Tag Archives: space

Russian Nuclear Military Satellite Spinning Out of Control

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A Russian satellite, which US officials have linked to the country's nuclear anti-satellite weapons program, is spinning out of control.

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A top-secret Russian satellite, which US officials have linked to the country's nuclear anti-satellite weapons program, is spinning out of control.

As Reuters reports, the spacecraft — called Cosmos 2553 — appears to no longer be in service, indicating a major setback for the country's efforts to develop space weapons.

The satellite has been orbiting around 1,242 miles above the planet, inside a radiation-heavy band that other spacecraft tend to avoid. Satellite tracker LeoLabs told the outlet that Doppler radar measurements indicated Cosmos 2553 was moving erratically and possibly tumbling.

"This observation strongly suggests the satellite is no longer operational," the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in an assessment last week.

Nuke Bag

Last year, Russia denied US officials' claims that Cosmos 2553 was part of a greater effort to develop a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite constellations.

Cosmos 2553's exact purpose remains murky at best. A spokesperson for the US Space Command told Reuters that Russia's stated goal of testing instruments in a high-radiation environment was inconsistent "with its characteristics."

"This inconsistency, paired with a demonstrated willingness to target US and Allied on-orbit objects, increases the risk of misperception and escalation," the spokesperson added.

While we still don't know what exactly Russia's mysterious satellite is doing over a thousand miles above the Earth's surface, its erratic movements could indicate yet another black eye for Russia's troubled space program, as well as a strange inflection point in efforts to militarize space.

Our planet's orbit is becoming an increasingly congested domain for supremacy, with several superpowers, including Russia and China, working on anti-satellite weapons that could give them the ability to plunge adversaries into darkness.

Case in point, Russia conducted an unexpected anti-satellite (ASAT) test in 2021, drawing the ire of US officials. At the time, a missile smashed into a derelict Russian satellite, creating a massive debris field that threatened the lives of its own cosmonauts on board the International Space Station.

More on anti-satellite tech: US Military Alarmed by Russian Nuclear Weapon Platform in Orbit

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Russian Nuclear Military Satellite Spinning Out of Control

Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry’s "Space Trip"

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Those who tuned in to watch pop star Katy Perry launch in Jeff Bezos' rocket were left largely unimpressed.

Tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch a crew of six women, including pop star Katy Perry, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos' girlfriend Lauren Sánchez, launch to the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere.

The 11-minute mission — which the media breathlessly and erroneously described as the "first all-female space flight" — saw Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket take off from its facility in the West Texas desert, soaring to the very edge of the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.

To call it a revolutionary day in the history of space exploration would be a vast overstatement. While plenty of flattering things can be said about Blue Origin's engineers who developed and built a reliable rocket that has taken dozens of mostly rich people to the edge of space, today's charade was a mostly vacuous media circus.

Basically, it was a bunch of zillionaires enjoying a meaningless thrill ride, put on by the second-richest man in the world. No cutting-edge science, no meaningful victory for womankind — not even the kind of weightlessness experienced by astronauts on board the International Space Station as they orbit the Earth.

The timing in particular was not great, with public sentiment for the ultra-rich — who are currently plundering the federal government, being accused of insider trading on an unprecedented scale, and driving inflation and living costs for average Americans higher — reaching historic lows.

In particularly ironic context, Trump's new administration is forcing NASA to undermine the history of women's spaceflight by taking down web pages about women in leadership and comics about women astronauts.

As such, those who tuned in to watch today's event unfold were left largely unimpressed.

"??Leave them locked in there," one user pleaded in the chat of a livestream hosted by the Associated Press after the crew returned to Earth.

"Intense waste of taxpayer dollars," another wrote.

"Two days of training," one user argued. "I thought one needed to train for going into space for months!!!"

Meanwhile, the one percenters on board the capsule appeared emotionally shaken by their journey into space.

"So I didn't expect to be this emotional, but it's also all the love that was in that capsule and all the heart, and the feelings, and all the things, and like seeing Jeff [Bezos], I went like..." Sánchez said in an interview after stepping out of the capsule and kissing the dirt beneath her feet.

But the chat wasn't seeing it that way.

"??You have no idea what the world is going through… so disconnected," one user wrote.

Perry, who has already been on the receiving end of plenty of criticism for her Blue Origin thrill ride, also appears to have enjoyed the experience.

"I feel super connected to love," Perry said in an interview, beaming. "I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, like, how much love you have to give."

CBS News broadcast journalist and TV personality Gayle King, who was also on board the rocket, appeared to be aware of the ongoing narrative that billionaires were simply going on an extremely expensive thrill ride.

"What happened to us was not a 'ride,' this was a bonafide freakin' flight," a defensive King said in an interview, admitting that she went into it terrified of flying. "I'm so proud of me right now, I still can't believe it."

To King, it was a moment of self-reflection.

"And you look down at the planet, and you think, that's where we came from?" she said. "To me, it's such a reminder about how we need to better, be better. Do better, be better, human beings."

"People are dying, Gayle," one user in the chat wrote.

More on Blue Origin: Olivia Munn Disgusted by Rocket Blasting Katy Perry Into Space

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Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Space

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Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez say their trip to space was path-paving step for women — as NASA removes images of women from its walls.

