Enlarge/ On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)
Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX's Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.
An artist's rendering of the BepiColombo mission, a joint ESA/JAXA project, which will take two spacecraft to the harsh environment of Mercury. (credit: ESA)
This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.
The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.
According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.
Glimpse of galactic merger, via James Webb telescope, may explain presence of monster black holes
A pair of black holes has been observed colliding in the ancient universe for the first time. The observations, by the James Webb Space Telescope, reveal a merger of two galaxies and the monster black holes at their centres when the universe was just 740m years old, about a 20th of its current age.
The discovery that massive mergers appear to have been common in the infant universe could help explain how supermassive black holes like the one at the heart of the Milky Way achieved such tremendous proportions.
Enlarge/ The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away. (credit: HEO on X)
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It's May 16, and today's image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.
According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO's focus is not on Earth; it's on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.
Enlarge/ Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission in November 2021. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
On a fall evening in 2022, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory were busy with the final stages of a planetary defense mission. As Andy Rivkin, one of the team leaders, was getting ready to appear in NASA’s live broadcast of the experiment, a colleague posted a photo of a pair of asteroids: the half-mile-wide Didymos and, orbiting around it, a smaller one called Dimorphos, taken about 7 million miles from Earth.
“We were able to see Didymos and this little dot in the right spot where we expected Dimorphos to be,” Rivkin recalled.
After the interview, Rivkin joined a crowd of scientists and guests to watch the mission’s finale on several big screens: As part of an asteroid deflection mission called DART, a spacecraft was closing in on Dimorphos and photographing its rocky surface in increasing detail.
Enlarge/ A view looking down at Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
Boeing is taking a few extra days to resolve a small helium leak on the Starliner spacecraft slated to ferry two NASA astronauts on a test flight to the International Space Station, officials said Tuesday.
This means the first crew launch of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, running years behind schedule and more than $1.4 billion over budget, won't happen before next Tuesday, May 21, at 4:43 pm EDT (20:43 UTC). Meeting this schedule assumes engineers can get comfortable with the helium leak. Officials from Boeing and NASA, which manages Boeing's multibillion-dollar Starliner commercial crew contract, previously targeted Friday, May 17, for the spacecraft's first launch with astronauts onboard.
Boeing's ground team traced the leak to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster on the spacecraft's service module.
Enlarge/ The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.
Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.
"I am very confident with the selection that we have made today," William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. "We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines."
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
A thick atmosphere has been detected around a planet that's twice as big as Earth in a nearby solar system, researchers reported Wednesday.
The so-called super Earth — known as 55 Cancri e — is among the few rocky planets outside our solar system with a significant atmosphere, wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The exact amounts are unclear. Earth's atmosphere is a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and other gases. "It's probably the firmest evidence yet that this planet has an atmosphere," said Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of Kansas who studies exoplanets and was not involved with the research.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
"The boiling temperatures on this planet — which can reach as hot as 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,300 degrees Celsius) — mean that it is unlikely to host life," the article points out.
"Instead, scientists say the discovery is a promising sign that other such rocky planets with thick atmospheres could exist that may be more hospitable."
"One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up," write two U.K. researchers in the Conversation:
Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton's law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System. To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter — it must be something quite exotic.
This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton's laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond [also known as modified Newtonian dynamics], proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble...
Due to a quirk of Mond, the gravity from the rest of our galaxy should cause Saturn's orbit to deviate from the Newtonian expectation in a subtle way. This can be tested by timing radio pulses between Earth and Cassini. Since Cassini was orbiting Saturn, this helped to measure the Earth-Saturn distance and allowed us to precisely track Saturn's orbit. But Cassini did not find any anomaly of the kind expected in Mond. Newton still works well for Saturn... Another test is provided by wide binary stars — two stars that orbit a shared centre several thousand AU apart. Mond predicted that such stars should orbit around each other 20% faster than expected with Newton's laws. But one of us, Indranil Banik, recently led a very detailed study that rules out this prediction. The chance of Mond being right given these results is the same as a fair coin landing heads up 190 times in a row. Results from yet another team show that Mond also fails to explain small bodies in the distant outer Solar System...
The standard dark matter model of cosmology isn't perfect, however. There are things it struggles to explain, from the universe's expansion rate to giant cosmic structures. So we may not yet have the perfect model. It seems dark matter is here to stay, but its nature may be different to what the Standard Model suggests. Or gravity may indeed be stronger than we think — but on very large scales only.
"Ultimately though, Mond, as presently formulated, cannot be considered a viable alternative to dark matter any more," the researchers conclude. "We may not like it, but the dark side still holds sway."
Enlarge/ An illustration depicts a NASA spacecraft approaching the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Though there are no plans to mine Psyche, such asteroids are being eyed for their valuable resources (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched to space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. While the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.
Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals like platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric vehicle batteries, respectively. Although there are plenty of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts that mining has on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Space dirt for housing structures for astronauts and radiation shielding?
Previous companies have rocketed toward similar goals before but went bust about a half-decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the stage, though, “the field has exploded in interest,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
SYDENHAM — A series of coronal mass ejections from the sun sent waves of charged particles crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere, creating shimmering bands of green and pink light. Read More
Enlarge/ Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas. (credit: ZoeAnn Bailey)
After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.
The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that 'Extreme' G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.
"The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days," the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.
Enlarge/ The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
NASA is looking for ways to get rock samples back from Mars for less than the $11 billion the agency would need under its own plan, so last month, officials put out a call to industry to propose ideas.
Boeing is the first company to release details about how it would attempt a Mars Sample Return mission. Its study involves a single flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the super heavy-lift launcher designed to send astronauts to the Moon on NASA's Artemis missions.
Jim Green, NASA's former chief scientist and longtime head of the agency's planetary science division, presented Boeing's concept Wednesday at the Humans to Mars summit, an annual event sponsored primarily by traditional space companies. Boeing is the lead contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stage and has pitched the SLS, primarily a crew launch vehicle, as a rocket for military satellites and deep space probes.
Source: securityboulevard.com – Author: Nathan Eddy Houston, we may have a problem. NASA’s cybersecurity framework for spacecraft development is inconsistent and must be improved, according to a 34-page review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO report highlighted the need for mandatory cybersecurity updates throughout the space agency’s $83 billion space development project […]
Enlarge/ 60 Starlink satellites stacked for launch at SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2019. (credit: SpaceX)
According to the research firm Quilty Space, SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet business is now profitable.
During a webinar on Thursday, analysts from the firm outlined the reasons why they think SpaceX has been able to achieve a positive cash flow in its space Internet business just five years after the first batch of 60 satellites were launched.
The co-founder of the firm, Chris Quilty, said the rapidity of Starlink's rise surprised a lot of people, including himself. "A lot of industry veterans kind of scoffed at the idea," he said. "We'd seen this before."
Enlarge/ HyImpulse's single-stage rocket, SR75, lifts off from Australia. (credit: HyImpulse)
Welcome to Edition 6.43 of the Rocket Report! This week saw the debut of two new rockets, a suborbital lifter from a German startup, and a new variant of the Long March 6 from China's state-owned launch provider. We also got within two hours of the debut of a crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner vehicle, but a rocket issue forced a 10-day delay. Soon, hopefully.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Orbital launch tally running ahead of 2023. There were 63 orbital launch attempts worldwide in the first quarter of 2024, which is 10 more than the same time last year, Payload reports. SpaceX accounted for 32 of the 34 US orbital launch attempts in Q1. One ULA Vulcan launch and one Rocket Lab Electron launch out of Wallops rounded out the remaining total. (Rocket Lab flights out of New Zealand are not counted in US launch totals.)
Enlarge/ Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane inside a NASA test chamber in Ohio. (credit: Sierra Space)
There is still some work to do to prepare Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane for its first mission, but the company says the winged resupply craft for the International Space Station will soon ship to its launch site in Florida.
The Dream Chaser will take off on top of a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket to head for the space station. A spokesperson for Sierra Space told Ars the spaceplane's launch is scheduled for the third or fourth quarter of this year.
But Sierra Space will transport the Dream Chaser to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a to-do list. There are two more significant tests the spacecraft must complete at the launch site. Technicians must also finish work on Dream Chaser's heat shield before it is ready to go on top of its Vulcan launcher. It's unclear how long these activities will take to complete.
A GAO review of NASA projects found that, while some cybersecurity challenges have been addressed, many security policies and standards remain optional.
Enlarge/ The Orion spacecraft after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Artemis I mission. (credit: NASA)
NASA has asked a panel of outside experts to review the agency's investigation into the unexpected loss of material from the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft on a test flight in 2022.
Chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry at the end of the 25-day unpiloted Artemis I mission in December 2022. Engineers inspecting the capsule after the flight found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry stripped away pieces of the heat shield as temperatures built up to 5,000° Fahrenheit.
This was the most significant discovery on the Artemis I, an unpiloted test flight that took the Orion capsule around the Moon for the first time. The next mission in NASA's Artemis program, Artemis II, is scheduled for launch late next year on a test flight to send four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.
The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled an International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy on Monday, outlining the Biden administration's plan to engage the global community on various technological security issues.
Blinken introduced this robust international cyber strategy while delivering a keynote at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco.
The strategic blueprint outlined in the latest strategy displayed the federal government's multifaceted approach to engaging the global community on a wide array of technological security issues, aiming to foster collaboration and cooperation among allies, partners and stakeholders worldwide.
What’s at the Core of the International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy
At the heart of the plan lies the concept of "digital solidarity," characterized by mutual assistance to victims of malicious cyber activity and other digital harms.
Digital solidarity entails collaborating on shared goals, capacity building, and mutual support to enhance security, resilience, self-determination, and prosperity. Against the backdrop of ongoing cyberattacks targeting U.S. allies by foreign actors like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, efforts focus on supporting allies and partners, particularly emerging economies, in harnessing the benefits of digital technologies while sustaining economic and development objectives.
