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Tag: Space industry

  • International Space Station Fast Facts | CNN

    International Space Station Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the International Space Station (ISS), a spacecraft built by a partnership of 16 nations: United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

    Information on ISS crews and expeditions can be found here.

    The ISS includes three main modules connected by nodes: the US Laboratory Module Destiny, the European Research Laboratory Columbus, and the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo (Hope). Each was launched separately and connected in space by astronauts.

    Mass: 925,335 pounds (419,725 kilograms)

    Habitable Volume: 13,696 cubic feet (388 cubic meters)

    Solar Array Length: 239 feet (75 meters)

    The ISS orbits Earth 16 times a day.

    As of June 22, 2023, 266 spacewalks have been conducted for station assembly and maintenance.

    November 1998 – A Russian Proton rocket places the first piece, the Zarya module, in orbit.

    December 1998 – The space shuttle Endeavour crew, on the STS-88 mission, attaches the Unity module to Zarya initiating the first ISS assembly sequence.

    June 1999 – The space shuttle Discovery crew, on mission STS-96, supplies two modules with tools and cranes.

    July 2000 – Zvezda, the fifth flight, docks with the ISS to become the third major component of the station.

    November 2000 – The first permanent crew, Expedition One, arrives at the station.

    November/December 2000 – The space shuttle Endeavour crew, on mission STS-97, installs the first set of US solar arrays on the station and visits Expedition One.

    February 2001 – Mission STS-98 delivers the US Destiny Laboratory Module.

    March 2001 – STS-102 delivers Expedition Two to the station and brings Expedition One home. The crew also brings Leonardo, the first Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, to the station.

    September 16, 2001 – The Russian Docking Compartment, Pirs, arrives at the ISS.

    June 2002 – STS-111 delivers the Expedition Five crew and brings the Expedition Four crew home. The crew also brings the Mobile Base System to the orbital outpost.

    December 2002 – STS-113 delivers the Expedition Six crew and the P1 Truss.

    May 3, 2003 – Expedition Six crew return to Earth on Soyuz TMA-1. Crew members Kenneth Bowersox and Don Pettit are the first American astronauts ever to land in a Soyuz spacecraft.

    July 29, 2003 – Marks the 1,000th consecutive day of people living and working aboard the ISS (this is a record for the station, but not for space).

    August 10, 2003 – Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko marries his fiancée Ekaterina Dmitriev from space. The bride and groom exchange vows over a hotline set up for the event. Dmitriev stands next to a life-sized picture of Malenchenko.

    April 22, 2004 – The second of four gyroscopes that stabilize the orbiting outpost of the ISS fails. NASA officials say this does not pose an immediate threat to the crew. An extra spacewalk will have to be conducted to the fix the electrical component box thought to be at fault.

    November 2, 2005 – Fifth anniversary of continuous human presence in space on the ISS.

    February 3, 2006 – SuitSat-1, an unmanned space suit containing a radio transmitter is deployed as a part of an ISS spacewalk. The suit is supposed to transmit recorded messages in six languages to school children and amateur radio operators for several days before reentering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, but it goes silent shortly after its deployment.

    March 31, 2006 – Arriving with the crew of Expedition Thirteen is Marcos Pontes, the first Brazilian astronaut. Staying eight days, Pontes conducts scientific experiments before returning to Earth with the crew of Expedition Twelve.

    July 7, 2006 – The arrival of Thomas Reiter of Germany via the Space Shuttle Discovery returns the station’s long-duration crew to three for the first time since May 2003 and the Columbia shuttle disaster. Reiter is the first non-US and non-Russian long-duration station crewmember, and he remains onboard during the first part of Expedition Fourteen.

    September 9, 2006 – Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the ISS, delivering the P3/P4 truss and its solar wings before undocking September 21 and returning to Earth.

    September 20, 2006 – Arriving with the crew of Expedition Fourteen is Anousheh Ansari, an American businesswoman. She spends about eight days conducting experiments and blogging about her experiences before returning to Earth with two of the three members of Expedition Thirteen.

    December 2006 – Arrival of Flight Engineer Sunita Williams via space shuttle mission STS-116. Williams replaces Reiter, who returns to Earth with the crew of STS-116.

    April 7, 2007 – Charles Simonyi becomes the fifth space tourist when he accompanies the Expedition Fifteen crew to the ISS. He spends 12 days aboard the space station before returning to Earth with the crew of Expedition Fourteen.

    June 10, 2007 – Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the the ISS to install a new segment and solar panel on the space station and retrieve astronaut Williams, who has been at the space station since December. Williams is replaced by Flight Engineer Clayton Anderson, who will return to earth aboard Discovery on Mission STS-120.

    June 15, 2007 – Four days after ISS’s computers crash, two Russian cosmonauts bring them back online. The computers control the station’s orientation as well as oxygen production. The crew used Atlantis’ thrusters to help maintain the station’s position while its computers were down.

    October 25, 2007 – Space Shuttle Discovery docks with the ISS. In the days while docked with the ISS, the Discovery crew delivers and connects Harmony to the ISS, a living and working compartment that will also serve as the docking port for Japanese and European Union laboratories. Discovery and ISS crew also move an ISS solar array to prepare for future ISS expansion, planning a special spacewalk to repair damage to the solar array that occurred during its unfurling.

    November 14, 2007 – ISS crew move the Harmony node from its temporary location on the Unity node to its permanent location attached to Destiny.

    February 9, 2008 – Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives. Its crew delivers the European-made Columbus laboratory, a 23-foot long module that will be home to a variety of science experiments. Atlantis remains docked with the ISS for just under nine days.

    March 9, 2008 – “Jules Verne,” the first of a series of European space vessels designed to deliver supplies to the ISS, launches from the Ariane Launch Complex in Kourou, French Guiana. The vessels, called Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), are propelled into space atop an Ariane 5 rocket, and are designed to dock with the ISS with no human assistance. The Jules Verne will wait to dock with the ISS until after Space Shuttle Endeavour’s March mission is completed.

    March 12, 2008 – Space Shuttle Endeavour docks with the ISS.

    March 24, 2008 – Endeavour detaches from the ISS. While docked, crew members make five spacewalks to deliver and assemble the Dextre Robotics System, deliver and attach the Kibo logistics module, attach science experiments to the exterior of the ISS, and perform other inspection and maintenance tasks.