Upon returning to Earth on Monday following her 11-minute trip to Earth's outer atmosphere onboard a Blue Origin spacecraft, pop star Katy Perry — still decked in her custom blue flightsuit and full-coverage glam — told reporters that her brief adventure in low orbit was for "future women." And "Earth." Or both, we guess?

"It's about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging," Perry gushed, explaining that she sang Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" whilst in orbit onboard the Blue Origin's New Shepard. "And it's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it."

"This is all for the benefit of Earth," she added.

Perry's word salad is, in part, a callout to the six-person flight crew's all-woman makeup, which has been central to the spectacle's framing. That's not an accident: the flight was organized by Lauren Sánchez, the former news anchor and helicopter pilot best known today as fiancée to Blue Origin's founder and the world's second-richest man Jeff Bezos, with Sánchez cryptically telling Vogue back in 2023 that the mission — then still in its nascency — would be "paving the way for women." (It was later revealed that Sánchez would be joined by Perry; the journalist and broadcast personality Gayle King; film producer Kerianne Flynn; civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen; and Aisha Bowe, a former aerospace engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.)

To be clear, Monday's flight didn't mark the first time that a rocket made it out of Earth's atmosphere without a man onboard. That honor belongs to Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who became the first woman in space after making a solo trip into the cosmos back in 1963. And while all these women are certainly accomplished in their respective fields, there's an insidious hollowness to the sweeping characterization of the flight as a great achievement for women that's somehow paving roads for aspiring future space travelers — particularly by Perry and Sánchez — that's deeply, and cynically, at odds with the way that new federal mandates about diversity policies are actively working to erase women's legacy in American space exploration.

As has been widely reported, NASA has been incredibly hard-hit by the Trump Administration's chaotic and widespread attacks on what it refers to as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Last month, the Orlando Sentinel first reported, NASA scrubbed language from a webpage about the agency's Artemis missions declaring that a goal of the mission was to put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon; just a few days later, NASA Watch reported that comic books imagining the first woman on the Moon had been deleted from NASA's website.

A webpage for "Women at NASA" is still standing, but pictures of women and people of color — astronauts, engineers, scientists — have reportedly been removed from NASA's real-world hallways amid the so-called "DEI" purge. Per Scientific American, the word "inclusion" has been removed as one of NASA's core pillars. And as 404 Media reported in February, NASA personnel were directed to remove mentions of women in leadership positions from its website.

These purges haven't just impacted the hard-earned visibility for women and minorities at NASA and across the American space sciences, whose work has been integral to the furthering of American space exploration. As The Verge reported last month, the administration's anti-DEI mandates — which intersect with ongoing confusion and chaos around federal funding cuts and layoffs, scientific censorship, and attacks on universities and research institutions — are wreaking havoc within the American space science landscape at large, threatening to make missions to space less safe.

"The 1986 Challenger disaster — in which seven crew members were killed when their Space Shuttle broke apart shortly after launch — was directly linked to a homogeneity of thought among NASA personnel," wrote acclaimed space journalist Georgina Torbett for the Verge. "The agency's lack of diverse perspectives fed into the tendency toward groupthink that contributed to the disaster, while research has shown that more cultural and ethnic diversity in groups leads to more creative and higher quality ideas — and lower risks for space missions."

Though Blue Origin and its most famous flyers repeatedly promoted the 11-minute journey as a push to get a diverse mix of young people interested in the sciences and achieving their dreams — Perry, for her part, told Elle Magazine for a pre-launch cover story that she hoped the trip would "inspire a whole new generation and make space and science glam" — nothing about the flight was particularly scientific or boundary-pushing. This was Blue Origin's eleventh successful space tourism flight. And while two of the flight's crewmembers do have backgrounds in STEM, as Amanda Hess noted in The New York Times, the crew's "central mission" wasn't to conduct science but "to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it."

"They are like payload specialists," Hess wrote, "with a specialty in marketing private rockets."

And then there's Blue Origin's founder, to which the supposedly historic all-women crew is inextricably linked. On the same day that president Donald Trump issued the executive order that caused NASA to erase its declaration that it would soon put a diverse group of astronauts on the Moon, and peel images celebrating the diversity of its spacefarers and scientists from its walls, Bezos stood — alongside several other billionaire Big Tech CEOs, together on prominent display — behind the returning commander-in-chief. (Several months before, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, killed the paper editorial board's endorsement of then-vice-president Kamala Harris for president, and has since reorientied its opinion pages in "support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.") Next to him was Sánchez. For the occasion, she wore suffragette white.

In case you're wondering, the space travelers didn't have anything to say about NASA's purge of material about women or the Trump administration's attack on science. Instead, speaking to Elle ahead of the flight, the crewmates discussed wearing makeup and doing their hair for the brief spaceflight.

"Who would not get glam before the flight?!" Sánchez told the magazine.

"Space is going to finally be glam," added Perry. "If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

In Perry's case, her vacant brand of empowerment feels sadly reminiscent of her recent refusal to address criticism of her decision to work with the music producer ?ukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald on her latest album, including to produce an attempt at a feminist anthem titled "Woman's World." In 2014, fellow musician Kesha Sebert — of "TiK ToK" fame — filed a bombshell lawsuit accusing Gottwald of drugging and raping her shortly after she signed to his record label at the age of 18, and subjecting her to years of "mental manipulation" and "emotional abuse" thereafter (Gottwald quickly sued Sebert for defamation, and the two parties finally settled the case in 2023 after a decade-long legal battle.)