The strategy emphasizes alignment with international partners on technology governance, fostering strong partnerships with civil society and the private sector, and promoting cybersecurity resilience through diverse products and services from trusted technology vendors.
Moreover, it underscores cooperative efforts to defend and advance human rights and build digital and cyber capacity for long-term resilience and responsiveness.
The Department of State, in collaboration with other federal agencies, will advance digital solidarity through four key areas of action supported by three guiding principles:
Promoting an open, inclusive, secure, and resilient digital ecosystem.
Aligning rights-respecting approaches to digital and data governance with international partners.
Advancing responsible state behavior in cyberspace and countering threats through coalition-building and engagement.
Strengthening international partner digital and cyber capacity.
Efforts to forge digital solidarity will be reinforced by active participation in international fora to shape obligations, norms, standards, and principles impacting cyberspace and digital technology issues. Leadership in these venues is crucial to safeguarding U.S. interests and values in the evolving digital landscape.
Recognizing the significance of digital diplomacy, the Department of State will lead interagency efforts to coordinate cyber and digital technology diplomacy to advance U.S. national interests and values in the coming decade.
Cybersecurity Threats from Nation States
The strategy addresses the malign activities of nations such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, condemning their exploitative use of technology for nefarious purposes, including hacking and espionage campaigns. It highlights concerns about these countries' efforts to undermine international regulatory frameworks and undercut U.S. technology manufacturers through state-sponsored subsidies.
“Cyber criminals and criminal syndicates operating in cyberspace now represent a specific threat to the economic and national security of countries around the world,” the International Cyberspace and Digital Strategy said.
“Cybercrime and online fraud cause significant harm to economic development, with small- to medium-sized enterprises and financial service providers especially at risk. According to one estimate, the global cost of cybercrime is estimated to top $23 trillion in 2027.”
AI Technology Governance
The landscape of AI technology governance is intricate, as per the latest strategy. While AI systems offer promising avenues for societal progress, the complexities of geopolitics further compound the challenges and uncertainties in their regulation and management.
AI technologies hold immense potential to drive knowledge expansion, boost prosperity, enhance productivity, and tackle pressing global issues. However, the rapid proliferation of AI technologies also presents substantial risks and ethical considerations.
These encompass a spectrum of concerns ranging from exacerbating inequality and economic instability to privacy breaches, discriminatory practices, and amplification of malicious cyber activities. Moreover, the dual-use nature of many AI applications poses challenges in ensuring that emerging technologies are not leveraged for nefarious purposes, including disinformation campaigns and military advancements lacking adequate human rights safeguards.
Balancing risks and rewards requires safeguarding democratic values, human rights, and fostering international collaboration to harness AI's benefits while mitigating destabilizing impacts.
The strategy also warns against complacency in critical technological domains, cautioning that failure to act could enable authoritarian states to shape the future of technology in a manner detrimental to U.S. interests and values.
By advocating for concerted efforts to uphold a rights-respecting, open, and secure cyberspace, the United States aims to advance a vision of global governance that safeguards democratic principles and promotes innovation and prosperity.
Media Disclaimer: This report is based on internal and external research obtained through various means. The information provided is for reference purposes only, and users bear full responsibility for their reliance on it. The Cyber Express assumes no liability for the accuracy or consequences of using this information.
Enlarge/ The crew of Polaris Dawn from L to R: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)
Over the weekend the crew of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission shared a wealth of details about the intriguing private mission that will send humans farther than they have flown from Earth in half a century.
Commanded and funded by private astronaut Jared Isaacman, the mission seeks to test new technologies that will further the expansion of humanity into space. Among the objectives are pushing the performance of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, performing the first commercial spacewalk in a new spacesuit developed by SpaceX, and testing Starlink laser-based communications in space.
"Our first objective is to travel farther from the Earth and the last time humans walked on the Moon with Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago," Isaacman said during an online chat hosted by the social network site X. "So we target an apogee of 1,400 kilometers. That puts us just inside the Van Allen radiation belt. It's an awesome opportunity for us to get some data, but really it's about pushing beyond our comfort zone."
Enlarge/ The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft on their launch pad Monday. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams climbed into their seats inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft Monday night in Florida, but trouble with the capsule's Atlas V rocket kept the commercial ship's long-delayed crew test flight on the ground.
Around two hours before launch time, shortly after 8:30 pm EDT (00:30 UTC), United Launch Alliance's launch team stopped the countdown. "The engineering team has evaluated, the vehicle is not in a configuration where we can proceed with flight today," said Doug Lebo, ULA's launch conductor.
The culprit was a misbehaving valve on the rocket's Centaur upper stage, which has two RL10 engines fed by super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.
Enlarge/ Astronauts Suni Williams (left) and Butch Wilmore (right) inside a Starliner simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. (credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)
If you want to know what it's like to take a new spacecraft on its first test run in orbit, there are only three people in the Western world you can call.
That fact should drive home the rarity of debuting a new human-rated spaceship. When Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off Monday night, this group of three will grow to five. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former US Navy test pilots, will be at the controls of Starliner for the ride into low-Earth orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
"The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator. "The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake. We don’t take that lightly at all."
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago.
These were the people who, for decades, had developed and flown the Space Shuttle. They oversaw the construction of the International Space Station. Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.
Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.
Enlarge/ A Long March 5 rocket carrying the Chang'e-6 lunar probe blasts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on May 3, 2024 in Wenchang, China. (credit: Li Zhenzhou/VCG via Getty Images)
China is going back to the Moon for more samples.
On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang'e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the far side of the Moon—something scientists have never been able to study before in-depth.
The mission's goal is to bring about 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of rocks back to Earth a little more than a month from now.
On Thursday, renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, formerly of OpenAI and Tesla, tweeted a lighthearted proposal that large language models (LLMs) like the one that runs ChatGPT could one day be modified to operate in or be transmitted to space, potentially to communicate with extraterrestrial life. He said the idea was "just for fun," but with his influential profile in the field, the idea may inspire others in the future.
Karpathy's bona fides in AI almost speak for themselves, receiving a PhD from Stanford under computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li in 2015. He then became one of the founding members of OpenAI as a research scientist, then served as senior director of AI at Tesla between 2017 and 2022. In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI for a year, leaving this past February. He's posted several highly regarded tutorials covering AI concepts on YouTube, and whenever he talks about AI, people listen.
Most recently, Karpathy has been working on a project called "llm.c" that implements the training process for OpenAI's 2019 GPT-2 LLM in pure C, dramatically speeding up the process and demonstrating that working with LLMs doesn't necessarily require complex development environments. The project's streamlined approach and concise codebase sparked Karpathy's imagination.
Enlarge/ This image captured by Astroscale's ADRAS-J satellite shows the discarded upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket. (credit: Astroscale)
Welcome to Edition 6.42 of the Rocket Report! Several major missions are set for launch in the next few months. These include the first crew flight on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, set for liftoff on May 6, and the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket, which could happen before the end of May. Perhaps as soon as early summer, SpaceX could launch the Polaris Dawn mission with four private astronauts, who will perform the first fully commercial spacewalk in orbit. In June or July, Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket is slated to launch for the first time. Rest assured, Ars will have it all covered.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
German rocket arrives at Scottish spaceport. Rocket Factory Augsburg has delivered a booster for its privately developed RFA One rocket to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, the company announced on X. The first stage for the RFA One rocket was installed on its launch pad at SaxaVord to undergo preparations for a static fire test. The booster arrived at the Scottish launch site with five of its kerosene-fueled Helix engines. The remaining four Helix engines, for a total of nine, will be fitted to the RFA One booster at SaxaVord, the company said.
Enlarge/ Orion, the Moon, and Earth in one photo in December 2022. (credit: NASA)
NASA's acting inspector general, George A. Scott, released a report Wednesday that provided an assessment of NASA's readiness to launch the Artemis II mission next year. This is an important flight for the space agency because, while the crew of four will not land on the Moon, it will be the first time humans have flown into deep space in more than half a century.
The report did not contain any huge surprises. In recent months the biggest hurdle for the Artemis II mission has been the performance of the heat shield that protects the Orion spacecraft during its fiery reentry at more than 25,000 mph from the Moon.
Although NASA downplayed the heat shield issue in the immediate aftermath of the uncrewed Artemis I flight in late 2022, it is clear that the unexpected damage and charring during that uncrewed mission is a significant concern. As recently as last week, Amit Kshatriya, who oversees development for the Artemis missions in NASA's exploration division, said the agency is still looking for the root cause of the problem.
Enlarge/ EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wants Europe to have its own secure satellite communications network. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
It has been 18 months since the European Union announced its intent to develop an independent satellite Internet constellation, and the plans appear to be heading into troubled waters.
In that time, a single bid—from a consortium of multinational companies that includes Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space—has emerged to build the network of a few hundred satellites. The companies are to build, launch, and deploy the network of satellites, intended as Europe's answer to SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service for connectivity and secure communications, by 2027.
However, the European Commission recently delayed the awarding of a contract to this consortium from March to an undetermined date. In April, Europe's Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, said, “There is an independent committee which is working on the evaluation process. The work is being carried out extremely seriously." He did not say when this work would conclude.
When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback.
The signal, which arrived on June 10, 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts. In the last 10 years, astronomers have picked up nearly 5,000 of them. This one was particularly special: nearly double the age of anything previously observed, and three and a half times more energetic.
But like the others that came before, it was otherwise a mystery. No one knows what causes fast radio bursts. They flash in a seemingly random and unpredictable pattern from all over the sky. Some appear from within our galaxy, others from previously unexamined depths of the universe. Some repeat in cyclical patterns for days at a time and then vanish; others have been consistently repeating every few days since we first identified them. Most never repeat at all.
Despite the mystery, these radio waves are starting to prove extraordinarily useful. By the time our telescopes detect them, they have passed through clouds of hot, rippling plasma, through gas so diffuse that particles barely touch each other, and through our own Milky Way. And every time they hit the free electrons floating in all that stuff, the waves shift a little bit. The ones that reach our telescopes carry with them a smeary fingerprint of all the ordinary matter they’ve encountered between wherever they came from and where we are now.
