Month: January 2024

The Marshall Star for January 17, 2024

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28 Min Read The Marshall Star for January 17, 2024 ‘Be King’: Team Redstone Invites All to Honor Civil Rights Icon’s Legacy By Jessica Barnett Several accomplished speakers took to the stage Jan. 11 at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to share how Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy helped shape their lives. The event was hosted by Marshall’s ODEO (Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity), along with the FBI and U.S. Army, in the center’s Activities Building 4316 as a way of honoring King, a minister and activist…

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NASA Sets Briefings for Crew-8, International Space Station Missions

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The four crew members representing NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station pose for an official portrait at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA will host a pair of news conferences Thursday, Jan. 25, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to highlight upcoming crew rotation missions to the International Space Station. A mission overview news conference will begin at 1 p.m. EST and cover NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to the microgravity laboratory and Expeditions 70/71. A crew news conference will start at 2:30 p.m.,…

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China launches Tianzhou 7 cargo craft to Tiangong space station (video)

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China has launched its first space station mission of the year to resupply the orbital outpost. A Long March 7 rocket topped with the robotic Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan island in the South China Sea on Wednesday (Jan. 17) at 9:27 a.m. EST (1427 GMT; 10:27 p.m. Beijing time). Tianzhou 7 is planned to rendezvous and dock with China’s three-module Tiangong space station around three hours after launch. The three crewmembers of the Shenzhou 17 mission onboard Tiangong will oversee the…

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Webb Shows Many Early Galaxies Looked Like Pool Noodles, Surfboards

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5 Min Read Webb Shows Many Early Galaxies Looked Like Pool Noodles, Surfboards Researchers are analyzing distant galaxies when the universe was only 600 million to 6 billion years old. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (UT Austin) Researchers analyzing images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found that galaxies in the early universe are often flat and elongated, like surfboards and pool noodles – and are rarely round, like volleyballs or frisbees. “Roughly 50 to 80% of the galaxies we…

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Axiom Space Ax-3 private spaceflight with SpaceX: Mission updates

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Refresh 2024-01-17T13:08:18.542Z SpaceX ready to launch private Ax-3 astronaut mission today Closeup of the Ax-3 Dragon capsule on the pad ahead of its planned Jan. 17, 2024 liftoff.  (Image credit: SpaceX) SpaceX is poised for its next crewed liftoff. The company remains on target to launch the private Ax-3 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday (Jan. 17) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as planned. “We’re happy to say that we’re on track — we’re ready,” Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said during a call with reporters on…

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Space is now ‘most essential’ domain for US military, Pentagon says

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U.S. military leaders keep stressing that space is the battlefield of the future. The latest statements that continue this orbital saber-rattling came during a change-of-command ceremony at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs on Jan. 10. During the ceremony, leadership of U.S. Space Command changed from Gen. James Dickinson to Gen. Stephen Whiting, now the third commander to oversee Space Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in outer space. During the ceremony, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks asserted that, while the People’s Republic of China…

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Expedition 69 Crew, Three NASA Astronauts to Share Mission Highlights

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Expedition 69 Flight Engineers play chess with NASA mission controllers Credit NASA Jan. 16, 2024 RELEASE: 24-001 Four astronauts, including the current record holder for the longest single U.S. stay in space aboard the International Space Station, will make their first public appearance in Houston since returning to Earth. The crew also will be available for interviews before the event at 5 p.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 18, at Space Center Houston. Expedition 69 NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, Woody Hoburg, and Frank Rubio, along with United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut Sultan…

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NASA, DOD Seek Universities to Develop CubeSats for Launch 

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A set of NanoRacks CubeSats is photographed by an Expedition 38 crew member after the deployment by the Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (SSOD). The CubeSats program contains a variety of experiments such as Earth observations and advanced electronics testing. NASA NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force to offer a set of hands-on learning engagements that will help higher education institutions, faculty, and students learn more about what it takes to build small satellites and be selected for flight opportunities.  Teams selected for the University…

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NASA’s X-59 Quiet Supersonic Research Aircraft Unveiled

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NASA and Lockheed Martin publicly unveil the X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft at a ceremony in Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which seeks to solve one of the major barriers to supersonic flight over land, currently banned in the United States, by making sonic booms quieter.

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