    April 3, 2008 – The unmanned European cargo ship Jules Verne successfully docks with the ISS. Able to carry more than three times the volume of the Russian-built Progress resupply vehicles, the Jules Verne contains fuel, water, oxygen and other supplies.

    April 10, 2008 – Two members of Expedition 17 crew arrive at the ISS via a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Travelling with them is Yi So-yeon, a space flight participant and South Korea’s first astronaut. Yi later returns to Earth aboard an older Soyuz spacecraft along with members of the Expedition 16 crew.

    June 2, 2008 – Space Shuttle Discovery docks with the ISS. Discovery is carrying Japan’s Kibo lab, a replacement pump for the station’s toilet, and astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who is replacing Garrett Reisman as part of the station’s crew.

    June 11, 2008 – Discovery undocks with the ISS after its crew successfully delivers and installs the Japanese-built Kibo lab, delivers parts to repair the ISS’s malfunctioning toilet, collects debris samples from the station’s faulty solar power wing, and retrieves an inspection boom left behind during a previous shuttle mission. Station crewmember Reisman departs with Discovery.

    October 12, 2008 – The Soyuz TMA-13 capsule carrying two Americans – flight commander Michael Fincke and computer game millionaire Richard Garriott, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov – lifts off from Kazakhstan. It docks with the ISS on October 14.

    March 12, 2009 – Orbital debris from a prior space shuttle mission forces the crew of Expedition 18 to temporarily retreat to its Soyuz capsule.

    August 24, 2011 – Russian emergency officials report that an unmanned Russian cargo craft, the Progress-M12M that was to deliver 3.85 tons of food and supplies to the ISS, crashed in a remote area of Siberia.

    May 19, 2012 – SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, the first private spacecraft bound for the ISS, is aborted a half a second before liftoff. SpaceX engineers trace the problem to a faulty rocket engine valve.

    May 22, 2012 – The unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket carries the Dragon spacecraft, which is filled with food, supplies and science experiments and bound for the ISS.

    May 25, 2012 – The unmanned SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connects to the International Space Station, the first private spacecraft to successfully reach an orbiting space station.

    October 7, 2012 – SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, with its Dragon capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of supplies bound for the ISS, launches from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It is the first of a dozen NASA-contracted flights to resupply the International Space Station, at a total cost of $1.6 billion.

    May 9, 2013 – The crew discovers that the ISS is leaking ammonia. The crew performs a spacewalk and corrects the leak two days later.

    November 9, 2013 – Russian cosmonauts perform the first ever spacewalk of the Olympic Torch ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

    December 11, 2013 – A pump on one of the station’s two external cooling loops shuts down after hitting a temperature limit, according to NASA. The malfunctioning loop had been producing too much ammonia, possibly the result of a malfunctioning valve.

    December 24, 2013 – Astronauts complete a repair job to replace the problematic pump. Their spacewalk lasts seven and a half hours, and is the second ever spacewalk on Christmas Eve. The first was in 1999 for a Hubble Repair Mission.

    March 10, 2014 – After five and a half months aboard the ISS, Expedition 38 astronauts return to earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-10M spacecraft.

    September 16, 2014 – NASA announces that Boeing and Space X have been awarded contracts to build vehicles that will shuttle astronauts to and from the space station.

    December 15, 2015 – Astronaut Tim Peake is the first British European Space Agency astronaut to arrive at the ISS.

    March 2, 2016 – NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko land in the Kazakhstan desert after a nearly yearlong mission on the ISS.

    August 3, 2018 – NASA selects nine astronauts, seven men and two women, for missions in spacecraft developed by Boeing and SpaceX. The flights, scheduled for 2019, will be the first launches to space from US soil since the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011, and the first in capsules developed and built by the private sector.

    June 2019 – NASA announces the ISS is opening for commercial use. The newest NASA directive is intended to allow “commercial manufacturing and production and allow both NASA and private astronauts to conduct new commercial activities aboard the orbiting laboratory.”

    October 18, 2019 – NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch conduct the first all-female spacewalk outside of the ISS. The spacewalk last seven hours and 17 minutes.

    May 30, 2020 – SpaceX and NASA’s Falcon 9, bound for the ISS, launches. This is the first crewed spaceflight to launch from US soil since 2011. The astronauts spend two months working on the ISS, then return to Earth on August 2.

    November 16, 2020 – The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts on board safely docks with the ISS. The spacecraft launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on November 15 and marks the first fully operational crewed mission for SpaceX.

    April 21, 2021 – Russia announces that it is ready to start building its own space station with the aim of launching it into orbit by 2030, according to Interfax news agency. The project will mark a new chapter for Russian space exploration. Russia, which signed a memorandum of understanding in March to explore establishing a joint lunar base with China, will notify its ISS partners regarding its departure from ISS at a future date.

    June 16, 2021 – NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet conduct a spacewalk to install solar arrays on the space station. After technical delays, the work is completed four days later. The arrays are rolled up like carpet and are 750 pounds (340 kilograms) and 10 feet (three meters) wide. They will provide a power boost to the space station.

    January 31, 2022 – NASA reveals it intends to keep operating the ISS until the end of 2030, after which the ISS will be crashed into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo.

    April 9, 2022 – The first crew entirely comprised of private citizens reaches the ISS.

    July 26, 2022 – Russia announces it is planning to pull out of the ISS after 2024, ending its decades-long partnership with NASA at the orbiting outpost.

    October 6, 2022 – A SpaceX capsule carrying a multinational crew of astronauts docks with the ISS after a 29-hour trek. The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12 p.m. ET on October 5. The four crew members included astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada of NASA, astronaut Koichi Wakata of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, the first Russian to travel on a SpaceX spaceflight.

    October 24, 2022 – According to NASA, the ISS fires its thrusters to maneuver out of the way of a piece of oncoming Russian space junk.

    December 22, 2022 – Two NASA astronauts carry out a spacewalk to install a new solar panel on the ISS. The spacewalk lasts about seven hours.

