When SpaceX developed reusable boosters for its Falcon rockets, it helped cut costs of launches.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that last week's first-time catch of "its huge Starship booster" could "extend SpaceX's cost advantages, especially in launches to low-Earth orbit, where SpaceX and others operate satellites." A fully and rapidly reusable Starship would push down SpaceX's costs by limiting the need to crank out new hardware and cutting downtime between flights, space industry executives say. Bain, the consulting firm, has estimated that Starship would reduce the cost of getting each kilogram to low-Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times... SpaceX's rocket peers are moving toward reusability, but they are behind the progress Musk's company has made.

- The huge booster that will power New Glenn, the orbital rocket Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is developing, is designed to be reusable. That rocket is slated to launch for the first time next month.

- ULA, the rocket operator owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is looking to recover the two engines that help power the first part of its new rocket, Vulcan Centaur. The parent company for Arianespace, whose new vehicle is powered by an expendable booster, has also invested in a startup developing a reusable booster.

- Last year, Rocket Lab USA used an engine that had flown before on a flight of its Electron rocket, and is working on a new vehicle, called Neutron, with a booster it could use again.

- Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said the reusable vehicle the Texas-based company is developing with Northrop Grumman would give launch customers more flexibility and better pricing. "It really comes down to the affordability and the schedule," Kim said in a recent interview.
"We need reusability for rockets, just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses," Musk said in a video SpaceX posted earlier this year...

In Iceland, "a volcanic system has awoken after an 800-year slumber," according to a multimedia CNN Special Report. "But in another part of Iceland, scientists and engineers are hoping to harness magma's immense power to solve the planet's biggest problem..."

It all started in 2009 when Bjarni Pálsson, an engineer with Iceland's national power company, accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. "Armed with new technology and know-how, he is going back in..." The ambition of the geothermal experts and volcanologists that comprise the Krafla Magma Testbed is to convert the immense heat and pressure into a new "limitless" form of supercharged geothermal energy — a tantalizing prospect as the world struggles to end its relationship with planet-heating fossil fuels. "This has never been done before," said Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, director of the Geothermal Research Cluster, which developed the project....

If all goes to plan, the first borehole will be completed in 2027 and will mark the first time anyone has ever implanted sensors directly into a magma chamber... If the first drilling experiment succeeds, the team will move onto the second borehole, due to be completed in 2029 — and this could be the global gamechanger. It's here the team will attempt to harness the intense heat of magma to produce a new kind of extreme geothermal energy, many times more powerful than conventional...

If they succeed, the implications could reverberate around the world, Ingólfsson said. There are an estimated 800 million people living within roughly 60 miles of an active volcano.
The report includes a map showing volcano sites around the earth where similar drilling could theoretically unleash the same intense magma-powered extreme geothermal energy.

Iceland's plan is to drill down 1.2 miles — about 2 kilometers — into a magma chamber that's around 1,800 Fahrenheit (nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius). The engineering feat "won't be easy," the article acknowledges. "But as humans heat the planet at record speed with fossil fuel pollution, there is increasing pressure to perform moonshot feats of engineering to save us from ourselves."

"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful.

"It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything."

SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage.
"Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.

And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said.
Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture.

"Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

"After safely splashing down on Earth as part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission Friday, a NASA astronaut experienced a medical issue," NASA reported Friday.

But today there's an update: After an overnight stay at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola in Florida, the NASA astronaut was released and returned to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday. The crew member is in good health and will resume normal post-flight reconditioning with other crew members.

As part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission [SpaceX's eighth crew-rotation mission to the ISS], the astronaut was one of four crewmates who safely splashed down aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft near Pensacola on October 25. The crew members completed a 235-day mission, 232 days of which were spent aboard the International Space Station conducting scientific research.

To protect the crew member's medical privacy, specific details on the individual's condition and identity will not be shared.

Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work. From a report: The researchers said these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts' fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said.

The researchers said they had been subject to ridicule by some scientists after taking part in a large Guardian survey of experts in May, during which they and many others expressed their feelings of extreme fear about future temperature rises and the world's failure to take sufficient action. They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial.

However, the researchers said that embracing their emotions was necessary to do good science and was a spur to working towards better ways of tackling the climate crisis and the rapidly increasing damage being done to the world. They also said that those dismissing their fears as doom-laden and alarmist were speaking frequently from a position of privilege in western countries, with little direct experience of the effects of the climate crisis.

