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☆ Branson's Virgin Orbit to pause ops, furlough nearly all employees - source
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-15 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

March 15 (Reuters) - Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit (VORB.O) on Wednesday said it was pausing all operations from March 16 and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the satellite launch company was also furloughing nearly all of its employees. Chief Executive Dan Hart told staff in a meeting that the furlough was intended to buy Virgin Orbit time to finalize a new investment plan to help pull the company out of its financial woes, according to the source, who attended the meeting. The duration of the furlough was unclear, but Hart said he would provide employees an update by the middle of next week on when they could return, the source said. In a statement to Reuters, the company confirmed the operational pause but it did not give details on the furloughs. Last month, Virgin Orbit said it was investigating the failure of its mission in January to deploy nine small satellites into lower Earth orbit (LEO) from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest England.

☆ OneWeb 'moves on' from Soyuz-stranded satellites as its network nears completion
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-15 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Dmitry Rogozin said at the time that his agency wanted OneWeb to provide guarantees that its satellites were not going to be used against Russia. But it has been unable to retrieve the satellites from their Soyuz launchsite at the Russia-owned Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The satellites are worth a combined $50 million, OneWeb chief executive Neil Masterson said Tuesday. OneWeb, which manufactures at least two satellites per day, had another batch of 36 satellites ready for launch soon after cancelling Soyuz, Masterson said. Asked if Russia's custody of the commercially sensitive technology raises security or competitive concerns for OneWeb, Masterson said: "It's not a material problem."

☆ Amazon targets 2024 launch of first Kuiper internet satellites
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit.

☆ SpaceX capsule returns crew of four from space station mission
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-12 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) - Four crew members aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down off Florida's Gulf coast on Saturday, returning safely from a five-month science mission on the International Space Station. The Crew-5 team launched from Florida on Oct. 6 to conduct routine science aboard the station. The mission was SpaceX's sixth crewed flight for NASA since its Crew Dragon spacecraft first flew humans in May 2020, when it restored crewed launches from American soil after nearly a decade of U.S. dependence on Russia's Soyuz program for space station flights. Kikina, the only woman in Russia's cosmonaut corps, was the first Russian to fly on an American spacecraft under a renewed agreement signed in 2022 between NASA and Russia's space agency to conduct joint flights. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, currently on the station, launched there on a Soyuz rocket in September.

☆ Japan's new rocket fails after engine issue, in blow to space ambitions
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-07 | by ( Tim Kelly | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/4] An H3 rocket carrying a land observation satellite lifts off from the launching pad at Tanegashima Space Center on the southwestern island of Tanegashima, Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan March 7, 2023, in this photo taken by Kyodo. The 57-metre (187 ft) tall H3 rocket lifted off without a hitch from the Tanegashima space port, a live-streamed broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) showed. But upon reaching space, the rocket's second-stage engine failed to ignite, forcing mission officials to manually destroy the vehicle. "This will have a serious impact on Japan's future space policy, space business and technological competitiveness," he added. A successful launch on Tuesday would have put the Japanese rocket into space ahead of the planned launch later this year of the European Space Agency's new lower-cost Ariane 6 vehicle.

☆ As space junk threat grows, government and investors seek solutions
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

And with no set norms for military space behavior, some fear a potential space weapon attack that could generate far more debris. U.S. Space Command on Friday released a formal list of what it views as responsible space behaviors, in a bid to steer military norms in orbit. The wide-ranging report includes a section on space debris that urges space players to dispose safely of their defunct satellites and notify other operators if any problems with their spacecraft might pose a debris hazard. Another part of the space debris mitigation equation is in-space satellite servicing, concepts in development by dozens of firms including Astroscale, Northrop Grumman (NOC.N), Maxar (MAXR.N) and Airbus (AIR.PA). Australia-based Neumann Space, for instance, is developing a technology that could help recycle old, defunct satellites into fuel - using the scrap metal to generate plasma thrust for new satellites.

☆ Virgin Galactic finishes lengthy spacecraft upgrades, plans Q2 commercial service
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

REUTERS/Joe SkipperWASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc (SPCE.N) has completed a lengthy upgrade period for its centerpiece tourist spacecraft, with commercial service on track to begin in the second quarter of 2023, the company said on Tuesday. This month, VSS Unity's twin-fuselage carrier plane VMS Eve made its first flight since 2021. Virgin Galactic is targeting monthly commercial missions after the Italian Air Force flight, a long-awaited cadence to handle the company's some 800 customers in line to fly. The company in February re-opened ticket sales to the public for spacecraft flights, setting prices at $450,000 per person with an initial deposit of $150,000. Each flight in space, over 50 miles (80 km) above ground, lasts roughly 10 minutes in microgravity, with VSS Unity launching mid-air from the center of its VMS Eve carrier plane.

☆ NASA to name solar scientist as agency's science chief, sources say
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-27 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - NASA has picked a longtime solar scientist who heads its heliophysics division to become the U.S. space agency's science chief, according two people familiar with the decision. Nicola Fox, former top scientist on the Parker Solar Probe mission studying the sun, will be named this week as NASA's associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate, said the two sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement. Fox will lead NASA's science directorate, a unit with an annual budget of roughly $7 billion that oversees some of the agency's best-known programs from the robotic hunts for past life on Mars to exploring distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope. Fox will succeed Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American astrophysicist who had led the directorate since 2016 before his retirement in December. Sandra Connelly, formerly Zurbuchen's deputy, has been leading the directorate in an acting capacity.

