. Water only develops metallic properties under extreme pressure, such as exists deep inside of large planets. Now, an international collaboration has used a completely different approach to produce metallic water and documented the phase transition at BESSY II. The study is published now in Nature. Every child knows that wa

Bristol UK (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
New research led by the University of Bristol demonstrates that a decline in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 played a major role in driving Earth's climate from a warm greenhouse into a cold icehouse world around 34 million years ago. This transition could be partly reversed in the next centuries due to the anthropogenic rise in CO2. Between 40 and 34 million years ago, Earth's climat