When asked about working with Gottwald for her recent album on the popular "Call Her Daddy" podcast, Perry didn't seem to think it was a big deal.

"Look, I understand that it started a lot of conversations," Perry meekly responded, adding that Gottwald "was one of many collaborators that I collaborated with."

As Hess notes for the NYT, over 100 women have gone to space since Sally Ride's historic 1983 flight; even so, women remain deeply underrepresented in astronomy and space exploration. And to that end, going to space for the good of all women, or the "benefit of Earth," or even to make science "glam," are much better stories than "a centibillionaire and his fiancée said I could go to space on their penis-shaped rocket, I wanted to go, and I wanted to look good for it."

At best, Perry and Sánchez are cosplaying in ChatGPT-generated feminism, searching for excuses to paint billionaire-funded space tourism as something more than what it was. At worst, though, their framing of their mission as a path-carving, glass-shattering step for women obfiscuates the very real attacks on women and minorities across the American sciences that threaten the legacy of the real women spacefarers and scientists who came before Sánchez, Perry, and company — and in turn, the direction of the young women who dream of furthering American space exploration in the future.

More on The Perry Flight: Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry's "Space Trip"

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Zillionaire Girlbosses Astonished by Backlash to Their Frivolous Trip to Space

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The widespread backlash and criticism to Blue Origin's all-women trip to

Earlier this week, a crew of six women — including pop star Katy Perry, CBS broadcast journalist Gayle King, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez — launched to the edge of space as part of an 11-minute thrill ride organized by the Amazon cofounder's space company.

The vacuous publicity stunt — which claimed to make the crew of mostly uber-wealthy media personalities "astronauts" after a mere two days of basic safety training — drew plenty of criticism.

After all, apart from spending an obscene amount of money and rattling off cringeworthy statements about "making space for future women," the crew had little to contribute to science, discourse, or meaningful feminism.

Put simply, the collective eye-rolls the stunt induced could've been visible from space.

Yet the widespread backlash came to the surprise of crew members, who had allegedly been inundated by messages from inspired fans.

"Anybody that’s criticizing doesn’t really understand what is happening here," King said during an interview following the launch, as quoted by People magazine. "We can all speak to the response we’re getting from young women, from young girls, about what this represents."

Bezos' multimillionaire fiancée also said that the criticism got her "fired up," arguing that Blue Origin employees had "put their heart and soul into this vehicle" — while she laid down on a padded, reclining seat to rocket into space.

Several other high-profile celebrities took a swipe at the publicity stunt.

"Billion dollars bought some good memes I guess," actor Olivia Wilde wrote in a Monday Instagram post, as quoted by People.

"Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind," she argued, while hosting an NBC daytime TV show earlier this month. "What are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?"

Comedian Amy Schumer also skewered the trip in a video.

"Guys, last second, they added me to space, and I’m going to space," she said sarcastically.

Model Emily Ratajkowski had an even stronger reaction, noting that she was "literally disgusted" by the "beyond parody" stunt. In a TikTok video, she pointed out that while the optics of women of color going to "space" looked great on paper, the stunt had little to do with actual progress.

"Instead it just speaks to the fact that we are living in an oligarchy where there's a very small group of people who are interested in going into space for the sake of getting a new lease on life, while the rest of the population... are worried about paying rent or [providing] dinner for their kids," Ratajkowski said.

Other onlookers also noted the baffling demonstration of privilege by the ultra-rich.

"If Jeff Bezos can send Katy Perry into space, he can pay a wealth tax so every American has debt-free healthcare," educator and activist Nina Turner wrote in a post on Bluesky.

However, the widespread criticism appeared to have fallen on deaf ears.

"This is a freaking journey," a defensive King said during a post-launch interview. "It was not a joyride."

"I’m not going to let you steal our joy," she added while addressing her "haters."

More on the stunt: Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Space

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SpaceX Tourist Says Whole Crew Got Horribly Sick When They Reached Orbit

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SpaceX's Fram2 private astronaut mission was off to a rough start, with crew members throwing up due to space motion sickness.

SpaceX launched its Fram2 private astronaut mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Monday.

Soon after, a crew of four astronauts on board the Crew Dragon vehicle entered a highly unusual polar orbit, giving them a unique perspective on some of the most remote places on Earth.

But as crypto billionaire and mission commander Chun Wang reported in a tweet, the once-in-a-lifetime journey had a pretty rough start — highlighting a brutal adjustment period many astronauts have to endure when traveling to space.

"The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable," he wrote. "Space motion sickness hit all of us — we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times."

"It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea," Wang added. "You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting."

It's a particularly pertinent topic as more people — often with less training and experience — are traveling into space for prolonged periods.

The motion sickness proved severe enough that nobody on board asked to open the Dragon capsule's cupola, a large glass dome that allows passengers to gaze at the Earth below, which replaces the hatch used to dock to the International Space Station on the tourism version of the craft.

"We were all focused on managing the motion sickness" instead, Wang wrote.

The phenomenon, often referred to as "space adaptation syndrome," is a common problem for space travelers adjusting to weightlessness once in orbit. According to a 2006 study, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of astronauts experience space motion sickness.