Scientists from 15 countries warned in an open letter that the potential collapse of the Atlantic Ocean's main circulation system (AMOC) has been "greatly underestimated" and could have devastating global impacts, according to oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf who spoke to The Guardian. The AMOC system, which moves heat through the northern Atlantic and influences weather patterns across Europe, has shown signs of weakening over the past 60-70 years due to global warming, with indicators including a persistent cold spot in the northern Atlantic and record-low salt levels in seawater.

Rahmstorf, who heads the Earth system analysis department at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, estimates a 50% chance of the system reaching a critical tipping point this century, which could trigger severe consequences including regional cooling in northwestern Europe, shifting rainfall patterns, and rising sea levels.

Four astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday after their record ISS mission stretched to eight months due to Boeing capsule malfunctions and hurricane disruptions. The SpaceX Dragon capsule landed off Florida's coast before dawn, carrying NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin.

Technical issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule in September, followed by Hurricane Milton and persistent rough seas, delayed their planned return by two months. The crew launched in March as part of NASA's commercial crew program. Their replacements include Boeing Starliner test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose mission expanded from eight days to eight months, alongside two SpaceX-launched astronauts. The new crew will remain aboard the station until February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Space Agency is in talks with SpaceX about the possibility of Elon Musk's space venture joining an international charter designed to reduce a growing swarm of debris in space, Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters. The 22-nation agency is spearheading one of several efforts to roll back the mass of space junk swirling round the planet from past missions that poses a risk to active satellites. Aschbacher said 110 countries or entities have joined ESA's Zero Debris charter, which aims to stop any new orbital garbage being generated by 2030.

Asked whether SpaceX, whose satellites now make up some two thirds of spacecraft active in low Earth orbit, had signed up, Aschbacher said: "Not yet, but we are in discussion with them... This is a charter that keeps evolving and... we will keep raising the topics because they are so fundamental." [...] There are currently 18,897 pieces of trackable space junk in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks such objects. Space debris and junk are often used interchangeably, but some consider space junk to include inactive payloads and rocket bodies as well as debris, or errant shards of broken satellites. There are no international laws on debris, but countries and space agencies have begun in recent years to devise proposals and national rules for tackling the problem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: As the world emerged from the lockdowns of the covid-19 pandemic, many countries promised to rebuild their economies in a climate-friendly fashion, amid hopes the recovery effort could accelerate the global journey to net-zero emissions. In reality, the opposite has happened. Instead of a "green recovery," global greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster now than they did in the decade preceding the global pandemic. Emissions rose 1.3 percent to 57.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023. That is a far faster annual rate of growth than during the decade 2010-2019, when emissions grew on average 0.8 percent per year. In fact, global greenhouse gas emissions are now just below the 59.1 gigatons peak recorded in 2019.

All sources of greenhouse gas emissions except land use are rising, according to a report from the United Nations Global Environment Program (UNEP), as economies continued to rebound from covid-19. Emissions from road transport, leaks from oil and gas infrastructure such as pipelines and industrial emissions all grew rapidly in 2023, UNEP said, while aviation emissions grew 19.5 percent. Rising emissions means the world's opportunity to avert catastrophic climate change is shrinking, Inger Anderson at UNEP said in a statement. "Climate crunch time is here," she said. "I urge every nation: no more hot air, please."

AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have demonstrated a new humanoid robot that can run at a top speed of just over 8 miles per hour (mph) -- or 3.6 meters per second (m/s) to be exact. This makes it the speediest machine of its kind built so far, albeit these speeds were only achieved with the help of added footwear. STAR1 is a bipedal robot built by the Chinese company Robot Era that's 5 feet 7 inches (171 centimeters) tall and weighs 143 pounds (65 kilograms).

Powered by high-torque motors and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the footwear-donning STAR1 navigated different types of terrain, including grassland and gravel, while jogging on paved roads and earth, and sustained its top speed for 34 minutes. A top speed of 8 mph means it beat Unitree's H1 robot -- which set the previous speed record for a bipedal robot at 7.4 mph (3.3 m/s) in March 2024. Although STAR1 had the help of footwear, H1 was not technically jogging or running as its feet did not both leave the ground at once during transit. You can watch STAR1 racing through the Gobi Desert here.

