Free Republic

Manned Circumnavigation of the Inner Solar System Posted on April 27, 2026 by Kirk Sorensen In 1969, a Bellcomm engineer named A. A. VanderVeen published a paper describing a family of trajectories so elegant they seem almost accidental. Fifty-five years later, the most attractive instance of that trajectory family departs Earth in August 2034. This post is about what it would mean to fly it. Back in February 2009, I opened a thread on the NASASpaceFlight.com forum with what I thought was a simple thought experiment: what interplanetary mission might be within reach of an extremely wealthy private individual —...

US Space Command Gen Stephen Whiting warns such a move could disrupt GPS, communications and daily life across the globe/ The head of U.S. Space Command said the U.S. is "very concerned" that Russia may be developing a nuclear weapon in space to target satellites, warning such a move could disrupt global communications, GPS systems and daily life on Earth. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, the commander of U.S. Space Command, made the remarks during an appearance on The General & The Journalist, a weekly podcast by The Times. "Russia remains a very historic and sophisticated space power. Yes, they have...

“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.” That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks full. Stars crowd the darkness. It seems reasonable to think someone else should be out there, and close enough to find. Yet the deeper physicists look into the laws that govern the universe, the more that silence starts to seem less like a cosmic riddle and more like a built-in feature of reality. Human intuition is not much help. It developed for ordinary...

With all the excitement over sending scientists back to the moon, it’s easy to forget we’ve already got a pair of talented chemists on Mars: the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Although they beam back plenty of breathtaking images, these two robots are more than just cameras on wheels. Their primary mission is to search for signs of ancient life, and they’re equipped with a suite of onboard scientific instruments and chemical reagents to carry that mission out. Now, new research published in Nature Communications details Curiosity’s latest find—never-before-seen organic compounds, including one with a structure similar to DNA precursors. “We...

51 years ago, India marked a historic milestone with the launch of Aryabhata, its first step into space. But long before the satellite lifted off aboard a Soviet rocket, its story had already begun in an unlikely place: a small church by the Arabian Sea. In the early 1960s, India’s fledgling space programme, what would later become the Indian Space Research Organisation, was operating with limited resources but boundless ambition. Under the leadership of Vikram Sarabhai, scientists were searching for a location close to the magnetic equator to study the upper atmosphere. They found it in Thumba, a quiet fishing...

Jeff Bezos just posted on Twitter/X that Blue Origin has successfully landed a booster and posted a video of the landing. The first person to congratulate him was Elon Musk.... https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/2045874068763632017 Kind of amazing that two US private companies have successfully landed boosters, but no other space agency or country has duplicated the feat, not Russia, China, EU, etc.

Iran used the satellite to monitor major U.S. military sites. Satellite imagery was taken in March prior to drone and missile strikes on the sites. Iran secretly purchased a spy satellite from China in 2024, which it then used to target U.S. bases. According to the Financial Times, Earth Eye Co, a Chinese company, built and launched a TEE-01B satellite in 2024. After it was launched into space from China, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Aerospace Corp purchased the satellite, leaked Iranian military documents show. Iran used the satellite to monitor major U.S. military sites. Satellite imagery was taken in...

A really good “astronaut’s eye view “ of earth reentry. It’s pretty wild, as you would imagine.

It’s keeping scientists up at night. Scientists around the world are sounding the alarm over an ambitious plan to install thousands of mirrors and myriad satellites in space, claiming that it will impact sleep and various ecosystems on a global level. “The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,” leaders of the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the Japanese Society for Chronobiology and the Canadian Society for Chronobiology declared in letters to the US Federal Communications Commission The Guardian reported....

Here's the thing, though. When the Telegraph asked Glover about being the first black astronaut to make this journey, his response didn’t exactly follow the usual script. He said: "It is a big question, and I wanna highlight, I guess maybe one facet of this is the tension, I call it. I live in this, and you know, this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her, her passion or her interests, or even if it's not something she wants to do, she can just be like, 'Girl power,' and that's awesome.”

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US...

A once-in-a-century crater formed on the moon right under our noses. A routine search of images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera found a fresh crater as wide as two American football fields, planetary scientist Mark Robinson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in The Woodlands, Texas. The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robinson said. According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The discovery can help highlight the risks impacts pose to future astronauts. One of the...

A meteorite has crashed through the roof of a house in the city of Koblenz in the west of Germany after a spectacular fireball lit up the night sky above western Europe on Sunday evening, March 8.More than 2,800 sightings of the fireball have been reported to the International Meteor Organization (IMO), with dozens of video recordings having been uploaded on social media. Witnesses reported hearing multiple explosions as the space rock disintegrated in the atmosphere, showering fragments across the western German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.According to available reports, multiple fragments of the meteorite have already been found in Koblenz's Güls...

Starship Flight 12 in 4 weeks, Amazon Urges FCC to Deny SpaceX Plan to Launch 1M Satellites | 7:43 Ellie in Space | 220K subscribers | 4,856 views | March 7, 2026

Jupiter is slightly smaller and flatter than scientists thought for decades, a new study finds. Researchers used radio data from the Juno spacecraft to refine measurements of the solar system's largest planet. Although the differences between the current and previous measurements are small, they are improving models of Jupiter's interior and of other gas giants like it outside the solar system, the team reported Feb. 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy. "Textbooks will need to be updated," study co-author Yohai Kaspi, a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a statement. "The size of Jupiter...

Astronauts haven't been to the moon since 1972 but if all goes well a manned mission to the moon will lift off as soon as next month. It's called Artemis II and the plan is to take four astronauts and send them into space on a trajectory that will wrap around, but not orbit, the moon. Just this weekend, the rocket that will launch the astronauts made its way to the launch pad. After many months inside the VAB being stacked and prepared for launch, the NASA SLS rocket has come outside fully as it rolls out to LC-39B ahead...

A Chinese space institute has filed to launch some satellites into orbit. And by "some," I mean nearly 200,000 total, which would be over ten times more than are in orbit today. Specifically, the Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation is hoping to launch two constellations of exactly 96,714 satellites each. That application has gone to the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is responsible for ensuring that one country's satellites don't broadcast on the same frequencies as another's. There's, uh, going to be a lot of work to do approving an application of that size. What exactly...

Donald Trump’s desire for Greenland is not just about access to oil, minerals and control of the new strategic and commercial corridors opening in the region. It’s also about data. Specifically, the most important data in the world. For decades, Pituffik Space Base – formerly Thule – in Greenland has been central to US space defense and Arctic strategy. It’s the US military’s only base above the Arctic Circle and their most northerly deep-water port and airstrip. It’s home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron. Its massive AN/FPS-132 radar has 240 degrees of coverage surveying the Arctic Ocean and Russia’s...

In July, researchers using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey telescope in Chile made an exceedingly rare discovery: a mysterious object passing through the solar system at far too high a speed to be bound by the Sun’s gravity. As the visitor made its closest approach to Earth, coming within just 167 million miles on December 19, an international team of researchers from the alien-hunting astronomy project Breakthrough Listen pointed the Green Bank Telescope — the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world — at 3I/ATLAS. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they revealed sobering — albeit probably expected —...

Teen Discovers 1.5M Space Objects With AI | Image by Matteo Paz @matteopaz06/X A recently graduated high school student made an artificial intelligence breakthrough using retired NASA data, which led to a public recruitment pitch from the agency’s new administrator on social media, including a fighter jet ride. The teenager from Pasadena, California, used AI to identify approximately 1.5 million previously unrecognized cosmic objects in archival NASA data. His work went viral on X, capturing the attention of senior space officials. This led to an informal public recruitment pitch from Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur recently appointed as NASA administrator....