Researchers have found that symptoms are usually the result of adaptation to a different gravitational force — not necessarily weightlessness alone — after finding that the same symptoms appear after spending more than an hour in a centrifuge on Earth.

Scientists are still looking for an effective treatment. While drug-based interventions have been proposed to mitigate symptoms, none of them have been systematically evaluated.

Other researchers are evaluating whether other interventions, like wearing a pair of VR goggles, could address the issue. In an experiment last year, a team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder found that duplicating the motion of the spacecraft inside VR — essentially a "virtual window" to the outside — could reduce moderate symptoms of motion sickness.

Fortunately, even without extensive countermeasures, many of these symptoms can go away on their own.

After sleeping "really well," Wang recounted that he "felt completely refreshed. The trace of motion sickness is all gone."

"We had breakfast, took a few X-ray images, and opened the cupola three minutes after midnight UTC — right above the South Pole," he added.

The Fram2 crew is expected to spend up to five days in orbit, ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, which is a first for a SpaceX astronaut mission, according to Space.com.

More on the mission: SpaceX Launching First-Ever Astronauts Over Earth's Poles Tonight

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Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He’s Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You’re Thinking"

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SpaceX's new Fram2 mission is experimenting with growing mushrooms in microgravity — but not the magic kind.

A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before.

We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved.

Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight of its kind, the four-person team launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first-ever civilian mission flying over Earth's poles.

Chartered by Chun — and, of course, greenlit by SpaceX owner and resident White House psychonaut Elon Musk — the four-person crew launched on March 31 and are currently in orbit, working on nearly two dozen scientific experiments they have planned for their short journey.

Among them, as Ars noted, is the plan to become the first mushroom growers in space — but "they’re not the ones you’re thinking," Philips told the website. Instead, per a Fram2 statement released ahead of the launch, they'll be growing delectable oyster mushrooms.

FOODiQ Global, the Australian company behind the "Mission MushVroom" experiment aboard Fram2, said in the press release that "oyster mushrooms are the perfect space crop" because they grow rapidly and have tons of nutrients. They even have "the unique ability to make vitamin D," the statement noted.

Along with all those nutritional benefits, those yummy shrooms will almost certainly taste better than space food — if top space minds can figure out a way to cook them in orbit, that is.

In an op-ed for Business Insider, FOODiQ founder and CEO Flávia Fayet-Moore said that she identified mushrooms as an ideal in-orbit crop, particularly for years-long missions to Mars and other planets.

"Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years?" the space nutritionist — yes, that is apparently a real thing — wrote. "I can't."

We won't know how well the shrooms grew in microgravity until Fram2 gets back to Earth this week.

More on space life: Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals

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Elon Musk’s "Charity" Is Hoarding Money Instead of Giving It to the Needy

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Elon Musk's charity is falling short of the minimum amount of money it is supposed to giveaway by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Miser

The holidays may be approaching, but it appears that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is remaining a total scrooge.

The New York Times reports that the centibillionaire's charity, the Musk Foundation, failed to give away the minimum amount of money it was supposed to last year by a stupendous margin of $421 million.

This continues Musk's pattern of shadily managing his ostensibly philanthropic efforts, such as when he made it seem like he was donating billions of dollars to the United Nations to combat world hunger but instead funneled that money to his own charity.

Now, if Musk doesn't give away that sum by the end of 2024, he will be forced to pay a "sizable penalty" to the Internal Revenue Service, according to NYT's reporting.

Pocket Change

According to the NYT, Musk's charity has increasingly fallen behind on payments despite possessing some $9 billion in assets today. It was $41 million short in 2021, $234 million in 2022, and is now approaching half a billion this year.

He's made up for those shortfalls so far by paying late, but only barely. "The distributions made by the foundation are meeting the bare minimum to avoid penalties," Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at the Ohio State University, told the NYT. "It is clear that the organization is not in a hurry to spend its money."

The newspaper notes that other charitable foundations have fallen short of the IRS's minimum by millions of dollars, but that Musk's is an anomaly even among those because of the staggering sum it has to pay and the rate at which that shortfall is increasing.

And there are other shady facets of the organization, the NYT found. It's never hired employees, and its three directors — Musk is one of them — have spent just two hours per week at the foundation over the past three years.

In the cases where it has actually given away money, it has often gone to organizations with close ties to Musk. In 2023, he made a $137 million donation to a nonprofit called The Foundation run by several of Musk's close associates, which operates a private school in Texas close to where several of Musk's businesses are based and where he plans to build a large subdivision for his employees.

Tax Attack

Ultra-wealthy figures have long used philanthropic organizations as a refuge from the treasury department, taking advantage of their generous tax breaks. That's nothing new.

But this dodgy charity management is especially hypocritical behavior from Musk, who has championed increased scrutiny into how government funds are spent and has proposed slashing trillions of dollars in federal expenditures through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which will be formed as part of the incoming Trump administration.

One of his chief targets, unsurprisingly, has been the IRS. Musk recently suggested "deleting" the federal agency, while consistently calling for the hollowing out of others. Even before his DOGE crusade and overt rightward turn, Musk has groused publicly about government tax men and spread obvious falsities about the IRS.

