Space

The NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida was briefly placed under emergency lockdown on Wednesday after receiving a threat by telephone. At about the same time, an alarm was set off at NASA’s Washington DC headquarters indicating there was an active shooter on the loose. NASA says there is no ongoing danger at either location, and that the threats were unrelated. A spokesperson at NASA’s DC headquarters said an “all clear” had been issued, and they were investigating how the alarm had been triggered. Fox Orlando reported NASA sent out a statement to say that security at the Kennedy Space Center issued an alert to lock down an administrative building, and staff were told to shelter in place. Kennedy spokesperson Patti Bielling said no credible threat was found by security forces and staff were given the all clear to return to the office around 12.25pm "Kennedy takes all threats seriously and is investigating the incident,” Ms Bielling said. …

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Smoke alarms went off in the Russian part of the International Space Station early on Thursday, after the crew reported noticing smoke and a smell of burnt plastic. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky in audio communications with mission control in early hours on Thursday said he saw and smelled smoke during recharging of the station’s batteries while French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said the smell of burning plastic had spread from the Russian segment to the US section. Russian space agency Roscosmos said that the alarm was activated overnight in the Zvezda unit, which functions as both a lab and living quarters for Russian cosmonauts. The crew looked for the source of the smoke but never found it and went back to sleep. Officials insisted all vital systems in the orbiting lab were now working properly and that there was no danger to the seven-member crew. The incident should not affect plans for a space walk later on Thursday, they added. Mr Novitsky told mission control on …

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A space minister is needed in Cabinet to stop the UK falling behind its rivals, experts have told MPs. Appearing before the Defence Select Committee on Tuesday during a discussion on space, industry leaders explained that the Government needed to act more like Japan and create a specific role to focus on the area. Nick Shave, chairman of UK Space, the trade association of the UK space industry, said there should be “a minister for space as a single role” so that all Government departments had a single point of interaction. When asked by Tobias Ellwood , chairman of the committee, if the Whitehall traditional construct was “out of date” and had not yet incorporated “cyber and space as new entities”, Mr Shave agreed. He said: "In some respects I would argue that we need to think about space in the strategic context that it is and some other nations do. In Japan, for example, they do have a defence and civil, then they have a Cabinet level position that is responsible for …

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Virgin Galactic has signed a deal with Nasa for a programme to train private astronauts for flights to the International Space Station. The commercial spaceflight company , founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2004, will identify candidates interested in becoming private astronauts and manage their training and preparation for the voyage. This will include training researchers and tourists for commercial space flights. The training will involve readying customers for space so they can withstand G-forces and cope in the zero-gravity of the space station. Its space plane programme, the SpaceShipTwo , is a separate venture for suborbital tourism and will not be providing the launch vehicle. Over the past few years Nasa has announced a series of commercial partnerships with private companies , part of a shift in the space industry away from governmental control and towards increasing private involvement. The US space agency has been working towards sending private …

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For Brits looking up at the sky on Saturday night, a tiny speck racing across the dark horizon offered an inspiring sight. For those who gathered outside to watch - while remaining socially distanced from each other - the successful launch by SpaceX of two astronauts into space unleashed a wave of excitement for a new era of space travel in a world weighed down by uncertainty and grief. Few people seemed more affected by the sight of the first commercial astronaut launch in history than Elon Musk , SpaceX chief executive and the billionaire founder of Tesla, the electric carmaker. “This is something that should get people right in the heart,” he said shortly after Saturday’s launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, as the normally outspoken chief executive appeared to be temporarily at a loss for words. “It appeals to anyone around the world who has that spirit for exploration. I am quite overcome. It’s hard to talk, frankly, we’ve spent 18 years working towards this.” …

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Bacteria and tiny life forms can survive and travel through space, potentially populating other planets, experiments on the International Space Station have revealed. Scientists have discovered that microbe colonies at least 0.5mm thick are resistant to the extreme cold and high radiation levels and can survive the harsh environment of space for years. They found that only those at the surface die, forming a protective layer for others underneath, meaning they could travel between planets by gathering into 'aggregates' of particles. The findings are based on analysis of a type of bacteria called Deinococcus that was placed in exposure panels outside the International Space Station. It backs a theory called 'panspermia' - the idea that organisms migrate between planets, moons and solar systems. Dr Akihiko Yamagishi, principal investigator of Tanpopo - the Japan Experimental Module of the orbiter, said: "The origin of life on Earth is the biggest mystery of human beings. …

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In May, eight lorries carrying a team of Skyrora engineers and a 32ft rocket headed up the A9 towards the “middle of nowhere in Scotland”. There, they performed what would be the first ground rocket test to take place in the UK in half a century. “It was the first significant step towards reaching space from our own soil and we’re proud to have taken that step,” says Volodymyr Levykin, the company’s founder, on a Zoom call. The tied-down launch in Kildermorie Estate, near Alness in the Highlands, was an example of how Britain could fulfil its ambition in getting a slice of the lucrative space industry, estimated to be worth £400bn by 2030 . Interest in space is at its highest point in decades. Elon Musk’s SpaceX launches attract tens of millions of viewers, while Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has already sold 600 tickets to space tourists hoping to reach orbit on SpaceShipTwo . The Government, meanwhile, this month splashed out £400m for a stake in broadband …

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The launch of "mega-constellations" of thousands of communication satellites could lead to a rise in collisions and build-up of space junk in the Earth's orbit, scientists have warned. A decrease in the cost of the manufacture of satellites is set to lead to the deployment of hundreds or thousands into space from next year, creating a massive rise in the number of active satellites from the 1,300 currently in use. But Dr Hugh Lewis, senior lecture in aerospace engineering at the University of Southampton, has warned a 200-year computer simulation has shown the creation of a mega-constellation could create a 50 per cent increase in the number of "catastrophic collisions" between satellites. He said this would increase the amount of space junk in orbit leading to the possibility of further collisions and the subsequent impact on the services provided by the satellites. He said: "There has been a paradigm shift in the manufacturing of satellites. The cost of making a single …

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The crew of the International Space Station were woken up in the middle of the night this week, to be told that an air leak in their craft had grown in size. The three astronauts - one American, two Russians - had been working for several months to repair the air leak, which is not uncommon on board the ISS. In the early hours of Monday however they were roused from their beds by Mission Control and told they needed to get to work. Ultimately there was no cause for alarm: a temperature change on board the ISS has sparked a faulty reading of sensors. “The size of the leak identified overnight has since been attributed to a temporary temperature change aboard the station with the overall rate of leak remaining unchanged,” Nasa said in a blog post on Tuesday, stressing that the three men were never in any danger. The existing leak is causing an atmospheric pressure decrease of one millimeter every eight hours, officials with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, said via …

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SpaceX, the rocket company of high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk , launched four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station on Sunday, Nasa's first full-fledged mission sending a crew into orbit aboard a privately owned spacecraft. SpaceX's newly designed Crew Dragon capsule , which the crew has dubbed Resilience, lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7.27 p.m. eastern time (0027 UK time on Monday) from Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Sidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he "most likely" had a moderate case of Covid-19. Nasa policy at Kennedy Space Centre requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated. An air leak caused an unexpected drop in capsule pressure less than two hours before launch, Nasa officials said. But technicians said they conducted a successful leak check, and the …

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