NASA's Boss Just Shook Up the Agency's Plans to Land on the Moon Sean Duffy called out SpaceX for being "behind schedule" on a lunar lander and said he'd explore other options. NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency's plans to return humans to the moon. Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA's projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the moon from lunar orbit and back.

Old rocket parts and decommissioned satellites are whizzing around in low Earth orbit, where they risk colliding with the ever-growing constellations of modern satellites being launched. A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions. "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. "Seventy-six percent of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88 percent of the objects are rocket bodies. That's important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now."

From lava worlds to gas giants, NASA says the variety of these worlds is staggering--and that signs of a further 8,000 distant planets are awaiting confirmation. The number of confirmed planets outside of our solar system--known as exoplanets-- has risen to 6,000, NASA has said. There is huge variety across these distant worlds, the space agency says, with discoveries including rocky planets, lava worlds, and gas giants enveloping their stars. Plenty more discoveries are likely on the way. As a result of continued monitoring by NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), there are more than 8,000 potential planets that have been identified and are awaiting confirmation.

As SpaceX's Starship vehicle gathered all of the attention this week, the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket continued to hit some impressive milestones. Both occurred during relatively anonymous launches of the company's Starlink satellites but are nonetheless notable because they underscore the value of first-stage reuse, which SpaceX has pioneered over the past decade. The first milestone occurred on Wednesday morning with the launch of the Starlink 10-56 mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first stage that launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was making its second launch and successfully landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship. Strikingly, this was the 400th time SpaceX has executed a drone ship landing.

The rapid expansion of satellite constellations in near-Earth orbits presents significant challenges in satellite network management, requiring innovative approaches for efficient, scalable, and resilient operations. This paper explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in optimizing the operation of satellite mega-constellations, drawing from the ConstellAI project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). A consortium comprising GMV GmbH, Saarland University, and Thales Alenia Space collaborates to develop AI-driven algorithms and demonstrates their effectiveness over traditional methods for two crucial operational challenges: data routing and resource allocation. In the routing use case, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used to improve the end-to-end latency by learning from historical queuing latency, outperforming classical shortest path algorithms. For resource allocation, RL optimizes the scheduling of tasks across constellations, focussing on efficiently using limited resources such as battery and memory. Both use cases were tested for multiple satellite constellation configurations and operational scenarios, resembling the real-life spacecraft operations of communications and Earth observation satellites. This research demonstrates that RL not only competes with classical approaches but also offers enhanced flexibility, scalability, and generalizability in decision-making processes, which is crucial for the autonomous and intelligent management of satellite fleets. The findings of this activity suggest that AI can fundamentally alter the landscape of satellite constellation management by providing more adaptive, robust, and cost-effective solutions.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's only a matter of time before a catastrophically sized asteroid barrels towards Earth again. Until very recently in human history, there was no way of knowing if one was hurtling towards us, much less do anything to alter its path. Now, international space agencies and disaster preparedness experts have powerful tools to keep watch over the skies--and the newest aide just opened its bug-inspired compound "eye." According to the European Space Agency, the Flyeye-1 telescope recently completed its "first light" test at the Italian Space Agency's Space Geodesy Center, located about 160 miles east of Naples.

The most accurate clock in space launches within days and will begin building a highly synchronised network out of the best clocks on Earth. But the project, decades in preparation, will only operate for a few years before it burns up as the International Space Station deorbits at the end of the decade. NASA's most accurate atomic clock will be tested on a mission to Venus The Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will generate a time signal with unprecedented accuracy and then transmit it via laser to nine ground stations as it passes overhead at 27,000 kilometres per hour. This network of clocks will be in extremely close synchronisation and provide highly accurate timekeeping around the world. The result is that ACES will be able to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that the passing of time is affected by the strength of gravity, with great accuracy.

A growing leak on the International Space Station has sparked fears that astronauts on board may need to evacuate, including the two stranded by Boeing's Starliner. All seven astronauts have been forced into the US side of the orbiting laboratory due to 50 'areas of concern' and four cracks in a Russian-made module. If the leaks become severe, the space station could rapidly lose oxygen and pressure. The moment Houston sounds the alarm of a threat, astronauts would have to race to shut the hatch of the leaking section and head to'lifeboats' docked on the ship. A spaceflight expert told DailyMail.com

From holes in robotic arm to cracks in the window, astronauts have been complaining about the state of the International Space Station (ISS) for years. A NASA report this week admitted that there are 50 'areas of concern' and four cracks that could lead to an emergency evacuation from the ISS due to it leaking oxygen. NASA warned that the issues stemmed from one leak which reached its fastest growth rate yet in April of this year. If the crew makes the daring escape it would be the first time in the orbiting lab's 24-year history of housing astronauts. The first reported issues in 2013 when a piece of space debris caused a small hole in one of the orbiting outpost's solar panels.

If you're subscribed to Amazon Prime Video, it's likely you've seen'Space Cadet' promoted at the top of your feed this week. The movie has raced to the top of the charts and sees Emma Roberts star as a trainee astronaut at NASA. In the film, Roberts' character, Rex, manages to make it on to NASA's training programme by faking her CV. However, in reality, it's much trickier to be selected, with just 360 lucky candidates making the cut at the US space agency since the 1960s. So, do you have what it takes to become an astonaut?