For someone so concerned about scrupulous spending, then, it seems that Musk can be quite underhanded with how he spends his fortune.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Gloats as Trump Announces Billionaires Will Be Exempt From Normal Environmental Rules

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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

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Footage shows SpaceX crews retrieving debris belonging to the upper stage of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket.

Breaking Things

There's always something you can learn from failure. Sometimes failure looks like your rocket blowing up after crashing into the ocean — but it's a learning opportunity nonetheless.

In the case of SpaceX, that means retrieving the watery remains of said rocket, Starship, to determine what went wrong during the less-than-perfect performance of its latest suborbital test flight. And so SpaceX employees traveled to the waters off the western coast of Australia, where the rocket's upper stage splashed down, to collect the debris.

These were the findings of SpaceX-focused content creator Interstellar Gateway, which gathered footage of the crews dredging up some of the spacecraft's hardware, including heat shield tiles and various tanks.

But there could be more than meets the eye. Based on Interstellar Gateway's sleuthing, the next retrieval mission could bring back the entire spacecraft in one piece.

"This was the first flight we've seen a vessel rigged specifically for towing... leading us to the realization that they may be attempting to return Starship back to port," Interstellar Gateway told Gizmodo. "Upon our investigation during their port operations, we noticed all of the needed lines and rigging materials needed to pull Starship back, as well as a staging area prepped with a crane, ready to remove Starship from the water."

Explosive Progress

SpaceX stunned the world with its fifth orbital flight test of Starship in October. After reaching space, the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, made a controlled descent down to the Earth's surface, guiding itself back to its launch tower where it was caught midair by a pair of mechanical arms — an astonishingly precise feat of engineering.

The rocket couldn't repeat the feat, however, during its latest test in November. Just four minutes into the flight, SpaceX had to call off the booster catch, forcing the rocket to make a rough splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it immediately exploded into flames.

By contrast, the upper stage, the Starship spacecraft itself, demonstrated it could relight one of its engines in space and made a much softer, controlled splashdown in the ocean. Still, it did catch fire and fall apart after the landing, though nowhere near as dramatically as with the booster.

Safe and Sound

Besides the reusability factor, there's a huge incentive for SpaceX to recover the Starship spacecraft in one piece.

"There is only so much data SpaceX can get from Starship via StarLink transmissions as it has always sank shortly after splashdown," Interstellar Gateway told Giz. "Similar to the valuable data being used from the first caught and intact booster, there are tons of structural and out of view faults that can be found from an intact Starship returning to land."

With any luck, that'll soon be the case. The next Starship launch is reportedly slated for no earlier than January 11 next year — so keep an eye out.

More on Starship: Video Shows Robot Welding SpaceX Starship

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Fusion Startup Conducts Strange Ceremony Involving Woman With Wires Coming Out of Her Back

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Spectacular Oracular

Earlier this year in a Silicon Valley warehouse, a nuclear fusion startup held a strange secret ceremony that featured, among other things, a bunch of giant capacitors and a woman with wires attached to her back playing piano alongside a robotic arm.

As Wired reports, attendees at the event hosted by the nuclear fusion startup Fuse included military and intelligence officials, venture capitalists, San Francisco art types, physicists, musicians both robotic and human — and, well, Grimes.

"Grace and luck came together in a freak wave, and people were moved," virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier wrote for the magazine. "Grimes was there, gaggle of kids orbiting her on the floor, transfixed. One said this must be what monsters listen to."

Hosted by the supermodel musician Charlotte Kemp Muhl — a multi-hyphenate powerhouse currently touring with St. Vincent and in a long-term relationship with Lanier's old friend Sean Ono Lennon — the event seems ostensibly meant to showcase to potential backers the kinds of people Fure has in its orbit.

Among them is Serene, the self-described hacker pianist attached to biofeedback wires during the ceremony who also happened to create Snowflake, the free internet module inside the Tor browser. Together, she and Muhl launched Finis Musicae, a startup billed as creating "robots for music" that were also on display at the clandestine event.

Fuse Frame

Obviously, none of Lanier's name-dropping sounds like it has anything to do with nuclear fusion — and indeed, there was no fusion on display at the event for the startup, founded by JC Btaiche, the son of a Lebanese nuclear physicist who was a mere 19-year-old when he started the firm.

As Btaiche told Lanier, his goal is to become the "SpaceX of fusion" and accomplish "Big Tech"-style achievements for all manner of partners. Given the unnamed members of the attendee rundown, those would-be partners likely had emissaries in attendance.

With another facility already located in Canada — Btaiche is, among other things, a former researcher at McGill and the founder of an ed-tech startup in Montreal — Fuse is clearly laying down roots in Silicon Valley.

As Lanier writes, the region has, for better or for worse, thirsted for this type of spectacle amid the rapid advancements of AI. What better way to give the people what they want than at an event promising another technology that's still in its earliest days?

More on startup world: Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

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Trump’s New Billionaire Head of NASA Says He May Pause His Own Personal Vacations Into Space While Leading Agency

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SpaceX space tourist Jared Isaacman may soon have to go on a hiatus from his trips into orbit now that he's been named NASA administrator.

Stuck in the Office

Billionaire Jared Isaacman has been to space twice. First, he commanded the first all-civilian mission to orbit in September 2021 on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. Almost exactly three years later, he again rode the craft to orbit to become the first private astronaut to go on a spacewalk.

