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Satellite launch company Virgin Orbit is starting an "operational pause" and furloughing most employees except for a skeleton crew, CNBC has reported. The company is reportedly seeking new investors to relieve financial pressure and plans to give "an update on go-forward operations in the coming weeks," a spokesperson said in a statement. Companies like SpaceX launch heavy rockets from the ground to get satellite payloads in orbit. However, Virgin Orbit carries smaller rockets to a height of about 35,000 feet on the wing of a Boeing 747, reducing fuel required. Earlier this year, it attempted to launch nine satellites into...

(209 kilometers)Someone should probably forward this to Elon Musk because it sounds like China is gunning for him, possibly in a quite literal fashion. The South China Morning Post is reporting that China has begun a space program that aims to put nearly 13,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit in the next four years. Most of these (but not all) will be communications satellites intended to create a global network to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink program. The Chinese claim that they’re trying to make sure they get their fair share of orbital slots, which seems harmless enough. But they’ll be doing...

SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built, recently completed a successful ground test of its engines. And now, Elon Musk’s mega rocket is almost ready to take off for its first orbital test flight.

Scientists have just spotted a strange circular filament wobbling around the sun's pole that has them really excited. A huge filament of solar plasma has broken off the sun's surface and is circling its north pole like a vortex of powerful winds, but scientists have no clue what caused it. "Talk about polar vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our star," space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov said on Twitter while sharing a video sequence taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics...

Distant Galaxy The image of the most distant galaxy, GHZ2/GLASS-z12. (NASA/ESA/CSA/T. Treu, UCLA/NAOJ/T. Bakx, Nagoya U) A galaxy whose light has traveled nearly 13.5 billion years to reach us has just been confirmed as the earliest galaxy found to date. By studying the oxygen content of the galaxy with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have precisely dated it to just 367 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the first lights in the Universe were still switching on and starting to propagate freely through space. The result confirms observations made by JWST, and offers new information...

Washington -- Nine military officers who had worked decades ago at a nuclear missile base in Montana have been diagnosed with blood cancer and there are “indications” the disease may be linked to their service, according to military briefing slides obtained by The Associated Press. One of the officers has died. All of the officers, known as missileers, were assigned as many as 25 years ago to Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to a vast field of 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silos. The nine officers were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to a January briefing by U.S. Space...

A research team using new methods to analyze data from NASA's Curiosity, a rover operating on Mars since 2012, was able to independently verify that fractures in the bedrock contained opal, on Earth a gemstone formed by the alteration of silica by water.... ..."Our new analysis of archival data showed striking similarity between all of the fracture halos we've observed much later in the mission," Gabriel said. "Seeing that these fracture networks were so widespread and likely chock-full of opal was incredible."....

All of China's activities in outer space are intended for the country's social, economic and technological development rather than for a "space race" with other nations, according to insiders in China's space industry. "We carry out spaceflights to develop high technology and improve economic growth and people's living standard. We don't take part in a space race with any other countries because competition in this regard is meaningless," said Yang Yuguang, a senior space industry observer in Beijing and vice-chair of the International Astronautical Federation's space transportation committee. "If some people are so fond of a space race, then it...

This video cover new updates, and alot of unknowns... and provide new updates as it get closer to Earth !

The location of the most distant galaxy ever detected. (NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani/ESA/Webb) Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet. That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang – a time period when the Universe was still foggy and bleary and the first rays of light were penetrating the darkness. So detailed are the JWST's long spectroscopic observations that researchers...

Artemis 1 and the Orion capsule are currently about an hour out from splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja, California NASA is providing live coverage of The inbound spacecraft. Splashdown is scheduled for 9:39am Pacific.

If extraterrestrial life sent us a message tomorrow, how would humanity respond? According to researchers, we don't know yet — and that's a problem. That's why, for the first time in 35 years, a team of policy experts and scientists have united to establish a set of alien-contact protocols for the entire world to follow in the event of a sudden encounter with E.T. "Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere," John Elliot, a computer scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland,...

Three Chinese astronauts landed back on earth on Sunday (Dec 4) on board the re-entry capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, state broadcaster CCTV reported, bringing to an end a six-month mission on China's space station. The three astronauts - commander Chen Dong and teammates Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe - who had been overseeing the final, pivotal period of construction at the space station, which was completed in November, all said they were feeling well after landing in audio aired on CCTV. The capsule landed at the Dongfeng site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous region at 8.09 pm, with...

China’s military is rapidly building a large force of space weapons, including sophisticated anti-satellite missiles, lasers, jammers, orbiting killer robots and cyber tools, designed to “blind and deafen” the American military in a future war, the U.S. military is warning. New details of Beijing’s growing space arms arsenal were revealed the Pentagon’s latest annual report to Congress on the Chinese military, released publicly on Tuesday. “The [People’s Liberation Army] continues to acquire and develop a range of counter-space capabilities and related technologies, including kinetic-kill missiles, ground-based lasers, and orbiting space robots, as well as expanding space surveillance capabilities, which can...

Several satellite and space launches throughout October 2022.

The climate crisis presents a huge challenge to all people on Earth. It has led many scientists to look for exo-planets, planets outside our solar system that humans could potentially settle. The James Webb Space Telescope was developed as part of this search to provide detailed observational data about earth-like exo-planets in the coming years. A new project, led by Dr. Assaf Hochman at the Fredy & Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), in collaboration with Dr. Paolo De Luca at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Dr. Thaddeus D. Komacek at the University...

Though it was actually the first operational space shuttle to be retired from NASA service, the Orbiter Vehicle-103 (OV-103) Space Shuttle Discovery certainly earned that retirement after more than 27 years in service. As the third operational orbiter – preceded only by Columbia and Challenger – Discovery actually launched and landed successfully 39 times, more spaceflights than any other craft to date.

The black hole considered until now as “the closest to Earth” was discovered in 2020 just a thousand light years from our planet. However, a group of scientists concluded that it consists of a “vampire two-star system” in a rare and short-lived evolutionary stage. The theory of the experts is that the binary system was captured shortly after one of the stars sucked the atmosphere of the other. In this line and according to the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, they would be two luminous stars, but with very different angular separations and orbital movements. The study was carried out...

Humans have managed to survive and grow plants in low-Earth orbit aboard several spacecraft and stations. Space is the ultimate “harsh environment” for life to exist in, including plants, due to such novel stressors as cosmic radiation and lack of gravity. Space biologist Anna-Lisa Paul describes plants as being able to “reach into their genetic toolbox and remake the tools they need” to adapt to the novel environment of space. Space agencies have been working on specialized systems that provide the conditions necessary for plant cultivation in space. These systems are containers that can control the internal environment and grow...

It is regularly eaten by more than half the world's population. And now, it's been grown in microgravity, on board the newly launched Chinese Wentian space laboratory. Wentian launched in July and joined up with the Tianhe module of China's new space station. Its original complement of eight experiments included one that attempted to grow rice in microgravity. There were actually two types of rice launched as part of the experiment. A tall shoot variety reached almost 30 centimeters in the first month of growth, and a dwarf variety reached around 5 cm. Both of these growth amounts are on...