SpaceX sends giant Starship into orbit for the first time but ends the flight early - CBC

It would be fair to say that design teams at SpaceX threw a lot of the rulebook out the window when they designed Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX's flagship rocket, which is still under developmental testing, was designed for missions that had never been attempted before. Starship is expected to carry payloads and crew to Mars at scale, and this required out-of-the-box thinking. It is for this reason that the Starship vehicle and Super Heavy booster had to be designed using a different approach. One of the most novel parts of any Starship flight is the landing, where the Starship vehicle glides on its belly through the upper parts of the atmosphere after reentry, then flips into an upright position for landing at the last possible moment. This is done to gradually slow it down, to manage reentry temperatures effectively, and to use a flip maneuver to get Starship into an upright position so it can land on the surface of Mars, or to be caught by SpaceX's Mechazilla launch tower arms back on Earth. SpaceX designed this flight profile (and designed Starship around the concept) for a good reason, which was to shed speed passively during reentry and to

Robyn Vincent is the co-host of The Metro on WDET. She is an award-winning journalist, a lifelong listener of WDET, and a graduate of Wayne State University, where she studied journalism. Before returning home to Detroit, she was a reporter, producer, editor, and executive producer for NPR stations in the Mountain West, including her favorite Western station, KUNC. She received a national fellowship from Investigative Reporters and Editors for her investigative work that probed the unchecked power of sheriffs in Colorado. She was also the editor-in-chief of an alternative weekly newspaper in Wyoming, leading the paper to win its first national award for a series she directed tracing one reporter’s experience living and working with Syrian refugees.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.