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  • Colonizing Mars could be dangerous and ridiculously expensive. Elon Musk wants to do it anyway | CNN Business

    Colonizing Mars could be dangerous and ridiculously expensive. Elon Musk wants to do it anyway | CNN Business

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    Austin, TX
    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk has spent nearly two decades rallying SpaceX fans around his goal of colonizing Mars, something world governments aren’t currently attempting — in part because of the unfathomable price tag such a mission will entail.

    Musk, the company’s CEO and chief engineer, refers to his interplanetary ambitions more like a sci-fi protagonist with a moral calling than an entrepreneur with a disruptive business plan.

    “If there’s something terrible that happens on Earth, either made by humans or natural, we want to have, like, life insurance for life as a whole,” Musk said during a virtual Mars conference on Aug. 31. “Then, there’s the kind of excitement and adventure.”

    SpaceX’s plans for a Red-Planet settlement bring up numerous technological, political and ethical questions. One of the most challenging hurdles may also be financial: Not even Musk has ventured to guess an all-in cost estimate.

    The last space program that came close to Musk’s interplanetary travel ambitions was NASA’s Apollo program, the mid-20th Century effort that landed six spacecraft and 12 astronauts on the moon. Apollo cost well over $280 billion in today’s dollars, and, in some years, NASA was taking up more than 4% of the entire national budget. The space agency, which in more recent years has received less than half of one percent of the federal budget, is mapping its own plans to return humans to the moon and, eventually, a path to Mars.

    But the agency has not indicated how much the latter could cost, either.

    Musk’s personal wealth has ballooned to about $100 billion — at least on paper — thanks in no small part to a series of stock and stock awards from his electric car company, Tesla. Musk has also repeatedly said that he hopes profits from SpaceX’s other businesses, including a satellite-internet venture that is currently in beta testing, will help fuel development of his Mars rocket. SpaceX has also raised nearly $6 billion from banks and venture capitalists, swelling into one of the most highly-valued private companies in the world, according to data firm Pitchbook. Presumably, at least some investors will one day be looking to cash out.

    And that begs the question: Is there money to be made on Mars?

    SpaceX is likely still many, many years from developing all the technology a Mars settlement would require. The company is in the early stages of developing its Starship, a massive rocket and spaceship system that Musk hopes will ferry cargo and convoys of people across the at-minimum 30 million-mile void between Earth and Mars. Musk has estimated Starship development will cost up to $10 billion, and Musk said Aug. 31 that SpaceX will look to launch “hundreds” of satellites aboard Starship before entrusting it with human lives.

    If it proves capable of the trek to Mars, settlers will need air-tight habitats to shield them from toxic air and the deadly radiation that rains down on its surface.

    “It’s not for the faint of heart,” Musk said. “Good chance you’ll die, and it’s going to be tough going…It’d better be pretty glorious if it works out.”

    But for at least the first 100 years that humans have a presence on Mars, the economic situation will be dubious, said Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, which recently launched the Perseverance rover to further study the planet robotically.

    Musk does have a plan for making Mars an attractive destination for long-term living: Terraforming, a hypothetical scenario in which humans make Mars more Earth-like by pumping gases into the atmosphere. It’d be an attempt to use the same greenhouse gases causing the climate crisis on our home planet to make Mars’ atmosphere thicker, warmer and more hospitable to life. Musk has promoted the idea that the process could be kicked off by dropping nuclear bombs on the planet.

    The idea of terraforming arose from scientists who were kicking around ideas, Meyer said, but not from anyone who thought it was something humans could or should do.

    “It was an intellectual exercise,” Meyer said. But there’s barely any oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere. And there’s an infinitesimally small amount of water, meaning it will be extremely difficult to grow crops, much less create a Mars-wide water cycle. It’s not even clear if there are enough resources on Mars to make terraforming possible at all.

    Musk, in a photo posted to his Instagram, wears one of SpaceX's

    “I think ‘Total Recall’ has the right idea,” he joked. “You’d need to use some alien technology.”

    Musk has also acknowledged that terraforming will be extremely resource-intensive. But the concept is ingrained in SpaceX lore, so much so that the company sells t-shirts saying “Nuke Mars” and “Occupy Mars.”

    Musk is frequently seen wearing one.

    Values and valuations

    There are no known resources on Mars that would be valuable enough to mine and sell back to Earthly businesses, Meyer said. “Part of the reason [scientists are] interested in Mars is — it’s pretty much made of the same stuff as Earth,” he told CNN Business.

    Musk has previously suggested that he agrees, noting that the resources on Mars would likely be valuable only to settlers hoping to build up industries on the planet. He noted eight years ago that the only “economic exchange” between Mars and Earth dwellers would be “intellectual property.”

    Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, has days that are roughly as long as Earth days. But it's a smaller planet, its temperatures average -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere is much thinner and comprised mostly of carbon dioxide.

    Money-making ambitions aside, the idea that Mars could one day become home to a metropolis and — potentially — a tourist destination is acknowledged by mainstream scientists like Meyer, NASA’s lead Mars expert.

    Meyer said that, 20 years ago, he attended a presentation about Mars business and tourism. “I went in pretty skeptical of this… and coming away I was thinking, ‘Well, [there are] some pretty reasonable ideas,” he said, adding that he now embraces the idea that businesspeople could make space travel more accessible.

    Meyer added that, in his mind, it’s not if Mars travel will one day be a profitable venture, but when.

    Musk hasn’t expanded on his ideas for making money on Mars, but his musings about exporting intellectual property echoed a book written by Robert Zubrin, an influential but polarizing figure in the space community and a longtime Musk ally.

    “Ideas may be another possible export for Martian colonists,” Zubrin, who heads the Mars Society, wrote in his oft-cited 1996 book, “The Case for Mars.”

    To look towards a potential future of humanity, Zubrin looks to its past.

    “Just as the labor shortage prevalent in colonial and 19th century America drove the creation of Yankee Ingenuity’s flood of inventions, so the conditions of extreme labor shortage…will tend to drive Martian ingenuity.”

    In a recent interview with CNN Business, Zubrin stood by those ideas, arguing American colonization has worked. Zubrin again harkens back to the colonization of North America as an example of how would-be Mars colonists might fund their trip.

    “If you say, okay, you want to go to Mars, you’re going to want to offer something,” Zubrin said. “If you look at Colonial America, a middle-class person could travel to America by liquidating their farm. But, the proceeds would give them a one-way ticket. But if you are working, what you could do is sell your labor for seven years. Remember the indentured servants?”