Living in a pollution-free environment is a fundamental right, India's Supreme Court said on Wednesday as it urged authorities to address deteriorating air quality in the north of the country. From a report: India's capital Delhi recorded a "very poor" air quality index of 364 on Wednesday, according to the Central Pollution Control Board, which considers readings below 50 to be good. Swiss group IQAir rated Delhi the world's most polluted city in its live rankings. The city battles toxic air every winter and authorities say much of the smoke comes from farmers illegally burning paddy stubble to clear their fields in the neighbouring breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana. The Supreme Court pulled up the governments of both states for taking "selective action" against stubble burning, saying penal provisions were not being properly implemented.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email. The identity of the person -- or people -- who created Bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.

Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn't see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of Bitcoin, not the identity of its creator. Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."

For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. "While of course we can't outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case," says Hoback. Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding. [...] Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern -- and the reason he has gone into hiding. "Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping," says Todd. "Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi." "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."

"If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important."

Amazon has reached its goal set earlier this year to completely get rid of plastic air pillows at its warehouses by the end of the year. "As of October 2024, we've removed all plastic air pillows from our delivery packaging used at our global fulfillment centers," the e-commerce giant said in an October 9th blog post. The Verge reports: It's a welcome change following years of pressure from environmental groups to stop plastic pollution flooding into oceans. The company is still working to reduce the use of single-use plastics more broadly in its packaging. The most prolific type of plastic litter near coastlines is plastic film -- a material that makes up those once ubiquitous air pillows, according to Oceana. That film also happens to be the "deadliest" type of plastic pollution for large mammals like whales and dolphins that might ingest it, Oceana says.

The company swapped out plastic air pillows and single-use delivery bags for paper and cardboard alternatives in Europe in 2022. It also ditched plastic film packaging at its facilities in India in 2020. The US is Amazon's largest market, and the company hasn't managed to fully eliminate plastic packaging in North America just yet. It says it plans to reduce the amount of deliveries containing "Amazon-added plastic delivery packaging" in North America to just one-third of shipments by December, down from two-thirds in December 2023.

An anonymous reader shared this report from ComicBook.com: On Saturday, 20th Century Studios announced that the latest entry in the Alien sci-fi horror franchise will get a limited-edition VHS release on December 3 — just in time for the holidays.

The VHS release of Alien: Romulus is the first such release from a major studio since 2006... a major win for fans of physical media. In recent months, there has been a great bit of conversation surrounding the so-called death of physical media with the rise of digital and streaming with some retailers even having previously announced that they have or will be stopping sales of physical media. But with streaming platforms removing content for various reasons, there's been a rise in appreciation for physical media which has, in turn, resulted in increased sales, particularly when it comes to limited edition items such as Steelbooks [collectible steel-case disc releases]... Given that the Alien: Romulus VHS release is part of an overall celebration of the franchise for its 45th anniversary year, leaning into that nostalgia for feels pretty spot on.
The release will present the movie "in a 4:3 aspect ratio," writes the Verge, "hopefully with well-done pan-and-scan..." (Their post includes a promotional picture showing the "slick, vintage-style" box-cover art.)

"The tape has only the film," notes Gizmodo, "and no special featurette attached at the end, like some used to back in the day."

Gizmodo also reminds readers of Hulu's 2025 series Alien: Earth and an upcoming videogame sequel to 2014's Alien: Isolation.

For the first time in 50 years, humans will walk on the moon again. Currently planned for as soon as 2026, the Artemis III mission "will be one of the most complex undertakings of engineering and human ingenuity in the history of deep space exploration..." writes NASA. "Two crew members will descend to the surface and spend approximately a week near the South Pole of the Moon conducting new science before returning to lunar orbit..."

And they'll be wearing Prada, according to a Space News report from Milan: At a briefing at the International Astronautical Congress here October 16, Axiom and Prada revealed details about the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) suit that Axiom is creating for use by NASA on lunar landing missions starting with Artemis 3... Axiom emphasized the advanced capabilities in the suit, particularly when compared to the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts on moonwalks more than a half-century ago [including greater redundancy and healthy monitoring systems not available in Apollo-era suits]...

The unveiling came just over a year after Axiom announced it was working with luxury goods company Prada, an unconventional partnership intended to leverage Prada's expertise in materials and design... [Axiom's executive VP of extravehicular activity Russell Ralston] said Axiom has leveraged Prada's expertise in fabrics and garment design in helping create the outer layer of the suit, which reflects sunlight and keeps dust from getting into interior layers... "If you look across all the different technologies that are needed within the suit, the uniqueness of those technologies and their application, the supply chain has tended to be pretty unstable," he said. "So, one of the things that Prada has really helped us with is bringing stability to that base, especially on the fabric side...."