But the playboy space tourist may soon have to go on a hiatus from his privately-funded trips into orbit — because Isaacman was picked by president-elect Donald Trump, or perhaps his buddy Elon Musk, to become the next head of NASA.

The announcement catapulted the trained fighter jet pilot into the upper echelons of Washington, DC — which could force him to put his personal space travel ambitions on hold.

As part of the private Polaris program organized by Isaacman, the entrepreneur wanted to follow up his September spacewalk with two more trips on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon and eventually the company's much larger Starship.

"The future of the Polaris program is a little bit of a question mark at the moment," Isaacman told the audience of a space conference in Orlando, as quoted by Reuters. "It may wind up on hold for a little bit."

Spacefaring Kinda Guy

It's the first time Isaacman has made a public appearance since being appointed NASA administrator. As Reuters points out, the billionaire appeared highly optimistic about the future of the private space industry at the event but offered few clues on how we would lead NASA starting in January.

The 41-year-old is widely expected to further existing private-public partnerships, which could turn out to be a major windfall for SpaceX, which is already a major NASA contractor.

"At NASA, we will passionately pursue these possibilities and usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization," Isaacman wrote in an announcement on X last week.

Where his new role will leave the Polaris program and SpaceX's other private astronaut partnerships with the likes of Axiom and Vast remains unclear.

In short, while it may not be him personally riding a spacecraft into space, given his new role in the Trump administration, SpaceX's space exploration ambitions almost certainly just got a major boost.

More on Isaacman: The New Head of NASA Had an Interesting Disagreement with the Space Agency

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Trump's New Billionaire Head of NASA Says He May Pause His Own Personal Vacations Into Space While Leading Agency

Man Renovates Decommissioned Missile Silo Into Delightful Airbnb, Attracts "Swingers"

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A man in Arkansas turned a decommissioned missile silo into a lavish Airbnb over ten years, spending $800,000.

Doomsdairbnb

A man in Arkansas turned a decommissioned missile silo into a lavish short-term rental property.

But whether it was a wise long-term investment remains to be seen. As owner GT Hill tells Business Insider, he bought the silo for $90,000 in 2010, and then spent a whopping $800,000 over ten years to convert the space into a unique rental experience.

"Probably 20 percent of my interest was in the doomsday prepper aspect or the idea of preparing to survive in the case of a catastrophe," Hill wrote. "I'm not a full doomsday prepper, but I like the idea of being prepared for the unknown, including having food storage and some survival skills."

The end product, dubbed Titan II, is a 3500-square-foot living space located in the middle of a 200-acre ranch and 150 feet below the ground. Hill says it's already hosted famous YouTubers, bands, birthday parties, and "even some swingers."

And in case the end of the world is nigh, Hill will have the ideal place to seek shelter for himself and his family — as long as it's not already booked up, that is.

"Being underground the place is typically cooler than a normal living space but extra blankets are provided," the Airbnb description reads.

Location, Location

The missile silo itself was decommissioned after Russia and the US signed a treaty in 1979 to limit their nuclear arsenals.

"They actually had to blow up the top of the structure and fill it in," Hill wrote. "So it was an underground structure, but completely buried."

The ten years of hard work Hill put into the property included pumping out a tidal wave of water that had accumulated in the space.

"The place had asbestos and methane gas at the top of the control center, where the crew quarters were," Hill wrote. "I recorded videos of the whole process, and you can actually hear my voice change because of the methane in the air."

"After spending $800,000, we're probably netting $80,000 a year in revenue from the place now that I rent it out on Airbnb," he added.

In short, "it's not a great way to spend time or money," Hill admitted.

More on Airbnb: Airbnb Apologizes After Allowing Listing for "1830s Slave Cabin"

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Man Renovates Decommissioned Missile Silo Into Delightful Airbnb, Attracts "Swingers"

Man Renovates Decommissioned Missile Silo Into Delightful Airbnb, Attracts "Swingers"

Posted on by

A man in Arkansas turned a decommissioned missile silo into a lavish Airbnb over ten years, spending $800,000.

Doomsdairbnb

A man in Arkansas turned a decommissioned missile silo into a lavish short-term rental property.

But whether it was a wise long-term investment remains to be seen. As owner GT Hill tells Business Insider, he bought the silo for $90,000 in 2010, and then spent a whopping $800,000 over ten years to convert the space into a unique rental experience.

"Probably 20 percent of my interest was in the doomsday prepper aspect or the idea of preparing to survive in the case of a catastrophe," Hill wrote. "I'm not a full doomsday prepper, but I like the idea of being prepared for the unknown, including having food storage and some survival skills."

The end product, dubbed Titan II, is a 3500-square-foot living space located in the middle of a 200-acre ranch and 150 feet below the ground. Hill says it's already hosted famous YouTubers, bands, birthday parties, and "even some swingers."

And in case the end of the world is nigh, Hill will have the ideal place to seek shelter for himself and his family — as long as it's not already booked up, that is.

"Being underground the place is typically cooler than a normal living space but extra blankets are provided," the Airbnb description reads.

Location, Location

The missile silo itself was decommissioned after Russia and the US signed a treaty in 1979 to limit their nuclear arsenals.

"They actually had to blow up the top of the structure and fill it in," Hill wrote. "So it was an underground structure, but completely buried."