    “So there’ll be some selection for, like, you know, if you can pay it, you can go on your own terms — but if you can’t…effectively it’s like $300,000 which is about what a working person can make in seven years, or what a middle class person can put together by selling their house,” Zubrin added.

    Zubrin, who has worked with conservative think tanks but says he is not politically affiliated, also acknowledged that colonization can go hand-in-hand with exploitation: “If somebody says, ‘But won’t there be exploitation there?’ Well sure, that’s what people do to each other all the time.”

    (Musk has not expounded on his thoughts about colonialism, and he donates to both US political parties.)

    To be clear: The story of American colonialism also included chattel slavery and the brutalization and erasure of many native populations.

    “There aren’t native Martians,” Zubrin said.

    But Damien Williams — a teacher and PhD student at Virginia Tech who studies the intersection of advanced technologies, ethics and societies — warns that the stories we may tell ourselves about America and exploring outer space can leave out key context.

    A prototype of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft is seen at the company's Texas launch facility on September 28, 2019 in Boca Chica near Brownsville, Texas

    It’s still unclear, for example, who Musk envisions as the first Mars settlers. NASA astronauts? Ultra-wealthy thrill-seekers? SpaceX employees?

    “This competitive stance of expansion and exploration, it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Williams, who also works with the advocacy group Just Space Alliance, said. But, when it comes to a private company using resources that international treaties say do not belong to anyone — “Who’s been brought in and how? Who’s been left out and why? These things matter.”

    Musk’s use of the word “colonization” also belies a long history of Americans and other Western nations enriching themselves by exploiting and enslaving others. And when it comes to colonizing another planet, it’s not just the microbial lifeforms that may exist on Mars that should be concerned. Without clearly defined objectives and agreements, SpaceX’s colony could create a “contentious sphere of conflict,” Williams said.

    “The values that we take with us into space exploration should be front and center,” he added.

    SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

    Update: This story has been updated with additional quotes from Robert Zubrin regarding how Mars settlers might pay for their journey.

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  • Mystery cylinder on Western Australia beach likely space junk, authorities say | CNN

    Mystery cylinder on Western Australia beach likely space junk, authorities say | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    A mystery object that washed ashore on Australia’s western coast sparking a flurry of local excitement and speculation over its origin is most likely space junk, police said Tuesday.

    Since it has turned up on a beach at Green Head, a coastal town 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Perth, the copper-colored cylinder had drawn in curious local residents eager to catch a glimpse of the unidentified object.

    Speculation also erupted online with people posting a host of theories about where it might have come from.

    The Western Australia Police Force said in a statement on Tuesday that the item is believed to be “space debris”, echoing similar comments from the country’s space agency which was working on the same hypothesis.

    Police were initially cautious, throwing up a cordon around the object and telling locals to keep away.

    But in a new update on Tuesday, police said an analysis by the Department of Fire and Emergency Service and Chemistry Centre of Western Australia had found the object to be safe, posing no current risk to the community.

    Police added they were discussing ways with relevant agencies to safely remove and store the object, while working on finalizing their findings.

    But space junk looks the most likely explanation.

    “The object could be from a foreign space launch vehicle and we are liaising with global counterparts who may be able to provide more information,” the Australian Space Agency tweeted on Monday.

    The bulky cylinder, which stands taller than a human, appears to be damaged at one end and is covered with barnacles, suggesting it has spent a significant amount of time at sea before washing up.

    The space agency urged people to avoid handling and moving the object due to its unknown origin and to report any further discovery of suspected debris.

    Police said previously that the item did not appear to originate from a commercial aircraft and vowed to guard it until its removal.

    Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist from Flinders University in Adelaide, said the cylinder is likely the third phase of a polar satellite launch vehicle previously launched by India.

    “It is identical in dimension and materials,” Gorman told CNN, comparing it with launch vehicles used by India since 2010.

    Space rockets are multi-stage, meaning they are made up of various compartments carrying fuel, each of which are dumped in a sequential order when the propellant runs out, with much of the debris falling back to Earth.

    Gorman also said the largely intact color and shape of the cylinder suggests that it did not reach outer space before it detached, sparing it from intense burn with the atmosphere on re-entry. It may have landed in the ocean about five to 10 years ago until a recent deep sea storm pushed it to the shore, she added.

    Gorman said the cylinder runs on solid fuel, which only releases toxic substances under high temperature. But she advised local residents to err on the side of caution.

    “Just as general rule, you don’t touch space junk unless you need to,” she said.

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  • India shoots for the moon with historic Chandrayaan-3 mission | CNN

    India shoots for the moon with historic Chandrayaan-3 mission | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    India is bidding to become only the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon with the launch Friday of its Chandrayaan-3 mission.

    Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, is expected to take off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh state at 2:30 p.m. local time (5 a.m. ET).

    It’s India’s second attempt at a soft landing, after its previous effort with the Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 failed. Its first lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1, orbited the moon and was then deliberately crash-landed onto the lunar surface in 2008.

    Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 is comprised of a lander, propulsion module and rover. Its aim is to safely land on the lunar surface, collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon’s composition.

    Only three other countries have achieved the complicated feat of soft-landing a spacecraft on the moon’s surface – the United States, Russia and China.

    Indian engineers have been working on the launch for years. They are aiming to land Chandrayaan-3 near the challenging terrain of the moon’s unexplored South Pole.

    India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, discovered water molecules on the moon’s surface. Eleven years later, the Chandrayaan-2 successfully entered lunar orbit but its rover crash-landed on the moon’s surface. It too was supposed to explore the moon’s South Pole.

    At the time, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the engineers behind the mission despite the failure, promising to keep working on India’s space program and ambitions.

    Just before Friday’s launch, Modi said the day “will always be etched in golden letters as far as India’s space sector is concerned.”

    “This remarkable mission will carry the hopes and dreams of our nation,” he said in a Twitter post.

    India has since spent about $75 million on its Chandrayaan-3 mission.

    Modi said the rocket will cover more than 300,000 kilometers (186,411 miles) and reach the moon in the “coming weeks.”

    India’s space program dates back more than six decades, to when it was a newly independent republic and a deeply poor country reeling from a bloody partition.