This makes fast radio bursts, or FRBs, invaluable tools for scientific discovery—especially for astronomers interested in the very diffuse gas and dust floating between galaxies, which we know very little about.
“We don’t know what they are, and we don’t know what causes them. But it doesn’t matter. This is the tool we would have constructed and developed if we had the chance to be playing God and create the universe,” says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney and the lead author of the Science paper that reported the record-breaking burst.
Many astronomers now feel confident that finding more such distant FRBs will enable them to create the most detailed three-dimensional cosmological map ever made—what Ryder likens to a CT scan of the universe. Even just five years ago making such a map might have seemed an intractable technical challenge: spotting an FFB and then recording enough data to determine where it came from is extraordinarily difficult because most of that work must happen in the few milliseconds before the burst passes.
But that challenge is about to be obliterated. By the end of this decade, a new generation of radio telescopes and related technologies coming online in Australia, Canada, Chile, California, and elsewhere should transform the effort to find FRBs—and help unpack what they can tell us. What was once a series of serendipitous discoveries will become something that’s almost routine. Not only will astronomers be able to build out that new map of the universe, but they’ll have the chance to vastly improve our understanding of how galaxies are born and how they change over time.
We know that about 5% of the total weight of the universe is made up of baryons like protons and neutrons— the particles that make up atoms, or all the “stuff” in the universe. (The other 95% includes dark energy and dark matter.) But the astronomers managed to locate only about 2.5%, not 5%, of the universe’s total. “They counted the stars, black holes, white dwarfs, exotic objects, the atomic gas, the molecular gas in galaxies, the hot plasma, etc. They added it all up and wound up at least a factor of two short of what it should have been,” says Xavier Prochaska, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert in analyzing the light in the early universe. “It’s embarrassing. We’re not actively observing half of the matter in the universe.”
All those missing baryons were a serious problem for simulations of how galaxies form, how our universe is structured, and what happens as it continues to expand.
Astronomers began to speculate that the missing matter exists in extremely diffuse clouds of what’s known as the warm–hot intergalactic medium, or WHIM. Theoretically, the WHIM would contain all that unobserved material. After the 1998 paper was published, Prochaska committed himself to finding it.
But nearly 10 years of his life and about $50 million in taxpayer money later, the hunt was going very poorly.
That search had focused largely on picking apart the light from distant galactic nuclei and studying x-ray emissions from tendrils of gas connecting galaxies. The breakthrough came in 2007, when Prochaska was sitting on a couch in a meeting room at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reviewing new research papers with his colleagues. There, amid the stacks of research, sat the paper reporting the discovery of the first FRB.
Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic, astronomers at West Virginia University, had discovered a recording of an energetic radio wave unlike anything previously observed. The wave lasted for less than five milliseconds, and its spectral lines were very smeared and distorted, unusual characteristics for a radio pulse that was also brighter and more energetic than other known transient phenomena. The researchers concluded that the wave could not have come from within our galaxy, meaning that it had traveled some unknown distance through the universe.
Here was a signal that had traversed long distances of space, been shaped and affected by electrons along the way, and had enough energy to be clearly detectable despite all the stuff it had passed through. There are no other signals we can currently detect that commonly occur throughout the universe and have this exact set of traits.
“I saw that and I said, ‘Holy cow—that’s how we can solve the missing-baryons problem,’” Prochaska says. Astronomers had used a similar technique with the light from pulsars— spinning neutron stars that beam radiation from their poles—to count electrons in the Milky Way. But pulsars are too dim to illuminate more of the universe. FRBs were thousands of times brighter, offering a way to use that technique to study space well beyond our galaxy.
This visualization of large-scale structure in the universe shows galaxies (bright knots) and the filaments of material between them.
NASA/NCSA UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS VISUALIZATION BY FRANK SUMMERS, SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, SIMULATION BY MARTIN WHITE AND LARS HERNQUIST, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
There’s a catch, though: in order for an FRB to be an indicator of what lies in the seemingly empty space between galaxies, researchers have to know where it comes from. If you don’t know how far the FRB has traveled, you can’t make any definitive estimate of what space looks like between its origin point and Earth.
Astronomers couldn’t even point to the direction that the first 2007 FRB came from, let alone calculate the distance it had traveled. It was detected by an enormous single-dish radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory (now called the Murriyang) in New South Wales, which is great at picking up incoming radio waves but can pinpoint FRBs only to an area of the sky as large as Earth’s full moon. For the next decade, telescopes continued to identify FRBs without providing a precise origin, making them a fascinating mystery but not practically useful.
Then, in 2015, one particular radio wave flashed—and then flashed again. Over the course of two months of observation from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the radio waves came again and again, flashing 10 times. This was the first repeating burst of FRBs ever observed (a mystery in its own right), and now researchers had a chance to determine where the radio waves had begun, using the opportunity to home in on its location.
In 2017, that’s what happened. The researchers obtained an accurate position for the fast radio burst using the NRAO Very Large Array telescope in central New Mexico. Armed with that position, the researchers then used the Gemini optical telescope in Hawaii to take a picture of the location, revealing the galaxy where the FRB had begun and how far it had traveled. “That’s when it became clear that at least some of these we’d get the distance for. That’s when I got really involved and started writing telescope proposals,” Prochaska says.
That same year, astronomers from across the globe gathered in Aspen, Colorado, to discuss the potential for studying FRBs. Researchers debated what caused them. Neutron stars? Magnetars, neutron stars with such powerful magnetic fields that they emit x-rays and gamma rays? Merging galaxies? Aliens? Did repeating FRBs and one-offs have different origins, or could there be some other explanation for why some bursts repeat and most do not? Did it even matter, since all the bursts could be used as probes regardless of what caused them? At that Aspen meeting, Prochaska met with a team of radio astronomers based in Australia, including Keith Bannister, a telescope expert involved in the early work to build a precursor facility for the Square Kilometer Array, an international collaboration to build the largest radio telescope arrays in the world.
The construction of that precursor telescope, called ASKAP, was still underway during that meeting. But Bannister, a telescope expert at the Australian government’s scientific research agency, CSIRO, believed that it could be requisitioned and adapted to simultaneously locate and observe FRBs.
Bannister and the other radio experts affiliated with ASKAP understood how to manipulate radio telescopes for the unique demands of FRB hunting; Prochaska was an expert in everything “not radio.” They agreed to work together to identify and locate one-off FRBs (because there are many more of these than there are repeating ones) and then use the data to address the problem of the missing baryons.
And over the course of the next five years, that’s exactly what they did—with astonishing success.
Building a pipeline
To pinpoint a burst in the sky, you need a telescope with two things that have traditionally been at odds in radio astronomy: a very large field of view and high resolution. The large field of view gives you the greatest possible chance to detect a fleeting, unpredictable burst. High resolution lets you determine where that burst actually sits in your field of view.
ASKAP was the perfect candidate for the job. Located in the westernmost part of the Australian outback, where cattle and sheep graze on public land and people are few and far between, the telescope consists of 36 dishes, each with a large field of view. These dishes are separated by large distances, allowing observations to be combined through a technique called interferometry so that a small patch of the sky can be viewed with high precision.
The dishes weren’t formally in use yet, but Bannister had an idea. He took them and jerry-rigged a “fly’s eye” telescope, pointing the dishes at different parts of the sky to maximize its ability to spot something that might flash anywhere.
“Suddenly, it felt like we were living in paradise,” Bannister says. “There had only ever been three or four FRB detections at this point, and people weren’t entirely sure if [FRBs] were real or not, and we were finding them every two weeks.”
When ASKAP’s interferometer went online inSeptember 2018, the real work began. Bannister designed a piece of software that he likens to live-action replay of the FRB event. “This thing comes by and smacks into your telescope and disappears, and you’ve got a millisecond to get its phone number,” he says. To do so, the software detects the presence of an FRB within a hundredth of a second and then reaches upstream to create a recording of the telescope’s data before the system overwrites it. Data from all the dishes can be processed and combined to reconstruct a view of the sky and find a precise point of origin.
The team can then send the coordinates on to optical telescopes, which can take detailed pictures of the spot to confirm the presence of a galaxy—the likely origin point of the FRB.
These two dishes are part of CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.
CSIRO
Ryder’s team used data on the galaxy’s spectrum, gathered from the European Southern Observatory, to measure how much its light stretched as it traversed space to reach our telescopes. This “redshift” becomes a proxy for distance, allowing astronomers to estimate just how much space the FRB’s light has passed through.
In 2018, the live-action replay worked for the first time, making Bannister, Ryder, Prochaska, and the rest of their research team the first to localize an FRB that was not repeating. By the following year, the team had localized about five of them. By 2020, they had published a paper in Nature declaring that the FRBs had let them count up the universe’s missing baryons.
The centerpiece of the paper’s argument was something called the dispersion measure—a number that reflects how much an FRB’s light has been smeared by all the free electrons along our line of sight. In general, the farther an FRB travels, the higher the dispersion measure should be. Armed with both the travel distance (the redshift) and the dispersion measure for a number of FRBs, the researchers found they could extrapolate the total density of particles in the universe. J-P Macquart, the paper’s lead author, believed that the relationship between dispersion measure and FRB distance was predictable and could be applied to map the universe.
As a leader in the field and a key player in the advancement of FRB research, Macquart would have been interviewed for this piece. But he died of a heart attack one week after the paper was published, at the age of 45. FRB researchers began to call the relationship between dispersion and distance the “Macquart relation,” in honor of his memory and his push for the groundbreaking idea that FRBs could be used for cosmology.
Proving that the Macquart relation would hold at greater distances became not just a scientific quest but also an emotional one.
“I remember thinking that I know something about the universe that no one else knows.”