Not surprisingly, Prada also contributed to the appearance of the suit. "One of the things that was important to us was the appeal of the suit, the look of the suit," Ralston said. "Something that Prada brought to the table was helping with the general aesthetic of the suit." One design aspect that brought the two companies together was a prominent red stripe on the suit. Ralston noted that was a nod to a NASA tradition where the mission commander's suit would have that red stripe to distinguish them from another spacewalker...

While the current focus of the suit is for walking on the moon, Ralston said the suit can be easily adapted for applications in low Earth orbit, such as spacewalks from the International Space Station or Axiom's future commercial space station.
The article adds that 30 people worked on the suit (full- or part-time). "These suits will give the astronauts increased range of motion and flexibility to explore more of the landscape than on previous lunar missions," according to NASA.

With "the ability to send high quality images and video to the ground with advanced communication technology, they will be sharing a unique new human experience with the world."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

That massive geothermal energy project in Utah gets a closer look from the Washington Post, which calls it "a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States." Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2 million homes. In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years...

White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."

The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."

"A technology pioneered by Benjamin Franklin is being revived to build more efficient electric motors," reports the Wall Street Journal, "an effort in its nascent stage that has the potential to be massive." A handful of scientists and engineers — armed with materials and techniques unimaginable in the 1700s — are creating modern versions of Franklin's "electrostatic motor," that are on the cusp of commercialization... Franklin's "electrostatic motor" uses alternating positive and negative charges — the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer — to spin an axle, and doesn't rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D. student or engineer rediscovers this historical curiosity. But other than applications in tiny pumps and actuators etched on microchips, where this technology has been in use for decades, their work hasn't made it out of the lab.

Electrostatic motors have several potentially huge advantages over regular motors. They are up to 80% more efficient than conventional motors after all the dependencies of regular electric motors are added in. They could also allow new kinds of control and precision in robots, where they could function more like our muscles. And they don't use rare-earth elements because they don't have permanent magnets, and require as little as 5% as much copper as a conventional motor. Both materials have become increasingly scarce and expensive over the past decade, and supply chains for them are dominated by China.
"It's reminiscent of the early 1990s, when Sony began to produce and sell the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, a breakthrough that's now ubiquitous..." according to the article. "These motors could lead to more efficient air-conditioning systems, factories, logistics hubs and data centers, and — since they can double as generators — better ways of generating renewable energy. They might even show up in tiny surveillance drones."

And the article points out that C-Motive Technologies, a 16-person startup in Wisconsin, is already "reaching out to companies, hoping to get their motors out into the real world." ("So far, FedEx and Rockwell Automation, the century-old supplier of automation to factories, are among those testing their motors.") C-Motive's founders discovered that a number of technologies had matured enough that, when combined, could yield electrostatic motors competitive with conventional ones. These enabling technologies include super fast-switching power electronics — like those in modern electric vehicles — that can toggle elements of the motor between states of positive and negative charge very quickly... Dogged exploration of combinations of various readily available industrial organic fluids led to a proprietary mix that can both multiply the strength of the electric field and insulate the motor's spinning parts from each other — all without adding too much friction — says C-Motive Chief Executive Matt Maroon.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6C -- enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn't be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century -- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles. [...]

The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space News: SpaceX has been awarded contracts for eight launches under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Oct. 18. The contracts worth $733.5 million span seven missions for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and one for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) projected to launch in 2026. These are part of the NSSL Phase 3 procurement of launch services for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

The NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program is structured as an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, a flexible procurement method often used in government contracting. The total value of the Lane 1 contract is estimated at $5.6 billion over five years, with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) selected as the primary vendors to compete for individual task orders. The Space Development Agency is utilizing SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch small satellites into a low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, a network of satellites designed to enhance military communications and intelligence capabilities. SpaceX has already completed two successful launches for the Tranche 0 portion of SDA's constellation.

"The Phase 3 Lane 1 construct allows us to execute launch services more quickly for risk-tolerant payloads, putting more capabilities in orbit faster to support national security," said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space at the Space Force. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has yet to perform its first launch and will need to complete at least two successful flights to qualify for NSSL certification, while ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which has completed two flights, is still awaiting final certification for the program.