    When it launched its first rocket into space in 1963, the country was no match for the ambitions of the US and the former Soviet Union, which were way ahead in the space race.

    Now, India is the world’s most populous nation and its fifth largest economy. It boasts a burgeoning young population and is home to a growing hub of innovation and technology.

    And India’s space ambitions have been playing catch up under Modi.

    For the leader, who swept to power in 2014 on a ticket of nationalism and future greatness, India’s space program is a symbol of the country’s rising prominence on the global stage.

    In 2014, India became the first Asian nation to reach Mars, when it put the Mangalyaan probe into orbit around the Red Planet, for $74 million – less than the $100 million Hollywood spent making space thriller “Gravity.”

    Three years later, India launched a record 104 satellites in one mission.

    In 2019, Modi announced in a rare televised address that India had shot down one of its own satellites, in what it claimed was an anti-satellite test, making it one of only four countries to do so.

    That same year ISRO’s former chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan said India was planning to set up an independent space station by 2030. Currently, the only space stations available for expedition crews are the International Space Station (a joint project between several countries) and China’s Tiangong Space Station.

    The rapid development and innovation has made space tech one of India’s hottest sectors for investors – and world leaders appear to have taken notice.

    Last month, when Modi met US President Joe Biden in Washington on a state visit, the White House said both leaders sought more collaboration in the space economy.

    And India’s space ambitions do not stop at the moon or Mars. ISRO has also proposed sending an orbiter to Venus.

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  • CNBC Daily Open: Don’t bet against the U.S. economy

    CNBC Daily Open: Don’t bet against the U.S. economy

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    Shoppers during the grand opening of a Costco Wholesale store in Kyle, Texas, on Thursday, March 30, 2023.

    Jordan Vonderhaar | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

    What you need to know today

    Larger in reality
    The U.S. economy     grew an annualized 2% from January to March, according to the Commerce Department’s third and final estimate of first-quarter gross domestic product. That’s a big jump from the initial estimate of 1.3% and higher than the 1.4% Dow Jones consensus — consumer spending and exports were stronger than previously thought.

    Boosted by banks
    U.S. stocks rose Thursday, buoyed by gains in the banking sector as investors celebrated positive results in the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test for banks. Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Friday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped around 0.6% as Tokyo’s inflation reading for June came in at 3.1% year on year. However, South Korea’s Kospi added 0.5% on the news that the country’s industrial production in May rose 3.2% month over month — economists expected production to decline.

    China’s businesses falter
    China’s factory activity in June shrank for a third consecutive month, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. Non-manufacturing activity — which includes sectors like finance, health care and real estate — grew, but at its slowest pace this year. China’s monetary stimulus “just isn’t working,” according to China Beige Book, a U.S.-based research company.

    Successful spaceflight, but shares sink
    Virgin Galactic successfully completed its first commercial spaceflight yesterday. Named Galactic 01, the flight took off in New Mexico and carried three paying passengers, all of whom are members of the Italian Air Force. Despite the smooth mission, Virgin Galactic shares sank more than 10% yesterday and a further 1.9% in extended training.

    [PRO] IPOs come to life
    The initial public offering market’s stirring to life again. Three big IPOs — Savers Value Village, Kodiak Gas Services and Fidelis Insurance — were priced Wednesday and started trading yesterday. CNBC Pro’s Bob Pisani breaks down their performance, picks a winner and explains what this means for the general IPO market.

    The bottom line

    Don’t fight the Fed, goes the saying in markets. Traders might want to add a new maxim: Don’t bet against the U.S. economy.

    Despite endless warning of an inevitable recession, the U.S. economy defiantly expanded 2% in the first quarter of this year. It was pushed up by a rebound in exports, which rose 7.8% after falling 3.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022.

    More significantly, consumer spending jumped 4.2%, the fastest quarterly pace since the second quarter of 2021 — back when households were still flush with cash from stimulus checks. I previously argued that the U.S. economy might just avoid a recession thanks to the strength of consumers — and it seems this latest data point corroborates that theory.

    There are other signs the economy still refuses to buckle. Initial jobless claims for the week ended June 24 fell to 239,000, according to a report from the Labor Department. That figure’s 26,000 lower than the previous week and well below economists’ estimates, implying an unexpected improvement in the job market. 

    Meanwhile, stock markets rose after a banner day for big banks. The S&P 500 advanced 0.45%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.8%, but the Nasdaq Composite closed flat. All three indexes are on track to end the first half of the year at incredible numbers. So far, the S&P has gained 14.5%, the Dow’s up 2.9% and the Nasdaq has popped nearly 30% and is heading for its best first half since 1983.

    Can markets sustain that incredible momentum? The personal consumption expenditures price index, coming out later today, will provide some clues. It’s the inflation gauge the Fed watches mostly closely, so if the PCE surprises with a hotter-than-expected reading, consecutive rate hikes might be on the way.

    Still, given the resilience of the markets and the economy in the face of 10 consecutive hikes, perhaps they could continue surprising us as we head into the second half of 2023.

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  • CNBC Daily Open: The U.S. economy refuses to buckle

    CNBC Daily Open: The U.S. economy refuses to buckle

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    Shoppers are seen at Whole Foods Market on October 14, 2022, in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Elijah Nouvelage | Afp | Getty Images

    This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

    What you need to know today

    Larger in reality
    The U.S. economy     grew an annualized 2% from January to March, according to the Commerce Department’s third and final estimate of first-quarter gross domestic product. That’s a big jump from the initial estimate of 1.3% and higher than the 1.4% Dow Jones consensus — consumer spending and exports were stronger than previously thought.

    Boosted by banks
    U.S. stocks rose Thursday, buoyed by gains in the banking sector as investors celebrated positive results in the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test for banks. European markets closed mixed. H&M jumped 18% after reporting better-than-expected second-quarter profits. Separately, Spain’s inflation in June fell to 1.9% year on year.

    Krona in a corner
    Sweden’s currency dropped to a record low of 0.0846 krona to 1 euro after the country’s central bank raised interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75%. Higher interest rates usually causes a currency to appreciate because it’d give more returns — so the drop implies traders are concerned about the state of the Swedish economy.