The researchers knew that the ASKAP telescope was capable of detecting bursts from very far away—they just needed to find one. Whenever the telescope detected an FRB, Ryder was tasked with helping to determine where it had originated. It took much longer than he would have liked. But one morning in July 2022, after many months of frustration, Ryder downloaded the newest data email from the European Southern Observatory and began to scroll through the spectrum data. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling—and then there it was: light from 8 billion years ago, or a redshift of one, symbolized by two very close, bright lines on the computer screen, showing the optical emissions from oxygen. “I remember thinking that I know something about the universe that no one else knows,” he says. “I wanted to jump onto a Slack and tell everyone, but then I thought: No, just sit here and revel in this. It has taken a lot to get to this point.”
With the October 2023 Science paper, the team had basically doubled the distance baseline for the Macquart relation, honoring Macquart’s memory in the best way they knew how. The distance jump was significant because Ryder and the others on his team wanted to confirm that their work would hold true even for FRBs whose light comes from so far away that it reflects a much younger universe. They also wanted to establish that it was possible to find FRBs at this redshift, because astronomers need to collect evidence about many more like this one in order to create the cosmological map that motivates so much FRB research.
“It’s encouraging that the Macquart relation does still seem to hold, and that we can still see fast radio bursts coming from those distances,” Ryder said. “We assume that there are many more out there.”
Mapping the cosmic web
The missing stuff that lies between galaxies, which should contain the majority of the matter in the universe, is often called the cosmic web. The diffuse gases aren’t floating like random clouds; they’re strung together more like a spiderweb, a complex weaving of delicate filaments that stretches as the galaxies at their nodes grow and shift. This gas probably escaped from galaxies into the space beyond when the galaxies first formed, shoved outward by massive explosions.
“We don’t understand how gas is pushed in and out of galaxies. It’s fundamental for understanding how galaxies form and evolve,” says Kiyoshi Masui, the director of MIT’s Synoptic Radio Lab. “We only exist because stars exist, and yet this process of building up the building blocks of the universe is poorly understood … Our ability to model that is the gaping hole in our understanding of how the universe works.”
Astronomers are also working to build large-scale maps of galaxies in order to precisely measure the expansion of the universe. But the cosmological modeling underway with FRBs should create a picture of invisible gasses between galaxies, one that currently does not exist. To build a three-dimensional map of this cosmic web, astronomers will need precise data on thousands of FRBs from regions near Earth and from very far away, like the FRB at redshift one. “Ultimately, fast radio bursts will give you a very detailed picture of how gas gets pushed around,” Masui says. “To get to the cosmological data, samples have to get bigger, but not a lot bigger.”
That’s the task at hand for Masui, who leads a team searching for FRBs much closer to our galaxy than the ones found by the Australian-led collaboration. Masui’s team conducts FRB research with the CHIME telescope in British Columbia, a nontraditional radio telescope with a very wide field of view and focusing reflectors that look like half-pipes instead of dishes. CHIME (short for “Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment)” has no moving parts and is less reliant on mirrors than a traditional telescope (focusing light in only one direction rather than two), instead using digital techniques to process its data. CHIME can use its digital technology to focus on many places at once, creating a 200-square-degree field of view compared with ASKAP’s 30-degree one. Masui likened it to a mirror that can be focused on thousands of different places simultaneously.
Because of this enormous field of view, CHIME has been able to gather data on thousands of bursts that are closer to the Milky Way. While CHIME cannot yet precisely locate where they are coming from the way that ASKAP can (the telescope is much more compact, providing lower resolution), Masui is leading the effort to change that by building three smaller versions of the same telescope in British Columbia; Green Bank, West Virginia; and Northern California. The additional data provided by these telescopes, the first of which will probably be collected sometime this year, can be combined with data from the original CHIME telescope to produce location information that is about 1,000 times more precise. That should be detailed enough for cosmological mapping.
The reflectors of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, have been used to spot thousands of FRBs.
ANDRE RECNIK/CHIME
Telescope technology is improving so fast that the quest to gather enough FRB samples from different parts of the universe for a cosmological map could be finished within the next 10 years. In addition to CHIME, the BURSTT radio telescope in Taiwan should go online this year; the CHORD telescope in Canada, designed to surpass CHIME, should begin operations in 2025; and the Deep Synoptic Array in California could transform the field of radio astronomy when it’s finished, which is expected to happen sometime around the end of the decade.
And at ASKAP, Bannister is building a new tool that will quintuple the sensitivity of the telescope, beginning this year. If you can imagine stuffing a million people simultaneously watching uncompressed YouTube videos into a box the size of a fridge, that’s probably the easiest way to visualize the data handling capabilities of this new processor, called a field-programmable gate array, which Bannister is almost finished programming. He expects the new device to allow the team to detect one new FRB each day.
With all the telescopes in competition, Bannister says, “in five or 10 years’ time, there will be 1,000 new FRBs detected before you can write a paper about the one you just found … We’re in a race to make them boring.”
Prochaska is so confident FRBs will finally give us the cosmological map he’s been working toward his entire life that he’s started studying for a degree in oceanography. Once astronomers have measured distances for 1,000 of the bursts, he plans to give up the work entirely.
“In a decade, we could have a pretty decent cosmological map that’s very precise,” he says. “That’s what the 1,000 FRBs are for—and I should be fired if we don’t.”
Unlike most scientists, Prochaska can define the end goal. He knows that all those FRBs should allow astronomers to paint a map of the invisible gases in the universe, creating a picture of how galaxies evolve as gases move outward and then fall back in. FRBs will grant us an understanding of the shape of the universe that we don’t have today—even if the mystery of what makes them endures.
Anna Kramer is a science and climate journalist based in Washington, D.C.
Washington, DC, was hot and humid on June 23, 1993, but no one was sweating more than Daniel Goldin, the administrator of NASA. Standing outside the House chamber, he watched nervously as votes registered on the electronic tally board. The space station wasn’t going to make it. The United States had spent more than $11 billion on it by then, with thousands of pounds of paperwork to show for it—but zero pounds of flight hardware. Whether there would ever be a station came down, now, to a cancellation vote on the House floor.
Politically, the space station was something of a wayward orphan. It was a nine-year-old Reagan administration initiative, expanded by George H.W. Bush as the centerpiece of a would-be return to the moon and an attempt to reach Mars. When voters replaced Bush with Bill Clinton, Goldin persuaded the new president to keep the station by pitching it as a post-Soviet reconstruction effort. The Russians were great at building stations, which would save NASA a fortune in R&D. In turn, NASA’s funding would keep Russian rocket scientists employed—and less likely to freelance for hostile foreign powers. Still, dissatisfaction with NASA was a bipartisan affair: everyone seemed to agree that the agency was bloated and ossified. Representative Tim Roemer, a Democrat from Indiana, wanted to make some big changes, and he introduced an amendment to the NASA authorization bill to kill the station once and for all.
Goldin had made more than 100 phone calls in the day and a half before the vote, hoping to sway lawmakers to endorse the station, which he saw as critical for studying biomedicine, electronics, materials engineering, and the human body in a completely alien environment: microgravity. Things down to the molecular level behave profoundly differently in space, and flying experiments a week at a time on the shuttle wasn’t enough to learn much. Real research required a permanent presence in space, and that meant a space station.
Supporters of the space station had gone into the vote expecting to win. Not by much—20 votes, maybe. But the longer the vote went on, the closer it got. Each side began cheering as it pulled ahead. The 110 new members of Congress, none of whom had ever before cast a vote involving the station, revealed themselves to be less reliable than expected.
Finally, the tally reached 215–215, with one vote remaining: Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights legend. As Lewis walked down the hall toward the legislative chamber, Goldin’s legislative aide, Jeff Lawrence, told the administrator to say something—anything—to win him over. As Lewis walked by, Goldin had only one second, maybe two, and the best he could get out was a raw, honest, “Congressman Lewis, the future of the space program depends on you.” He added: “The nation is counting on you. How will you vote?”
Lewis smiled as he walked by. He said, “I ain’t telling you.”
The station, later named the International Space Station, survived by his single vote, 216–215. Five years later, Russia launched the first module from Kazakhstan, and since November 2000, not a single day has elapsed without a human being in space.
NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030. This will involve a “deorbit vehicle” docking with the ISS, which is the size of a football field (including end zones), and firing thrusters so that the station, which circles the Earth at five miles per second, slams down squarely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, avoiding land, injury, and the loss of human life.
As the scorched remains of the station sink to the bottom of the sea, however, the story of America in low Earth orbit (LEO) will continue. The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body. To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. They will also demonstrate a new model in which NASA builds infrastructure and the private sector takes it from there, freeing the agency to explore deeper and deeper into space, where the process can be repeated. They’re already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow.
From the dawn of the space age, space stations were envisioned as essential to leaving Earth.
In 1952, Wernher von Braun, the primary architect of the American space program, called them “as inevitable as the rising of the sun” and said they’d be integral to any sustainable exploration program, mitigating cost and complexity. Indeed, he proposed building a space station before a moon or Mars program, so that expeditions would have a logistical way station for resupply and refueling.
“Going into the 1960s, there’s a lot of consensus and momentum around the idea that space is going to be a three-step process,” says historian David Hitt, coauthor of Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story. Step one, he told me, is transportation. You’ve got to leave Earth somehow, which means developing the infrastructure to build human-safe rockets and launching them. Step two is habitation. You need a place to live once you are in space—for its own sake as a science laboratory, and also as a logistical waypoint between Earth and other celestial objects. “Once you have transportation and habitation,” he says, “you can take your next step, which is exploration.”
The mindset changed after the Soviet Union beat the United States to orbit, first with its Sputnik I satellite in 1957 and again when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961. President John F. Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth “before this decade is out.” It was an outrageously ambitious goal, given that NASA had only managed to launch a human to space three weeks earlier. “It required moving quickly, and the way you do that is to take the three-step plan and get rid of step two,” Hitt told me. “As it turned out, if you skip the habitation stage, it works—the US got to the moon, but did so in a way that did not lay the groundwork for the long-term sustainability of the program.”