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday proposed a $175,000 civil penalty against SpaceX for failing to submit some safety data to the agency prior to an August 2022 launch of Starlink satellites. The FAA said SpaceX was required to submit the information, known as launch collision analysis trajectory data, directly to the agency at least seven days prior to an attempted launch. The data is used to assess the probability of the launch vehicle colliding with one of the thousands of tracked objects orbiting the Earth. SpaceX has 30 days to respond to the FAA after receiving the penalty notice. In 2021, the FAA revised SpaceX commercial launch requirements to mandate that an FAA safety inspector be present for every flight at its Boca Chica launch facility after the FAA said the company violated license requirements for a Starship launch.

☆ What's up there? Possible explanations for mystery objects downed by U.S.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Military officials say that until they are able to recover the debris, they are unlikely to know for sure what the objects were. Scientists use balloons to study wind patterns, air quality, and other aspects of Earth's atmosphere. STILL UNEXPLAINEDThe object downed over Canada on Saturday was described by Canada's defense minister as resembling a balloon. Senator Marco Rubio, leaving a classified briefing on the objects on Tuesday, told reporters that they are no different than the hundreds of benign objects cited in past intelligence reports. "We've never shot down anything in over 65 years of NORAD, and in one week they shot down three things," he said.

WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts. It was the third unidentified flying object to be knocked out of the sky by U.S. warplanes since Friday, following the Feb. 4 downing of a suspected Chinese weather balloon that put North American air defenses on high alert. "We're calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason, said VanHerck, who is head of the joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Air Force Northern Command. However, the government's effort to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects — whether they are in space, the skies or even underwater — has led to hundreds of reports that are being investigated, senior military leaders have said. But so far, the Pentagon has not found evidence to indicate Earthly visits from intelligent alien life, those officials have said.

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Blue Origin, the private space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was awarded its first interplanetary NASA contract on Thursday to launch a mission next year to study the magnetic field around Mars, the U.S. space agency and company said. Blue Origin has flown previous NASA missions with its smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket, which can carry research payloads on short, microgravity trips to the edge of space and back. Blue Origin, known for its astro-tourism business for wealthy customers and celebrities, is one of 13 firms NASA chose last year for its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare missions (VADR) program. VADR essentially is intended to spur private development of private space launch vehicles by assigning lower-cost NASA science missions to new rockets with an unproven record and higher chance of failure. Blue Origin also declined to discuss financial details.

☆ SpaceX test-fires Starship booster in milestone for debut orbital launch
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - SpaceX's towering Super Heavy booster, one half of the company's Starship rocket system, briefly roared to life for the first time on Thursday in a test-firing that puts the behemoth moon and Mars vehicle closer to its first orbital flight in the coming months, a company live stream showed. Thirty one of the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor rocket engines fired for roughly 10 seconds at SpaceX's south Texas rocket facilities, the company's Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted shortly after the test. Reporting by Joey Roulette Editing by Chris ReeseOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ SpaceX curbed Ukraine's use of Starlink internet for drones -company president
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - SpaceX has taken steps to prevent Ukraine's military from using the company's Starlink satellite internet service for controlling drones in the region during the country's war with Russia, SpaceX's president said Wednesday. Speaking later with reporters, Shotwell referred to reports that the Ukrainian military had used the Starlink service to control drones. SpaceX has privately shipped truckloads of Starlink terminals to Ukraine, allowing the country's military to communicate by plugging them in and connecting them with the nearly 4,000 satellites SpaceX has launched into low-Earth orbit so far. Governments including the United States and France have paid for other shipments of Starlink terminals on top of those funded privately by SpaceX. Starlink had suffered services outages in Ukraine late last year, for reasons SpaceX did not explain.

☆ Why Instagram Will Never Be Able to Compete With TikTok
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( Chris Stokel-Walker | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

TikTok's secret sauce is its ability to keep users on the platform, and without sacrificing its core, Instagram won't be able to compete. That's because on TikTok, every video a creator makes has to outperform every other TikTok video. Victim of its own successUnlike TikTok, Instagram has long been seen as a secure place on which to build a digital following. A year ago, when the researcher Valdovinos Kaye was interviewing TikTok creators for his book, he found that they desperately sought to transport their audiences over to Instagram. Rather than copying TikTok's success, Instagram might need to focus on what separates it from the pack.

☆ Explainer: What to expect during the green comet's encounter with Earth
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Nicknamed "dirty snowballs" by astronomers, comets are balls of ice, dust and rocks that typically hail from the ring of icy material called the Oort cloud at our solar system's outer edge. One known comet actually originated outside the solar system - 2I/Borisov. Comets are composed of a solid core of rock, ice and dust and are blanketed by a thin and gassy atmosphere of more ice and dust, called a coma. Its greenish, emerald hue reflects the comet's chemical composition - it is the result of a clash between sunlight and carbon-based molecules in the comet's coma. NASA plans to observe the comet with its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which could provide clues about the solar system's formation.