    Successful spaceflight, but shares sink
    Virgin Galactic successfully completed its first commercial spaceflight yesterday. Named Galactic 01, the flight took off in New Mexico and carried three paying passengers, all of whom are members of the Italian Air Force. Despite the smooth mission, Virgin Galactic shares sank more than 10% yesterday and a further 0.7% in extended training.

    [PRO] IPOs come to life
    The initial public offering market’s stirring to life again. Three big IPOs — Savers Value Village, Kodiak Gas Services and Fidelis Insurance — were priced Wednesday and started trading yesterday. CNBC Pro’s Bob Pisani breaks down their performance, picks a winner and explains what this means for the general IPO market.

    The bottom line

    Don’t fight the Fed, goes the saying in markets. Traders might want to add a new maxim: Don’t bet against the U.S. economy.

    Despite endless warning of an inevitable recession, the U.S. economy defiantly expanded 2% in the first quarter of this year. It was pushed up by a rebound in exports, which rose 7.8% after falling 3.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022.

    More significantly, consumer spending jumped 4.2%, the fastest quarterly pace since the second quarter of 2021 — back when households were still flush with cash from stimulus checks. I previously argued that the U.S. economy might just avoid a recession thanks to the strength of consumers — and it seems this latest data point corroborates that theory.

    There are other signs the economy still refuses to buckle. Initial jobless claims for the week ended June 24 fell to 239,000, according to a report from the Labor Department. That figure’s 26,000 lower than the previous week and well below economists’ estimates, implying an unexpected improvement in the job market. 

    Meanwhile, stock markets rose after a banner day for big banks. The S&P 500 advanced 0.45%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.8%, but the Nasdaq Composite closed flat. All three indexes are on track to end the first half of the year at incredible numbers. So far, the S&P has gained 14.5%, the Dow’s up 2.9% and the Nasdaq has popped nearly 30% and is heading for its best first half since 1983.

    Can markets sustain that incredible momentum? The personal consumption expenditures price index, coming out later today, will provide some clues. It’s the inflation gauge the Fed watches mostly closely, so if the PCE surprises with a hotter-than-expected reading, consecutive rate hikes might be on the way.

    Still, given the resilience of the markets and the economy in the face of 10 consecutive hikes, perhaps they could continue surprising us as we head into the second half of 2023.

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  • Virgin Galactic raises $300 million, seeks another $400 million to expand spacecraft fleet

    Virgin Galactic raises $300 million, seeks another $400 million to expand spacecraft fleet

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    Carrier aircraft VMS Eve releases spacecraft VSS Unity before firing its rocket engine during the Unity 25 spaceflight on May 25, 2023.

    Virgin Galactic

    Virgin Galactic has successfully raised $300 million via an “at the market” offering of common stock, the company disclosed in a securities filing on Thursday.

    Now, the space tourism company aims to raise an additional $400 million through a subsequent stock offering, as Virgin Galactic looks to fund the development and expansion of its spacecraft fleet.

    Shares of Virgin Galactic have rallied since the company announced plans to launch its first commercial spaceflight by the end of this month.

    Sign up here to receive weekly editions of CNBC’s Investing in Space newsletter.

    The company opened the first fundraise on Aug. 4, saying at the time that the funds “would be used for general corporate purposes, including working capital, general and administrative matters, development of its spaceship fleet, and other infrastructure to scale its commercial operations.”

    Virgin Galactic had cash and securities totaling $874 million at the end of the first quarter, it reported in May.

    The company has a single carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, and one spacecraft, VSS Unity, which it’s said can conduct flights as frequently as once a month.

    But Virgin Galactic’s growth hinges on its ability to expand its fleet with the Delta-class vehicles it is developing, and the common stock offerings are a way to stop gap its cash burn until those spacecraft are flying.

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  • Search efforts grow as mission to rescue 5 aboard missing submersible races clock | CNN

    Search efforts grow as mission to rescue 5 aboard missing submersible races clock | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The multinational search efforts for a submersible with five people onboard that disappeared Sunday while diving to view the Titanic’s resting place grew Tuesday as more ships and aircraft joined the mission to find the mariners before their oxygen runs out.

    A spokesperson for the US Navy said the military branch is sending subject matter experts and a “Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System” to help in the rescue mission for the commercial submersible, which disappeared Sunday morning and as of Tuesday night, had just over 30 hours of oxygen left.

    The system has the capacity to lift and recover large, bulky and heavy undersea objects, like the small submersible.

    The equipment and personnel were expected to arrive at St. John’s, Newfoundland, by Tuesday night, the spokesperson said.

    The US Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Air Force are also deploying more aircraft and vessels to aid in the search for the 21-foot submersible. The fleet of assets joining the operation include a Canadian pipe-laying vessel with underwater capabilities, along with other vessels and aircraft.

    Follow live updates

    OceanGate Expeditions says the submersible, known as “Titan,” begins each trip with 96 hours of life support on the vessel. That is “a short amount of time,” said retired Capt. Bobbie Scholley, a former US Navy diver.

    “The hard part is finding the submersible. And once they find the submersible, there are all sorts of situations of how to get that submersible to the surface, and rescue the crew,” Scholley said.

    The international search and rescue operation is “doing everything possible” as part of a “complex search effort” but has so far “not yielded any results,” US Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick told reporters Tuesday at a 1 p.m. ET news conference. The “unique” and “challenging” search effort has brought together “our nations’ best experts,” he said.

    At the time, Frederick estimated the vessel was down to 40 hours of oxygen – and officials do not know whether that’s enough time to rescue those onboard.

    “What I will tell you is, we will do everything in our power to effect a rescue,” he said in response to a question about the oxygen time limit from CNN.

    If searchers locate the submersible deep in the ocean, the mission to recover the craft and any onboard survivors will be complex.

    “There’s very few assets in the world that can go down that deep,” said retired Capt. Chip McCord, whose 30 years of US Navy experience includes overseeing several salvage operations.

    Because of the depth of the ocean floor, a search craft would have to “go up and down like an elevator” rather than cruise the bottom of the sea, he added.

    Searchers have taken the mission below sea level after scouring an area of the ocean’s surface about the size of Connecticut, US Coast Guard District 1 Rear Admiral John Mauger said Tuesday morning. “We now have underwater search capability on scene, and so we’re going to be using that to see if we can locate the submersible in the water,” he told CNN.