“Even going back to the Mercury program, the goal was always the moon. Skylab is the first time that space itself became the destination.”
David Hitt, historian
We are still working on that. Two years after the final Apollo mission, NASA launched the first American space station, Skylab. Adapted from the second stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, it was enormous: 99 feet (30 meters) long and by far the heaviest spacecraft ever launched. NASA would eventually launch three missions of three astronauts each to the station, where they would perform more than a hundred experiments.
“In a very real way, Skylab was the first American space mission,” Hitt says. “Before Skylab, we were flying moon missions—even going back to the Mercury program, the goal was always the moon. Skylab is the first time that space itself became the destination.” Its goals were foundational to what would later come. “The big thing that Skylab taught us is that human beings can, in fact, live and work long durations in a space environment. If we’re serious about going to Mars, you [may] spend way longer in space than you’re going to spend on the Martian surface.”
Skylab remains the only space station built and launched solely by the United States. In 1986, the Soviet Union launched the first module of Mir, a modular space station built like Lego blocks, one segment at a time. Because NASA had discontinued the Saturn V rocket, the agency necessarily adopted the same modular station model, eventually partnering with Russia and other countries to build the ISS. Today it shares the skies with Tiangong, China’s permanent space station, the first module of which launched in 2021. None of these stations have acted as moon or Mars way stations in the von Braun mold; to satisfy that requirement, NASA is developing a future station called Gateway that is intended to orbit the moon. Its first module could launch next year.
Although they never became transportation hubs, each space station has advanced the critical cause of learning what long stretches of space do to the human body. (Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who flew on Mir, holds the all-time record for continuous spaceflight, with 437 days.) Researchers still have a relative paucity of knowledge about how the body responds to space. On Earth, we have the collective experience of more than 100 billion human beings across 300,000 years, and still much about the human body remains a mystery. Why do we yawn? What should we eat? Fewer than a thousand people in 63 years have ever been to space. Such studies can only occur on permanent space stations.
“During the shuttle program, we were studying the effects of just a shorter-duration spaceflight—a couple weeks—on the human body,” Steven Platts, chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program, told me. Among the problems was “orthostatic intolerance,” which is the body’s inability to regulate blood pressure. It affected about a quarter of crew members who returned from space. Once NASA and Russia launched the ISS and spaceflight durations increased from weeks to months, that number leaped to 80%. “We spent a lot of time trying to tease out that mechanism. And we eventually came up with countermeasures so that that risk is now considered closed,” he says.
Other challenges include spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, which is a change in the structure and function of the eye, something researchers identified about 10 years ago. “We didn’t really see it with the shuttle, but as we started doing more and more station missions, we saw it,” Platts says. They have also identified small, structural changes in the brain but have yet to figure out what that means in the long term: “That’s a relatively new risk that we didn’t know about before the space station.”
Overall, he says, the ability of the human body to regulate its function in space is “amazing.” His group is working on about 30 risks to humans posed by space exploration, which it classifies in a color-coding scheme. Green issues are well controlled. Yellow risks are of moderate concern, and red ones must be solved before missions are possible. “Right now, for low Earth orbit there are no red. Everything is yellow and green. We understand it pretty well and we can deal with it. But as we get to lunar, we see more yellow and some red, and as we get to Mars, we see more red yet,” Platts says. “There are things that we know right now are a problem, and we’re working hard to try and figure them out, either from a research standpoint or an engineering standpoint.”
Some problems can only be studied as we venture farther into space—the long-term effects of Mars dust on the human body, for example. Others, such as the unanticipated development of psychiatric disorders, can be studied closer to home.
NASA and other institutions are currently studying all this on the ISS and will need to continue such research long beyond the space station’s retirement—one reason why it is imperative that someone else launch a successor space station, and soon. To that end, just as it did with SpaceX from 2006 through 2011, the agency has seeded several companies with small investments, promising to lease space on emergent space stations. And right now, the soonest likely to launch is being led out of a sprawling former Fry’s Electronics retail store in a shopping center complex in Texas.
I met Michael Baine, the chief technology officer of Axiom Space, on a gray, drizzly January morning at the entrance to its Space Station Development Facility in Houston. Baine began his career at NASA Johnson Space Center just down the road, where he worked on everything from the shuttle and station to experimental lunar landers. Later, he left the agency to join Intuitive Machines as its chief of engineering. In February, that company’s Nova-C spacecraft, Odysseus, became the first US spacecraft to land successfully on the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, making Intuitive Machines the first private company to land successfully on a celestial object beyond Earth. Baine has worked at Axiom Space since 2016. The startup’s long-term goal is to build the first private commercial space station. It has successfully organized and managed three private missions to the International Space Station, in large part to study firsthand how humans work and live in space, so that they might design a more user-friendly product.
Axiom is not the only company interested in launching private space stations. Most notably, Blue Origin announced in 2021 that in partnership with the aerospace outfit Sierra Nevada, it would build Orbital Reef, a “mixed-use business park” capable of supporting up to 10 people simultaneously in low Earth orbit. In January, Sierra Nevada successfully stress-tested a one-third-scale test article of its habitat module, with the intention of launching a station into orbit on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in 2027. Other companies, such as Lockheed Martin, have made moves into the market, though their progress is less clear.
Axiom plans to build its own orbital facility much differently, Baine told me as we entered the facility. Suspended from the wall above, large, low-fidelity models of spacecraft hung from the ceiling, including the X-38 (an experimental emergency return vehicle for space station crew) and Zvezda, the Russian module of the ISS, which today is plagued by age-induced stress fractures and consequent leaks. Crew vehicles no longer dock with it.
Michael Baine, the chief
technology officer of Axiom Space, began his career at NASA Johnson Space Center.
ANTHONY RATHBUN
“It’s very difficult to build a full, self-sustaining space station and launch it in one shot,” Baine said as we walked past an open-concept cube farm beneath the models, where about 500 men and women are designing a space station to replace Zvezda and the rest of the ISS. “What you want to do is assemble it in space in a piecemeal fashion. The easiest way to do that is to start with something that is already there.”
That “something” is the International Space Station itself. In 2026, Baine expects to launch Axiom Hab One, a cylindrical module with crew quarters and manufacturing capabilities that will plug into an open port on the ISS. Later, Axiom plans to launch Hab Two, expanding habitation, scientific, and manufacturing services. Then it hopes to launch a research and manufacturing facility, complete with a spacious, fully glassed cupola to give Axiom astronauts and visitors on the station access to a complete view of planet Earth, as well as the length of the station. Finally, the company intends to launch a “power thermal module” with massive solar panels, expanded life support capabilities, and payload capacity.
“We wanted to turn over the keys to the shuttle, the station—all that—to the private sector.”
Lori Garver, former deputy administrator of NASA
Each new segment is designed to plug into the preceding Axiom segment. This isn’t aspirational; there is a hard deadline in effect. Unless the ISS gets a new lease on life, everything must be launched and assembled by 2030. Once NASA officially declares the ISS mission completed, the Lego-like Axiom Station will detach from the ISS as its own integrated and fully self-sustaining space station. Afterward, the deorbit vehicle will do its job and push the ISS into the ocean.
“It’s a big risk reduction for us to be able to use ISS as a staging point to build up our capability one element at a time,” Baine explains. That plan also offers a huge commercial advantage. There is already a robust, global user base of companies and researchers sending projects to the ISS. “In order to court those users to migrate to a commercial solution, it just becomes easier if you’re already at a location where they’re at,” he says. Everything from technical interfaces to the way Axiom Station will handle the outgassing of materials will be compatible with existing ISS hardware: “We have to meet the same standards that NASA does.”
The Axiom Station Earth Observatory module will allow astronauts a 360-degree view of their surroundings.
ANTHONY RATHBUN
A lot of people are betting that there are fortunes to be made in LEO, and because of that, the US taxpayer is not paying for Axiom Station. Though NASA intends to eventually rent space on Hab One, and has already awarded tens of millions of dollars to kick off early development, the commercial station is being built by hundreds of millions of private dollars. The cultivation of commercial research and manufacturing is ongoing, which was NASA’s aim going all the way back to Dan Goldin’s tenure as administrator.
“We wanted to turn over the keys to the shuttle, the station—all that—to the private sector,” says Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA and author of Escaping Gravity. “Dan believed if we could hand over low-Earth-orbit infrastructure, NASA could go farther into space, and I really bought into that.” Garver would later pioneer the commercial spaceflight model that led SpaceX and other companies to take over launch services, saving the agency tens of billions of dollars while simultaneously speeding launch cadence—the same model that led to Axiom’s space station work.
“After launching the first module in 1998, we announced that space was open for business,” Garver told me. The first person to reach out was Fisk Johnson, of S.C. Johnson & Son. He wanted to work with NASA to develop a bioreactor to help create new pharmaceuticals for liver disease in a microgravity environment. “I worked with him for probably three years at NASA,” Garver says. “Unfortunately, their flight mission was Columbia, and we lost the experiment in the tragedy.”
In the decades to follow, commercial research and development would increase, with limitations. NASA, Russia, and the other partner nations did not design the ISS specifically as a large-scale research and manufacturing facility, and one reason no company has elected to simply buy the station outright is that refurbishing it would be more complex and expensive than either building a new station, as Axiom has elected to do, or renting space on a modern successor.
As we came upon a stunning, full-scale mock-up of Hab One at the far end of the building, I asked Baine if starting with the technical solutions already developed by NASA—the way environmental systems work, for example—makes Axiom Station easier from an engineering perspective.
A mock-up of an Axiom station module interior.
ANTHONY RATHBUN
“You would think so,” he replied, “but these are very demanding standards, and they require a lot of attention to detail.” The voluminous testing and analyses to prove that you meet the requirements necessary to interface with ISS generate a lot of work, “but you end up with a structure or a component that is extremely reliable. The chances that a failure could propagate to a loss of crew is very, very remote.”
