One of the gold plated myths that Muskrats love to trot out is: Starlink will print money. It’s the one fart the desperately huff. Not so much it seems: But according to a damning new report by Bloomberg, Musk may have once again rigged the numbers in his favor by greatly underplaying the costs involved in launching the satellites, when…
NASA’s team has finally managed to pry off the last two stuck fasteners on the container that holds some incredibly valuable stuff: materials the agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampled from asteroid Bennu, over 100 million miles away. The samples, tucked inside a special landing capsule, were dropped off in the Utah desert in September. The treasure was quickly delivered to a special…
A new Chinese rocket just blasted its way into the record books. The Gravity-1 vehicle, built by Chinese company Orienspace, lifted off for the first time ever Thursday (Jan. 11). The squat, burly rocket rose off the deck of a ship stationed in the Yellow Sea at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT), sending two big plumes of…
Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We’re just 11 days into the new year, and we’ve already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this…
When scientists detected phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere in 2020, it triggered renewed, animated discussions about Venus and its potential habitability. It would be weird if the detection didn’t generate interest since phosphine is a potential biomarker. So people were understandably curious. Unfortunately, further study couldn’t confirm its presence. But even without phosphine, Venus’ atmosphere is…
These bright and unusually smooth spots dotting the moon’s liquid methane and ethane oceans first showed up in observations by NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in 2013. At the time, astronomers were puzzled by the islands’ unnerving ability to appear and disappear from observations over time, a quality that earned its enchanting nickname. Ever since, scientists have been trying to explain…