    The search zone covers an area about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 13,000 feet deep, Mauger said Monday afternoon. “We are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people onboard,” he told reporters.

    The submersible known as “Titan” – roughly the size of a minivan – was carrying one pilot and four “mission specialists” when it lost contact with its mother ship about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent, authorities said.

    The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that organizes a journey to the ocean floor for a price of $250,000, according to an archived version of its website.

    The 23,000-pound Titan is made of highly engineered carbon fiber and titanium and is equipped with repurposed everyday items, including a video game controller used to steer.

    The expedition reflects the ongoing fascination with the Titanic’s wreckage more than a century after it hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, killing more than 1,500 people. The journey is also part of the growing business of wealthy adventure tourism, along with the space flights of Blue Origin or the rise of guided tours to Mount Everest.

    OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush is among the five onboard, according to a source with knowledge of the mission plan.

    The others are British businessman Hamish Harding; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son, Sulaiman Dawood; and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, according to CNN reporting.

    OceanGate did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment about Rush being aboard.

    OceanGate in a statement on Monday said “every step possible is being taken to bring the five crew members back safely. We are deeply grateful for the urgent and extensive assistance we are receiving from multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies as we seek to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

    In 2018, the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society penned a letter to Rush, expressing concern over what they referred to as OceanGate’s “experimental approach” of the Titan and its planned expedition to the site of the Titanic wreckage, the New York Times reports.

    “Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes, (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” the letter – which was obtained by the Times – reads, in part.

    Specifically, the letter expressed concern over the company’s compliance with a maritime risk assessment certification known as DNV-GL.

    “Your marketing material advertises that the TITAN design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that Oceangate has the intention of following DNV-GL classrules,” the letter says. “Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.”

    OceanGate has not responded to a request for comment on the letter.

    The effort to locate those on board, meanwhile, has grown by the day. The Coast Guard is searching with aerial and water surface craft, and the Canadian Armed Forces is also deploying aircraft to assist in the search, a spokesperson told CNN.

    The Canadian research vessel Polar Prince, which took the submersible to the wreckage site, is assisting search and rescue efforts, a spokesperson for its co-owner Horizon Maritime told CNN.

    Officials involved in the search have not publicly named those aboard the submersible, but social media posts and friends and family have identified them.

    Action Aviation, an aircraft brokerage based in the United Arab Emirates, in a statement on Tuesday confirmed Harding, its chairman, is on board.

    “Both the Harding Family and the team at Action Aviation are very grateful for all the kind messages of concern and support from our friends and colleagues,” the statement said. “We are thankful for the continued efforts of the authorities and companies that have stepped in to aid in the rescue efforts. We put great faith and trust in their expertise.”

    Harding has an extensive record of adventures: In 2019 he took part in a flight crew that broke the world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe via both poles, and in 2020 he became one of the first people to dive to Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean, widely believed to be the deepest point in the world’s oceans.

    And last year, he paid an undisclosed sum of money for one of the seats on Blue Origin’s space flight.

    The day before the vessel went missing, Harding wrote of the Titanic mission: “I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic.”

    A friend told CNN on Tuesday that Harding is “larger than life.”

    “He lives exploration. He is an explorer to the core of his soul,” fellow explorer Jannicke Mikkelsen said. “He has been to the bottom of planet earth in the Mariana Trench … he’s even been in space. We circumnavigated the planet together … the north and south pole, and set the world speed record.”

    Nargeolet was scheduled to be on Sunday’s dive with him, Harding said Saturday in a Facebook post:

    “The team on the sub has a couple of legendary explorers, some of which have done over 30 dives to the RMS Titanic since the 1980s including PH Nargeolet,” Harding wrote, according to CNN news partner CTV News.

    A friend of Nargeolet, Mathieu Johann, told CNN Tuesday the missing submariner is a “hero” and said, “I hope that, right to the end, like in the movies, he’ll reappear very quickly to reassure us all.”

    “What we’re going through right now is this interminable wait,” Johann said.

    Nargeolet is a Titanic expert who has taken the trip every year, completing more than 37 dives to the wreck, according to an archived version of OceanGate Expeditions’ website accessible via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

    “Something we always think about as explorers and scientists … we’ve always known something like this could happen and now it’s happened,” said David Gallo, a colleague of Nargeolet and the senior adviser for Strategic Initiatives at RMS Titanic Inc. “But we’re still pretty much in shock, the community is. I hope it has a good ending.”

    Further, Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, of Pakistan, “embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean,” their family said Tuesday in a statement. “As of now, contact has been lost with their submersible craft and there is limited information available,” the family said, adding they’re praying for their loved ones’ safe return.

    The incident has left the community of undersea explorers in shock, said David Gallo, who called Nargeolet his “closest colleague. “We’ve always known something like this could happen and now it’s happened … I hope it is a good ending,” Gallo, senior adviser for strategic initiatives at RMS Titanic Inc., told CNN.

    An undated photo shows the OceanGate Titan vessel.

    The OceanGate Expeditions trip began with a 400-nautical-mile journey from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the Titanic wreck site. There, the submersible started its descent Sunday morning before losing contact with the Polar Prince, a converted ice breaker that was its mother ship.

    The last communication between the vessel and OceanGate staff at the surface came in at 11:47 a.m. The vessel was expected to resurface at 6:10 p.m. but did not do so, and authorities were notified at 6:35 p.m., according to Polar Prince co-owner Miawpukek Maritime Horizon Services.

    Chief Mi’sel Joe of Miawpukek First Nation, which co-owns the Polar Prince, got a call Sunday alerting him that the submersible was two hours overdue and still hadn’t surfaced and communication with it was lost, he said. At that point, requests for search and rescue had gone out, he said.

    “There’s a tremendous amount of concern,” Joe said. “I have anguish that people are going through this. I wish there was more I can do.”

    Unlike a submarine, a submersible needs a mother ship to launch it, has fewer power reserves and can’t stay underwater as long.

    A mother ship can communicate with a submersible “via text messages which are exchanged via a USBL (ultra-short baseline) acoustic system,” according to OceanGate Expeditions’ archived website. The submersible is required to communicate with the ship every 15 minutes or more frequently, if needed, the site says. That USBL system is the only communications link between the submersible and the surface, it adds.