Only looking at the mock-up did I realize the immensity of the spacecraft. It is 15 feet (4.6 meters) at its widest, and 36 feet long. Once docked with the ISS, Hab One, which weighs 30 metric tons on Earth and can support four astronauts, will be the longest element on the station.
“It is a spaceship-in-the-bottle problem. You basically have to feed all your systems through a 50-inch hatch.”
Michael Baine, chief technology officer, Axiom Space
Here at the Space Station Development Facility, the entire mock-up is made of CNC-machined wood. But the module is much further along than the existence of a “mock-up stage” would suggest. Its pressure vessel (that is, its primary shell, which holds air and maintains an Earth-like pressure environment in the vacuum of space) and its hatches are essentially completed and will soon be shipped from Italy by the same contractor that built many modules of the ISS. Baine walked me through a partitioned facility where Axiom Station’s avionics, propulsion, life support systems, communications, and other subsystems are well into development. Befitting the former Fry’s Electronics building in which we stood, there was a home-brew element to the systems, many of which were strewn across tables—an elaborate web of wires, tubes, circuit boards, and chips. The station will run on Linux.
Axiom built the mock-up to solve an almost comically fundamental challenge that any project such as this faces: turning the pressure shell and the myriad subsystems and components into a human-safe spacefaring vehicle. You can’t just drill holes in the pressure shell, any more than you can punch a hole in a balloon and expect it to keep its shape. Axiom must build the module inside and around it. “It is a spaceship-in-the-bottle problem,” Baine said. “You basically have to feed all your systems through a 50-inch hatch and integrate them into the element.” He calls it one of the hardest problems in the business, because it’s about more than assembling systems inside a pressure shell in Houston—it’s also about making the station user friendly for servicing in orbit, if ever a technical issue arises.
Axiom’s R&D facility
is housed in a sprawling
former Fry’s Electronics
retail store in a shopping
center complex.
A mock-up of Axiom’s
Habitat One (Hab One),
which will include crew
quarters and manufacturing
capabilities.
Today, tourism and research are probably the best-known uses of private spaceflight. But Axiom has other functions in mind for the station, including serving as a destination for countries that have yet to get involved in sending humans to space. Last year, the company announced the Axiom Space Access Program, which Tejpaul Bhatia, the company’s chief revenue officer, described as a “space program in a box” for countries around the world. Axiom says the program is evolving, but that it is a pathway for space participation. Azerbaijan was the first country to sign on.
But one of the most promising business prospects for the immediate future is manufacturing. Low Earth orbit is an especially good environment for making things in three areas: pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, and optics. Microgravity eliminates a number of physical phenomena that can interfere with sensitive steps in manufacturing processes, yielding more consistent material properties and structures. Axiom and Blue Origin are betting that modern space stations built around the insights gleaned from decades of ISS experimentation (but freed of its 1980s and 1990s technology) will pay dividends.
As part of its push to encourage companies to develop their own space stations, NASA has committed to leasing space on those that meet the agency’s stringent human-spaceflight requirements. Just as with a major shopping center, an “anchor tenant” can offer financial stability and attract more tenants. To help this along, a US national laboratory based in Melbourne, Florida, is specifically funding and supporting non-aerospace companies that might benefit from microgravity research.
Biomedicine in particular has yielded perhaps the best results with the nearest-term impact, as best represented by LambdaVision, a company established in 2009 by molecular biologists Nicole Wagner and Robert Birge. What makes it the most compelling glimpse of LEO’s promise is that LambdaVision was not founded as an aerospace company. Rather, Wagner and Birge were building a traditional, Earth-based company atop their research on a protein called bacteriorhodopsin and its potential to restore neural function. BR is a “proton pump,” which is just what it sounds like. It pumps a proton from one side of a cell to the other.
They focused on the problems of retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. In a healthy eye, photoreceptor cells—rods and cones—take in light and convert it into a signal that goes to bipolar and ganglion cells, and then to the optic nerve. In both diseases, the rods and cones start to die, and once they are gone, there is nothing to take in light and turn it into a signal that can be sent to the brain. Retinitis pigmentosa, which afflicts 1.5 million people around the world, begins by affecting peripheral vision and encroaches inward, leading to severe tunnel vision before causing complete blindness. Macular degeneration works the opposite way, first affecting central vision and then spreading outward. About 30 million people around the world suffer from it. Treatments exist for both diseases, but even the best can only slow their progression. In the end, blindness wins, and once it does, there is no treatment.
Wagner, Birge, and their team at LambdaVision had an idea for something that might help: a simple, flexible implant, about as big as the circle stamped out by a hole punch and the thickness of a piece of construction paper, that could replace the damaged light-sensing cells and restore full vision. In principle, physicians could install the patch in the back of the eye, the same way they treat detached retinas, so it would not even require specialized training.
The problem was making this artificial retina. The implant requires using a scaffold—essentially a tightly woven porous material similar to gauze—and binding a polymer to it. Atop that, the researchers begin applying alternating layers of BR protein and polymers. With enough layers, the protein can absorb enough light and pump protons—hydrogen ions, specifically—toward the bipolar and ganglion cells, which take it from there, restoring vision in high definition.
To apply multiple layers, scientists float the scaffold on a solution in multiple beakers, moving from one to the next and repeating the process. The problem is that fluid solutions are never perfect—things float, they sink, they settle, they form sediment, they evaporate, there is convection, there are surface-tension variations—and every variation and imperfection can lead to a flawed layer.
Nicole Wagner is cofounder of LambdaVision, a biotech startup that is working on making artificial retinas in low Earth orbit.
JULIE BIDWELL
If an implant requires 200 layers, an imperfection at layer 50 compounds massively by the end. The process is simply inefficient, and rife with irregular protein deposition. Early trials revealed that this issue negatively affected the artificial retina’s performance.
It was the sort of thing LambdaVision was hoping to work through as part of MassChallenge, a business incubation program in Boston. Wagner was working in the business accelerator’s co-working space one day in 2017. It had a “Google-y” feel, she felt, with an open-concept office and smart people all around, and she was at the desk they’d assigned her when somebody dropped by to say that the International Space Station National Laboratory was holding a lunch presentation down the hall, and there was free pizza.
Why not, Wagner thought. It would be pretty cool to hear people from NASA talk about the moon and Mars. When she got there, though, it turned out that it wasn’t that sort of presentation at all. Instead, representatives from CASIS—the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, a nonprofit that operates the ISS National Lab—gave a talk on how they are using microgravity to help people on Earth.
The US segment of the International Space Station, like Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven, is a national laboratory dedicated to scientific and technological research. The office simply has a better view. About half the science conducted on the US segment is managed by the ISS National Laboratory out of Florida, with the remainder overseen by NASA. This division of resources allows for a wide range of scientific investigations on the station. Where NASA’s research typically focuses on exploration, space technology, and fundamental science to support future deep-space missions, the ISS National Laboratory aims to develop a sustainable low-Earth-orbit economy, encompassing fields like materials science, biology, pharmaceutical research, and technology development.
“I never envisioned doing anything in space—I didn’t know how to get there, or how it worked. Before that moment, it all sounded like science fiction.”
Nicole Wagner, cofounder of LambdaVision
Research being conducted on the station touches on metallurgy and fiber optics. Alloys like nitinol (nickel-titanium) can withstand huge temperature swings and are superelastic, with extraordinary potential for medical devices, aerospace, and robotics. Think artificial muscles. The problem is that nitinol is extremely hard to make on Earth because materials settle out and heat can get distributed unevenly during manufacturing, which yields an unreliable product. The same liabilities degrade the quality of fiber optics manufactured on Earth.
The solution to both is to go to space: in microgravity, heat distributes more uniformly and sedimentation does not occur. Crystallization, the process of forming and growing crystals, is consistent across long distances with minimal degradation (meaning pristine fiber-optic signals even as you grow across vast stretches). More broadly, however, space-based crystallography has applications in almost every field of electronics and biomedicine.
As Wagner learned, researchers have found immediate gains on the space station today in everything from development of more effective vaccines (gravity on Earth harms the interaction of antigens and adjuvants) to higher-grade drug formulations and nanoparticle suspensions. One such drug, made by Taiho Pharmaceutical, is used to treat muscular dystrophy and has reached final-stage trials.
“They were talking at that time about things like bioprinting on orbit, and future missions they were planning,” Wagner told me. “It hit me immediately that we could do this—actually leverage microgravity to manufacture an artificial retina. I never envisioned doing anything in space—I didn’t know how to get there, or how it worked. Before that moment, it all sounded like science fiction.”
After the meeting, she immediately called her team. “There’s a prize that I think we can win,” she said. It was the CASIS-Boeing Technology in Space Prize, which funds research that might benefit from space-station access. “We’re gonna do it.”
Her team was immediately skeptical. In truth, she had her doubts as well. She was running a small startup. How were they going to build a small, automated science laboratory, put it on the International Space Station, have communication with it on the ground—how would they afford that? She pulled up a web browser and typed in “raspberry pi communication with space station.” She thought: What am I getting into?
LambdaVision’s artificial retina can be manufactured inside a small box, without need of astronaut intervention.
“It was my super-naïve vision of what space was at the time,” she told me. The proper term that now described her company, she soon learned, was “space adjacent”: a business that is not specifically in the aerospace industry but could benefit from—even work better by—leaving planet Earth.
She was relieved when she found out that LambdaVision didn’t have to develop its own mission control and space infrastructure. It already existed, and there were partner companies that specialized in space-adjacent businesses. Her company linked up with Space Tango, which focuses on building underlying health and technology products in space, to develop its hardware. They managed to condense their open beaker system to an automated experiment the size of a shoebox. And she was right about one thing: they did win the prize.
The team flew its first mission at the end of 2018, and it showed promising results. In the years since, the company has secured additional funding and flown a total of nine times to the ISS, most recently launching on January 30. With each mission, they have gradually improved their manufacturing hardware, system automation and imaging, and orbital processes. “We’re seeing much more evenly coated films in microgravity and overcome other challenges we see in a gravity environment,” Wagner says. “There’s much less waste.”