The ten years of hard work Hill put into the property included pumping out a tidal wave of water that had accumulated in the space.

"The place had asbestos and methane gas at the top of the control center, where the crew quarters were," Hill wrote. "I recorded videos of the whole process, and you can actually hear my voice change because of the methane in the air."

"After spending $800,000, we're probably netting $80,000 a year in revenue from the place now that I rent it out on Airbnb," he added.

In short, "it's not a great way to spend time or money," Hill admitted.

More on Airbnb: Airbnb Apologizes After Allowing Listing for "1830s Slave Cabin"

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Elon Musk Has Been Throwing Tens of Millions of Dollars at Republicans for Way Longer Than We Thought

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Though he's been very active in support of Donald Trump in 2024, it appears that Elon Musk has been donating big to GOP candidates for years.

Donation Station

Though he's been very active in support of former president Donald Trump during this election cycle, it appears that multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk has been donating heavily to GOP candidates for years now.

As sources close to the billionaire revealed to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has been quietly donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes since as early as 2022.

He donated so much, in fact, that he became one of the biggest conservative donors — all without anyone knowing.

During the 2022 midterm election cycle, the 53-year-old entrepreneur donated $50 million to a political action committee (PAC) called Citizens for Sanity. Started by ex-Trump aide Stephen Miller, the group's main focus aligns heavily with Musk's: lobbying against undocumented immigrants and transgender healthcare for children.

Though the exact dates of that donation were not included in the WSJ's reporting, the timing is nevertheless salient given that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO's daughter, Vivian Wilson, came out as trans in 2022 and moved to have her last name changed to her mother's to distance herself from him.

Murkey Money

Musk's donations to the PAC, which was incorporated in Delaware earlier in 2022 and listed employees from Miller's nonprofit American First Legal, were verified by tax filings and people who spoke with the WSJ about them. The billionaire donated to Miller's PAC through a "dark money" group called Building America’s Future, which allowed him to do so without his name being disclosed.

Along with spending big in the midterms, Musk also donated $10 million to Florida governor Ron DeSantis' presidential bid in 2023 — a sum that made him one of the Republican's biggest backers. Using a group called Faithful & Strong Policies, over half of the money from Musk's donations to the former presidential candidate ended up with a pro-DeSantis PAC called Never Back Down.

Beyond highlighting how easy it is for the rich to donate huge sums of money to candidates and causes through "dark money" groups without the public learning of it, these previously unreported donations also show that Musk has been quietly maneuvering in conservative politics for longer than most people knew.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Pretends Not to Know About the Horrible Accusations Against His "Good Friend" Puff Daddy

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Elon Musk Might Die of Old Age Before He Can Make It to Mars, Expert Suggests

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Elon Musk's plans to fly to Mars grow more ambitious every year — but it's unclear whether he'll live long enough to actually see it happen.

Mulling Martians

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's plans to turn humanity into a "multiplanetary" species grow more ambitious every year — but it's unclear whether he'll live long enough to actually see it happen.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, experts are skeptical about the billionaire's bold plan to take humans to Mars.

In an interview with the newspaper, aerodynamics expert Christopher Combs of the University of Texas said that it may take between 15 and 20 years for it to be safe enough for humans to travel to Mars. Should it take that long, the multi-hyphenate business owner will be in his 60s or 70s by the time he's able to reach the Red Planet.

"SpaceX has a history of designing iteratively, and we kind of expect things to go wrong the first few tries — if you have to wait two years between iterative attempts, that really stretches out your development cycle," Combs told the newspaper. "Can they be perfect the first time?"

Of particular concern are the logistics of getting to the Red Planet, which only has a single window every 26 months where that planet and ours are aligned closely enough to send spacecraft with the least amount of fuel. With future launches having to occur on that timeline, there will only be nine windows for SpaceX's Starships to go to Mars in the next 20 years.

Time Windows

At the age of 53, Musk will ultimately have to pull off at least one crewed Mars mission within the next 20 years to get there himself — and given that the next such window opens in the fourth quarter of this year, he's clearly not going to be able to launch anything to Mars again before late 2026.

To be fair, Musk himself has made public comments about the fuzziness of the Mars travel timeline as it relates to his own lifespan.

"If we don’t improve our pace of progress, I’m definitely, you know, gonna be dead before we go to Mars," Musk said during a 2020 conference. "I would like to not be dead by the time we go to Mars — that’s my aspiration here."

As per recent tweets, Musk is still hoping to send an uncrewed Starship spacecraft to the Red Planet during the next Earth-Mars transfer window in 2026 and claims humans will hitch rides there within the next eight years. Unlike Combs, astrophysicist Peter Hague thinks after crunching the numbers that it can be done.

"2031 for humans is credible," Hague tweeted. "If not 2033. This is happening and you’ll get to see it."

Which expert is more correct remains to be seen. SpaceX still has a lot to prove — and Musk is only getting older.

More on Musk and Mars: Elon Musk Makes Embarrassingly Stupid Claim: If Trump Loses, Humanity Will Never Make It to Mars

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NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner’s Thrusters

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Later this week, Boeing's plagued Starliner is set to attempt its return journey from the International Space Station.

But instead of ferrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to the ground, it'll be undocking and reentering without any crew on board — after a software update, that is, because it was originally unable to fly without astronauts inside it.