☆ Asteroid's sudden flyby shows blind spot in planetary threat detection
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-29 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

NASA for years has prioritized detecting asteroids much bigger and more existentially threatening than 2023 BU, the small space rock that streaked by 2,200 miles from the Earth's surface, closer than some satellites. If bound for Earth, it would have been pulverized in the atmosphere, with only small fragments possibly reaching land. But 2023 BU sits on the smaller end of a size group, asteroids 5-to-50 meters in diameter, that also includes those as big as an Olympic swimming pool. But with current capabilities, astronomers can't see when such a rock targets Earth until days prior. The successful demonstration, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), affirmed for the first time a method of planetary defense.

☆ A laid-off Google employee says she went to Disneyland to 'eat her feelings' after being locked out of her company systems
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Aditi Bharade | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

TikToker Nicole Tsai says she went to Disneyland to 'eat her feelings' after being laid off from Google. Sign up for our newsletter for the latest tech news and scoops — delivered daily to your inbox. The ex-employee, TikToker Nicole Tsai, said she was one of the 12,000 people laid off from the tech giant last Friday. According to her LinkedIn page, Tsai worked as a partner services program manager at Google in Irvine, California, since July 2021. She then decided to go to Disneyland, where she indulged in treats like churros, a teriyaki turkey leg, Rice Krispies, and a corn dog, snippets of the video posted to TikTok show.

☆ U.S. to test nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2027
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-24 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) - The United States plans to test a spacecraft engine powered by nuclear fission by 2027 as part of a long-term NASA effort to demonstrate more efficient methods of propelling astronauts to Mars in the future, the space agency’s chief said on Tuesday. NASA will partner with the U.S. military's research and development agency, DARPA, to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it to space "as soon as 2027," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during a conference in National Harbor, Maryland. NASA officials view nuclear thermal propulsion as crucial for sending humans beyond the moon and deeper into space. DARPA in 2021 awarded funds to General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin to study designs of nuclear reactors and spacecraft. By around March, the agency will pick a company to build the nuclear spacecraft for the 2027 demonstration, the program's manager Tabitha Dodson said in an interview.

☆ Moving species emerges as last resort as climate warms
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-17 | by ( Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +6 min

Moving species to save them — once considered taboo — is quickly gaining traction as climate change upends habitats. Concerns persist that the novel practice could cause unintended harm the same way invasive plants and animals have wreaked havoc on native species. “Climate change is causing a greater need for this — for taking a species outside its known historical range.”A pending change to the U.S. “In the future, some species’ ranges may shift due to climate change, or their current habitats might become unsuitable due to invasive species encroachment,” Armstrong said in an email. Humanity has been moving species around for centuries, often inadvertently and sometimes causing great harm.

The leak came from a tiny puncture - less than 1 millimetre wide - on the external cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule, one of two return capsules docked to the ISS that can bring crew members home. Russia said a new capsule, Soyuz MS-23, would be sent up on Feb. 20 to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22, which will be brought back to Earth empty. If there is an emergency in the meantime, Roscosmos said it will look at whether the MS-22 spacecraft can be used to rescue the crew. The U.S. agency said last month it was exploring whether SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft could offer an alternative ride home for some ISS crew members, in case Russia was unable to launch another Soyuz. Both NASA and Roscosmos believe the leak was caused by a micrometeoroid - a small particle of space rock - hitting the capsule at high velocity.

And while it’s still possible that some other modest pieces of legislation can be brought to a vote and passed in the House, the political dynamics inside the House GOP will make even the most milquetoast bipartisan and nonideological issues difficult to pass. Just for context — it’s been 100 years since an incoming House has failed to elect a speaker on its first roll call. It’s one that may, in fact, match the former president in malevolency and outpace him in ineptitude. Just look at what has taken place over the last several weeks in the lead-up to this week as Freedom Caucus members have been jockeying for power. To win enough votes for speaker, McCarthy has been hard at work horse-trading with the extreme right wing of his party to secure his speakership.

☆ MTG tears into the 19 Republicans who voted against McCarthy, calls their rebellion 'the worst thing that could possibly happen'
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-04 | by ( Tom Porter | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene addressed Kevin McCarthy's ailing bid to become House Speaker. "If the base only understood that 19 Republicans voting against McCarthy are playing Russian roulette with our hard earned Republican majority right now. This is the worst thing that could possibly happen," Greene, a Georgia Republican, wrote on Twitter. McCarthy is opposed by 19 Republicans from the hard right of the party, who are seeking sweeping concessions in return for their backing. The battle over the Speaker role has exposed deep divisions between Republican moderates who back McCarthy and the party's hard right.

☆ ‘Kaleidoscope’ Review: Episode Roulette
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-01 | by ( John Anderson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Very little about “Kaleidoscope,” the twisty eight-part heist series starring Giancarlo Esposito , Rufus Sewell and Paz Vega , is a mystery, per se, except perhaps why someone thought it was a particularly good idea. That said, once you’re in, you might not let go.

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