The system works autonomously, without need of astronaut intervention. Essentially, the team assembles it in a small box, astronauts plug it into power on the ISS, and when it has manufactured the sheets of artificial retinas, an astronaut unplugs it and ships it back to Earth.
“At first, we just wanted to demonstrate that it’s feasible to do this in space,” says Wagner. “We don’t worry about that now—we are thinking hard now about scaling the system up. To support our early clinical trials, we don’t need millions of artificial retinas. We need hundreds, maybe thousands, to start. And that gives us time to determine how we are going to scale that up as we transition from the ISS—a public space station—to private, commercial space stations in low Earth orbit.”
So far, LambdaVision has performed small-animal studies in rats and advanced to large-animal studies in pigs, successfully installing the implants and demonstrating their tolerability. The company is continuing preclinical development to support clinical trials—doing such things as testing the artificial retinas for efficacy and safety—with a goal of beginning human trials as soon as early 2027.
“When I think about doing it in space and talking about cost and efficiency, I don’t think about it any differently than if somebody said, ‘Hey I’m gonna go do this in China’ or ‘I’m gonna go do this in California,’” Wagner says. “A space station is actually closer. It’s only 250 miles in the sky, versus 3,000 miles to California.”
If LambdaVision is successful, that alone would practically justify the vote cast by John Lewis 31 years ago. It is hard to think of an achievement more profound than curing blindness for millions. But even more than delivering such sweeping and life-changing results, one of the most significant accomplishments of the ISS might be proving that such results can even be achieved in the first place.
So far, no major medicines born on the space station have been brought to market. No mass-produced technologies have yet emerged from low Earth orbit. Research has been iterative, and in-space manufacturing remains in the early stages. But according to Ariel Ekblaw, CEO of the Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space research center dedicated to working on “critical path” infrastructure for space architectures, NASA’s groundwork for the ISS has made a next generation of more product-focused work possible.
“Maybe Dan Goldin was ahead of his time in thinking that such work was going to be achieved within the time span of humanity’s first-ever truly large-scale international space station,” she told me, “and what we see now is not just basic science, but entities like biotech companies actually taking what we learned from NASA and the National Lab over the last 20-plus years, and envision putting mass-produced products or mass-produced infrastructure in space.”
A mock-up of NASA’s
Habitation and Logistics
Outpost (HALO) module,
the first component of
a planned moon-orbiting Gateway station.
JAMES BLAIR/NASA
If indeed the handoff of low Earth orbit from NASA-led to commercial operations succeeds, it would be a promising glimpse of the future of the lunar economy. There, as in LEO, NASA is methodically building infrastructure and solving fundamental problems of exploration. The moon-orbiting Gateway station—a NASA-led international effort—is deep into development, with the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module set to launch as early as next year. That station will serve as the “second step” of a sustainable moon strategy that was excised from the Apollo program 60 years ago. From there, NASA hopes to cultivate a presence on the lunar surface.
If the LEO model holds, the agency could one day transfer moon-base operations to the private sector and turn to Mars. There might be a lot of money to be made simply in harvesting water on the moon, to say nothing of rare earth elements that lend themselves to manufacturing as well.
One of the harshest restraints on progress in space has been, ironically, space. “Right now, on a good day, only 11 people fit in orbit on ISS and Tiangong,” says Ekblaw. The age of private space stations is going to be fundamentally transformative if only because there will be more room for dedicated researchers.
Axiom’s goal is to double its infrastructure in space every five years. This means doubling the number of people in orbit, the number of hosted payloads, and the amount of manufacturing they are capable of doing.
“Within two to three years, I could send a graduate student to space with Axiom,” Ekblaw says. “It requires a little creative fundraising, but I think that that is opening up a realm of possibility.” In the past, she explains, a doctoral researcher would be unbelievably fortunate to have research fly as part of a single flight mission.Today, however, researchers even in a master’s program can fly experiments repeatedly because of the increased opportunities afforded by commercial spaceflight.In the future, rather than relying on career NASA astronauts—who have myriad responsibilities in orbit and spend a good amount of time as guinea pigs themselves—scientists could go up personally to run their own research projects in greater depth.
“And that,” she says, “is a future that is very, very near.”
David W. Brown is a writer based in New Orleans. His next book, The Outside Cats, is about a team of polar explorers and his expedition with them to Antarctica. It will be published by Mariner Books.
On April 8, the moon will pass directly between Earth and the sun, creating a total solar eclipse across much of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Although total solar eclipses occur somewhere in the world every 18 months or so, this one is unusual because tens of millions of people in North America will likely witness it, from Mazatlán in Mexico to Newfoundland in Canada.
“It’s a huge communal experience,” says Meg Thacher, a senior lab instructor in the astronomy department at Smith College in Massachusetts. “A total solar eclipse is the Super Bowl of astronomy.” Here’s how to safely watch—and photograph—the natural phenomenon.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
It pays to have a plan of action for the day.
Before you decide on a spot to watch the eclipse, whether it’s in your own backyard, in a national park, or at a viewing party, it’s worth checking the weather forecast to see how likely clouds are to spoil the show. Currently the majority of the eclipse’s path of totality—areas where onlookers will see a full eclipse, as opposed to a partial one—is forecast to have some degree of cloud cover.
However, even if visibility turns out to be poor, you still have options. NASA and the National Science Foundation are broadcasting livestreams, and many eclipse viewing parties will broadcast unobstructed views as part of their festivities. The American Astronomical Society has a state-by-state list to help you find your nearest event.
Safety first
You need proper eye protection to look at the eclipse, because the sun’s light can cause long-term damage to your vision. Be sure to purchase either specially made eclipse glasses or handheld solar viewers. Glasses might be the best option if you plan to take photos, as they’ll keep your hands free. Eclipse glasses are thousands of times darker than regular sunglasses and contain a polymer designed to filter out harmful light.
You should also make sure any cameras, binoculars, or telescopes through which you plan to look at the sun have been fitted with a solar filter. You don’t need to double up and wear eclipse glasses if you already have a solar filter, though.
Once the moon fully obscures the sun, it’s safe to remove your eye protection for the duration of the totality, which is projected to last around four minutes during this eclipse.
A proper camera is your best bet …
Photographing an eclipse is pretty simple, says Randall Benton, a professional photographer who has been capturing them since 1979. Although cameras have changed vastly since then, the fundamentals remain the same. (If you plan to use your phone to take photos, skip to the next section.)
He recommends fixing a DSLR or mirrorless camera (equipped with a solar filter to protect both your eyes and the camera itself) to a tripod. A short exposure, which is designed to capture movement, is more likely to capture the details of the sun’s corona—the plasma surrounding it. A longer exposure, which keeps certain elements of pictures in focus while blurring others, is likely to stretch the corona further out. The exposure you choose will depend on the kind of shot you’d like to capture.
Before the eclipse begins, take the time to focus the camera exactly where you want the sun and moon to appear in your shot, and turn off any autofocus function. While some mounts come with an automated tracking feature that will follow the eclipse’s progression, others will require you to move your camera yourself, so make sure you’re familiar with the mount you’ve got to prevent the eclipse from drifting out of your frame.
Then, “when there’s just a sliver of sun left and it’s a few seconds away from disappearing, take the filter off the camera lens,” Benton says. “At the very last moment, there’s a phenomenon called the diamond ring effect, when the last speck of visible sunlight resembles a ring—that’s a great dramatic photo. Once the sunlight reappears, it’s time to put the filter back on.”
… but smartphones work too
Despite the rapid advances in smartphone cameras over the past decade or so, they can’t really rival DSLR or mirrorless cameras when it comes to capturing an eclipse.
Their short lenses means the sun will appear very small, which doesn’t tend to produce great photographs. That said, you can still capture the best photo possible by cutting out the plastic lens from a pair of spare eclipse glasses, taping it over your phone’s camera lens (or lenses), and securing the device in a tripod (or propping it up against a cup).
Don’t try to hold the phone, and use your phone’s shutter delay to decrease vibrations, says Gordon Telepun, an amateur enthusiast who has been photographing eclipses since 2001 and has advised NASA on how to capture them. “During totality, take the [eclipse glasses] filter off and take wide-angle shots of the corona in the sky and the landscape,” he says. “Automatic mode will work fine.”
Something smartphones are great at capturing is video of the moment the moon glides over the sun, says Benton: “That transition from daylight to nighttime is dramatic, and smartphones can handle that pretty well.”
Don’t be afraid to get creative
During the eclipse, there are plenty of other things to photograph besides the sun and moon. Foliage will create a natural version of a pinhole viewer, casting thousands of crescent images of the sun dancing around in the shade as the light streams through the trees.
Another natural phenomena is shadow bands—flickering gray ripples that appear on light-colored surfaces like sheets or the sides of houses within a few minutes of totality. “It’s almost like a stroboscopic effect,” Benton says, referring to the visual effect that makes objects appear as though they are moving more slowly than they actually are. “Videos of that could be interesting.”
“Take pictures of the faces of the people around you, too,” he adds. “Twenty years from now, your photo of the eclipse is going to be pretty much the same as anyone else’s. These other pictures are going to be a little more powerful in reminding you what your day was like.”
Take a moment to look around
Finally, when you’re looking up at the moon covering the sun during totality, let yourself enjoy the moment free from your technology. The next eclipse the US can expect to experience on this scale is in August 2044—so try hard to stay present.
“During totality, if you’re really concentrating on getting your photo, at some point let go of everything. Turn around—take a look with your eyes,” says Benton. “Whatever you’re seeing in the viewfinder or on the screen, it isn’t the same thing as seeing it with your own eyes. And it will change your life.”
Tzu-Wei Fang will always remember February 3, 2022. It was a Thursday just after Groundhog Day, and Fang, a physicist born in Taiwan, was analyzing satellite images of a cloud of charged particles that had erupted from the sun. The incoming cloud was a coronal mass ejection, or CME—essentially a massive burst of magnetized plasma from the sun’s upper atmosphere. It looked like dozens of similar CMEs that hit Earth every year, usually making their presence known mostly through mesmerizing polar light displays.
