North Korea test-fired a powerful new solid rocket motor for its next-generation ICBM. Welcome to Edition 8.10 of the Rocket Report! Dear readers, if everything goes according to plan, four astronauts are less than six months away from traveling around the far side of the Moon and breaking free…
Physicists spliced merger’s gravitational signal into isolated frequencies to determine surface areas. Back in 1971, the late physicist Stephen Hawking made an intriguing prediction: The total surface area of a black hole cannot decrease, only increase or remain stable. So if two black holes combine, the newly formed black…
“This is the first time we’ll have a space layer fully integrated into our warfighting operations.” The first 21 satellites in a constellation that could become a cornerstone for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield successfully launched from California Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon…
Interpreting the data is tricky because other non-biological processes could account for the findings. Last year, we reported on the discovery of an intriguing arrow-shaped rock on Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The rock contained chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. Granted,…
SpaceX is targeting an orbital Starship flight with a next-gen vehicle next year. It has been two weeks since SpaceX’s last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space.…
New research debunks some speculative climate fixes. A team of the world’s best ice and climate researchers studied a handful of recently publicized engineering concepts for protecting Earth’s polar ice caps and found that none of them are likely to work. Their peer-reviewed research, published Tuesday, shows some of…
Celebrated molecular biologist weathered late ’80s controversy to become Caltech president. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and former Caltech president David Baltimore—who found himself at the center of controversial allegations of fraud against a co-author—has died at 87 from cancer complications. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology for…
We’ll see how long the Department of War lasts. Space Force Combat Forces Command might stick around. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday authorizing the Department of Defense to refer to itself as the Department of War, reverting to a more bellicose title used until a 1940s-era…
One scientist says it’s like buying a car and running it into a tree to save on gas money. It was in 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, when NASA decided to put a satellite into orbit to track emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas pumped…
Judge rules Trump admin broke law, and says Supreme Court has been “unhelpful.” A federal judge sided with Harvard University in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, ordering the US government to unfreeze about $2.6 billion in funding. The judge’s ruling also criticized the Supreme Court for issuing orders…