Even before the ill-fated capsule launched in early June, engineers noticed several helium leaks. During Starliner's docking procedures, the leaks quickly turned into a real problem. The spacecraft missed its first attempt to dock with the space station.

Ever since, Boeing and NASA engineers have been struggling to identify the root cause of the problem.

At first, NASA remained adamant that it was simply a matter of routine procedure to investigate the mishap before imminently returning Wilmore and Williams on board Starliner. The agency repeatedly fought off reports that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space, arguing that engineers just needed a little more time to figure out the issue.

But it didn't take long for NASA to change its tune. While attempting to duplicate the issue at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, engineers eventually found what appeared to be the smoking gun, as SpaceNews' Jeff Foust details in a detailed new breakdown of the timeline.

A Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer — a disturbing finding, because it greatly degraded the thrusters' performance.

Worse, without being able to perfectly replicate and analyze the issue in the near vacuum of space, engineers weren't entirely sure how the issue was actually playing out in orbit.

During a late August press conference announcing its decision to send Starliner back empty, NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich admitted that "there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters."

"People really want to understand the physics of what's going on relative to the physics of the Teflon, what's causing it to heat up and what's causing it to contract," he admitted. "That's really what the team is off trying to understand. I think the NASA community in general would like to understand a little bit more of the root cause."

While engineers found that the thrusters had returned to a more regular shape after being fired in space, they were worried that similar deformations might take place during prolonged de-orbit firings.

A lot was on the line. Without perfect control over the thrusters, NASA became worried that the spacecraft could careen out of control.

"For me, one of the really important factors is that we just don’t know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem," NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox said, as quoted by SpaceNews.

"If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action," Stich said during last month's teleconference. "But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with a crew on board... it was just too much risk."

That's a polite way of saying that NASA had very serious concerns. According to Faust's reporting, the saga evolved into "NASA’s biggest human spaceflight safety crisis since the shuttle Columbia accident more than two decades ago."

Earlier this week, NASA announced that Starliner's uncrewed undocking will take place as soon as Friday evening.

Wilmore and Williams will stay behind, presumably watching as their ride to space departs without them.

The two astronauts will have to be patient as their ersatz shuttle, SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, won't arrive until no sooner than September 24. Even then, the pair will have to wait until the Crew Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth in February, extending what was supposed to be an eight-day mission into an eight-month affair.

More on Starliner: Astronauts Hear Strange Sounds Coming From Boeing's Cursed Starliner

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NASA Will Attempt to Launch Boeing’s Troubled Starliner Away From Space Station as Fast as Possible, Just in Case

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NASA is looking to get Boeing's plagued Starliner away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't lose control.

Last month, NASA officially announced that Boeing's plagued Starliner is returning without a crew on board.

The decision, which came as a black eye to the embattled aerospace giant, means that stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will return to the surface on board SpaceX's Crew-9 mission in February instead.

Later this week, likely on Friday evening, the space agency will attempt to have the faulty spacecraft undock from the International Space Station autonomously and eventually reenter the atmosphere.

And it sounds like NASA will be playing it as safe as possible. With the helium leaks affecting Starliner's propulsion system, the agency is looking to get the capsule away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't careen out of control — or, in a worst case scenario hypothesized by experts, even crash into the station.

During a teleconference today, NASA officials laid out the plan. The agency has chosen to have Starliner perform a "breakout burn" which, according to NASA's Johnson Space Center lead flight director Anthony Vareha, is a "series of 12 burns, each not very large, about one Newton meter per second each."

"It's a quicker way away from Station, way less stress on the thrusters," added NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

The original plan involved having the spacecraft perform a "dress rehearsal" for a "fly-around inspection" of the space station. That's something NASA is requiring both Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon to be able to perform before being certified, as part of its Commercial Crew program.

"The reason we chose doing this breakout burn is simply it gets the vehicle away from Station faster and, without the crew on board, able to take manual control if needed," Vareha explained. "There's just a lot less variables we need to account for when we do the breakout burn and allows us to get the vehicle on its trajectory home that much sooner."

During testing at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico earlier this summer, engineers discovered that a Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" had expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters. The seal was found to significantly constrain the flow of the oxidizer, greatly cutting into the thrusters' performance.

As a result, NASA is trying to be extremely light on the trigger button during its upcoming attempt to return Starliner.

When asked how confident he was in Starliner's ability to one day return to space, Stich appeared optimistic.

"We know that the thrusters work well when we don't command them in a manner that overheats them and gets the poppet to swell on the oxide," he explained. "We know that the thruster is a viable thruster, it's a good component," but the goal is to "not overheat it."

In other words, the space agency is far from giving up on Starliner, despite an extremely messy and potentially disastrous first crewed test flight.

NASA has openly discussed what it has learned from previous spaceflight disasters. During NASA's announcement that Starliner would come back empty last month, NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance Russ DeLoach went as far as to invoke the agency's fatal Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 respectively.

In short, Starliner's return to the ISS still appears to be on the table, no matter how far off such a mission may be at this point. That of course also depends on how successful NASA is in getting Starliner back on the ground.

The agency will be looking to "fill in some of the gaps we had in qualification," Stich said, adding that teams are already looking for ways to get Starliner "fully qualified in the future."

More on Starliner: NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner's Thrusters

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