“The CME wasn’t significant at all,” says Fang, who had been analyzing the incoming data from her office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado.
But five days later, Fang learned that the CME was not as innocuous as it had seemed. Just as the cloud of plasma was making its way to the planet, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was blasting off from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 49 new Starlink satellites in its nose cone.
The CME heated the tenuous gases in Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing it to swell, pushing the lower, denser layers upward. When the satellites were released from their rocket, they struggled against an unexpectedly thick medium. With thrusters too weak to push them to a higher, safer orbit, 38 of them spiraled back to Earth.
Scientists had long known that solar activity can change the density of the upper atmosphere, so the fact that this happened wasn’t a surprise. But the Starlink incident highlighted a big gap in capability: researchers lacked the ability to precisely predict the sorts of density changes that a given amount of solar activity would produce. And they did not have a good way to transfer those changes to predictions about how satellite trajectories would be affected.
The need to improve predictions was growing more urgent. A new solar cycle had just begun picking up strength after a prolonged quiet period, and the sun was spouting many more solar flares and CMEs than it had in years. At the same time, the number of satellites orbiting the planet had grown sevenfold since the last solar maximum. Researchers understood that a powerful solar storm could make conditions in near-Earth space so unpredictable that it would be impossible to tell whether objects were on a collision course. And that was a worry. One head-on crash between two large spacecraft can create thousands of out-of-control debris fragments that could remain in orbit for years, making space even harder for operators to navigate through.
The Starlink event proved to be just the catalyst the community needed. In the ensuingweeks, Fang, who had been working on a model of the upper atmosphere, began a partnership with SpaceX to get more data on the speed and trajectory of the constellation’s thousands of satellites. It was an unprecedented source of information that is allowing scientists to improve their models of how solar activity affects the environment in low Earth orbit. At the same time, other researchers are working to better connect this model of the sparse air in this part of the atmosphere with the trajectories of the satellites that pass through it.
If Fang and her colleagues succeed, they’ll be able to keep satellites safe even amid turbulent space weather, reducing the risk of potentially catastrophic orbital collisions.
Solar weather havoc
CMEs have been buffeting Earth since the beginning of time. But until the advent of electricity, their only observable consequences were the spectacular polar lights.
That changed in 1859 with the Carrington Event, the most energetic CME to hit Earth in recorded history. When that tsunami of magnetized plasma hit Earth’s atmosphere, it disrupted telegraph networks all over the world. Clerks saw their equipment give off sparks, and in some cases they received electrical shocks.
The satellite era has so far experienced only one major geomagnetic storm. Dubbed the Halloween storm because it pummeled Earth in the last week of October 2003, the CME affected nearly 60% of NASA space missions in orbit at the time, according to a later investigation by NOAA. A Japanese Earth-observation spacecraft lost contact with Earth, never to regain it—its electronics most likely fried by the onslaught of charged solar particles.
Thomas Berger, nowthe director of the Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center of the University of Colorado Boulder, was a young space-weather scientist at that time. He remembers the people buzzing about losing track of satellites.
Unlike aircraft, satellites are not constantly observed by radar in real time. Their likely trajectories are calculated days ahead, based on repeated observations by a handful of ground-based space radars and optical sensors scattered across the globe. When space weather warms up the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the increased density throws those predictions off, and it can take operators a while to find the satellites again.
“After the 2003 Halloween storm, the entire satellite catalogue was off track,” says Berger. “It took three days of emergency operations to locate and retrack all these objects. Some of the satellites were tens of kilometers below their usual orbit and maybe a thousand kilometers away from their expected position.”
When we don’t know where satellites—and space-debris fragments—are, it is more than an inconvenience. It means that operators can no longer make predictions about potential collisions—events that can not only destroy satellites but also create thousands of new pieces of space debris, creating cascading risks to other satellites.
The Halloween storm luckily passed without an orbital crash. But next time, satellite operators may not be so lucky.
A lot has changed in near-Earth space since 2003. The number of active satellites orbiting our planet has risen from 800 back then to more than 9,000 today, and low Earth orbit has seen the greatest increase in traffic. The quantity of space junk has also grown. Twenty years ago, the US Space Surveillance Network tracked some 11,000 pieces of such debris. Today, according to NASA, it keeps an eye on more than 35,000 objects. With that much more stuff hurtling around Earth, many more collision-avoidance maneuvers are needed to keep things safe.
And it is just a matter of time before Earth is hit with bigger CMEs. The Halloween storm packed dozens of times more power than the “insignificant” event that doomed the Starlink satellites. Yet it had only about one-tenth the energy of the Carrington Event. The orbital mayhem—not to mention the havoc on the ground—could certainly get much worse.
Extending weather forecasts into space
Six months before that fateful Groundhog Day, Fang had taken a job at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to work on a new simulation of the outermost parts of Earth’s atmosphere.
The model she was working on, the Whole Atmosphere Model and Ionosphere Plasmasphere Electrodynamics (WAM-IPE) forecast system, is an extension of kinds of models that meteorologists at NOAA use to forecast weather on Earth, only at much higher altitudes.
Most satellites in low Earth orbit travel within the second-highest layer of the atmosphere—a region called the thermosphere, which is filled with dispersed atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. Invisible waves rising from the mesosphere, the atmospheric layer underneath, push on the thermosphere, stirring hurricane-speed winds. But since the air in the thermosphere is so thin, satellites orbiting there barely notice. That changes when space weather hits. Within an hour, the density of this thin air can increase many times, and its atoms become charged by collisions with energetic solar particles, triggering aurora displays and electrical currents.
The WAM-IPE model attempts to simulate the intricacies of these processes and predict their outcomes. “It’s a lot of complex physics, and we still don’t completely understand all of it,” Fang says.
At the time of the Starlink incident, Fang’s model was still in experimental stages. The sorts of measurements of the upper atmosphere that could directly verify the model’s calculations were not yet available.
In 2022, only two spacecraft in orbit were able to provide some basic measurements of thermospheric density. No new mission by either NOAA or NASA was in the works that could fill the gaps in the near future.
But SpaceX had a solution to Fang’s problem. Starlink satellites, although not fitted with dedicated instruments to measure atmospheric density, carry GPS receivers to determine their position. During their conversations, Fang and Starlink engineers figured out that with some clever mathematics, they could calculate atmospheric density from changes in Starlink satellites’ trajectories.
“It’s quite complicated because you need to have a very good understanding of how the spacecraft’s shape affects its drag, but with that provided, we can look at the positional differences and see how that changes and calculate the density,” says Fang.
At that time, about 2,000 Starlink satellites were in orbit. And so, where there was no data before, Fang suddenly had an abundant resource to tap into and use to make sure the WAM-IPE model’s calculations matched reality—at least at Starlink’s orbital altitude. The constellation has since grown to 5,000 spacecraft, providing an even denser network of measurements.
Fang says that several othersatellite operators have since joined her effort, supplying NOAA with data to make the model work before the next big solar storm hits.
“The Starlink incident really raised the problem,” she says. “The industry is booming and now everybody is aware, and they come to us and want to understand the problem. It’s been a tricky two years, and sometimes I feel we are not solving it fast enough for them.”
Work left to do
In the months following the Starlink incident, other spacecraft operators began reporting issues related to space weather. In May 2022, the European Space Agency said its constellation of Swarm satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, had been losing altitude 10 times faster than they had during the previous 10 years. In December 2023, NASA announced that its asteroid-hunting space telescope Neowise will reenter Earth’s atmosphere by early 2025 because of the increasing drag caused by solar activity.
The current solar cycle is set to reach its maximum later this year. But the sun will likely keep on spouting CMEs and solar flares at a high rate for the next five years before the sun settles into its minimum. During those years, the number of satellites in orbit is set to continue to rise. Analysts expect that by the end of this decade the number of operational satellites could hit 100,000.
“It’s not unlikely that we will get a large geomagnetic storm in the next four or five years,” says Berger. “And that will really test the whole thing.”
Berger’s team in Colorado collaborates with Fang’s team at NOAA, trying to find ways to integrate the WAM-IPE model’s predictions of changes in atmospheric density into calculations of satellite orbits.
As the Starlink incident showed, it’s not just the big, cataclysmic solar storms that operators need to worry about.
Dan Oltrogge, an orbital tracking expert at Comspoc, a company that specializes in space situational awareness, says that the accuracy of satellite trajectory predictions at orbits below 250 miles (400 kilometers) is “particularly susceptible to space-weather variations.”
“It’s those altitudes where the International Space Station, the Chinese space station, and also many Earth-observing satellites orbit,” Oltrogge says. “When space weather changes, the atmospheric drag changes, and it changes where and how close things come together. It’s difficult to know when to make a collision-avoidance maneuver.”
The stronger the storm, the greater the fluctuations in atmospheric density, and the greater the uncertainty. According to Fang, the underwhelming Starlink storm thickened the atmosphere at altitudes between 120 and 240 miles by 50% to 125%. A once-in-a-century event like the Carrington storm could lead to a 900% density increase, she says.
The biggest worries, Fang says, are that we don’t fully understand the behavior of the sun and that we get so little notice about when CMEs will arrive.
“Even with the new model, we only know what is happening now,” she says. “We don’t have a real forecasting ability. We don’t know when a flare is going to happen or when a CME is going to happen.”
It might take a couple of days for a CME to hit Earth, but researchers don’t get measurements of its intensity until about 30 minutes before then, when it passes SOHO, a NASA and European Space Agency satellite some 900,000 miles away in a stable orbit between Earth and the sun. The European Space Agency is developing a new spacecraft, called Vigil, that would be capable of providing a side view of the sun, allowing researchers to see potentially dangerous sunspots not visible from Earth. But it will take years to get it off the ground. Until then, space operators will have to keep their fingers crossed and hope the space weather holds.
Tereza Pultarova is a freelance science and technology journalist based in London who specializes in space and sustainability.
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