    What we know about the timeline:

    Friday, June 16:

  • The Polar Prince departs St. John’s, NewfoundlandSaturday, June 17:
  • The Polar Prince arrives at the dive siteSunday, June 18:
  • 9 a.m.: The dive operations started
  • 11:47 a.m.: Last communication between vessel and OceanGate surface staff
  • 6:10 p.m.: Originally scheduled resurface time
  • 6:35 pm.: Authorities notified and response operation initiated
  • All times in Atlantic Daylight Time, which is 1.5 hours ahead of Eastern Time
  • Source: Miawpukek Maritime Horizon Services, which co-owns the Polar Prince

While Titan is made of carbon fiber and titanium, some parts are decidedly low-tech.

“It is operated … by a gaming controller, what essentially looks like a PlayStation controller,” said CNN correspondent Gabe Cohen, who sat in Titan in 2018 while reporting on OceanGate Expeditions for CNN affiliate KOMO.

Cohen was surprised by how simple some of the craft’s technology seemed, he said Tuesday on “CNN This Morning.”

It’s a “tiny vessel, quite cramped and small,” Cohen said. “You have to sit inside of it, shoes off. It can only fit five people.”

A Titanic dive takes about 10 hours from start to finish, including the two and a half hours it takes to reach the bottom, the website says. The company calls its clients “mission specialists,” who are trained as crew members in a variety of different roles, including communicating with the topside tracking team, taking sonar scans and opening and closing the vessel’s dome, the archived site says.

Clients do not need previous maritime experience to join as mission specialists, it adds.

In case of an emergency, the submersible is equipped with basic emergency medical supplies and pilots have basic first aid training, according to OceanGate Expeditions’ website.

Everybody is “focused onboard here for our friends,” an expedition participant on the Polar Prince said Monday.

“We have a situation that is now the part of a major Search and Rescue effort, being undertaken by major agencies,” Rory Golden said on Facebook after CNN contacted him. “That is where our focus is right now.”

Hamish Harding posted an image of the submersible to his social media accounts on Saturday.

Deep sea-mapping company Magellan, known for their one-of-a-kind deep sea imagery of the Titanic, is trying to get involved in the search and rescue efforts but a key transport issue is holding them back. Magellan Chairman David Thompson told CNN that his team is familiar with the site of the wreck and received written notice from OceanGate Expeditions to mobilize early Monday and help.

However, they need an aircraft with the ability to transport their deep-sea diving equipment from the UK to Canada to launch their operation. Specifically, he said, they would require the use of a C-17 Globemaster III military jet.

“We know the wreck site, we know the location, and the equipment we are trying to get picked up is the equipment we used to do that scanning of the Titanic,” Thompson said.

Thompson said the US Air Force or UK Royal Airforce have not gotten back to Magellan letting them know if or when a plane can be procured for them to use to transport the equipment they need to Canada to embark on rescue efforts.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Mathieu Johann’s relationship to Nargeolet. He is a friend.

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  • Amazon will not host re:MARS robotics and AI conference this year

    Amazon will not host re:MARS robotics and AI conference this year

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    Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer Jeff Wilke unveiled its latest delivery drone at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas on June 5, 2019.

    Amazon

    Amazon doesn’t plan to host its re:MARS conference on cutting-edge technologies like robotics and space this year, the company confirmed on Friday. It will incorporate the subjects into its existing lineup of Amazon Web Services events.

    The tech giant launched re:MARS, which stands for “Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space,” in 2019 as a way for startups, academics, researchers and executives to discuss the latest developments in these technologies. It morphed out of a private, invite-only version of the event, called Mars, that attracted tech elite and was hosted by Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos.

    The decision to cancel re:MARS was not made for budgetary reasons, Amazon said.

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been taking a hard look at costs across the company as it confronts slowing sales growth and a gloomy economic outlook. The company has undergone the largest layoffs in its history and Jassy has cut a number of initiatives, including the Amazon Care telehealth program, touring “treasure truck,” Glow children’s videoconferencing device and Explore virtual tours service.

    Amazon used re:MARS to spotlight some of its futuristic innovations, such as delivery drones, warehouse robots, and its first home robot. Bezos also held talks on space colonization, and tested out a pair of giant remote-controlled robotic hands. At last year’s conference, Amazon demonstrated a feature where its Alexa digital assistant impersonated a deceased relative.

    An Amazon Web Services spokesperson told CNBC in a statement: “AWS hosts hundreds of thousands of customers and partners every year at hundreds of events around the world. These events provide an invaluable opportunity to connect with our customers. Their time is precious and we take seriously the responsibility to make each event valuable for every attendee, whether that’s through developing new skills, identifying new solutions that will transform an organization, or building new connections that can advance a career. We consulted with customers and the community as always, and for 2023, decided to incorporate re:MARS topics — machine learning, automation, robotics, and space — into a well-funded lineup of existing AWS events.”

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  • Elon Musk discussed a possible Mongolia expansion with the country’s prime minister

    Elon Musk discussed a possible Mongolia expansion with the country’s prime minister

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    Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

    Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images

    Mongolia’s prime minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday discussed possible expansion and investments into the Asian country over a virtual meeting.

    “They discussed the possibility of welcoming Tesla to Mongolia for its electric vehicles battery factory, leveraging the country’s wide availability of copper and rare earth elements, which are essential components of electric cars’ batteries,” according to a statement issued on behalf of the Mongolian government.

    The East Asian country is rich in minerals and boasts large deposits of copper, gold and coal.

    “The Mongolian Government is committed to cooperating with international organisations to help boost the development of new technologies and raise investment in the country,” the statement said.

    A statement from the cabinet secretariat of Mongolia’s government added that the country’s prime minister emphasized his support for the use of electric cars and urged Mongolian citizens to use such vehicles.

    Musk and Oyun-Erdene also spoke about bringing Starlink — a satellite communications terminals and services provider operated by the Musk-founded SpaceX — to Mongolia. Starlink was registered as a company in Mongolia in 2022 and is expected to launch regionally this year.

    Musk’s meeting with the Mongolian leader comes after the tech giant last week met with Chinese vice premier Ding Xuexiang and other top officials in China, as Beijing looks to portray a friendly business environment for foreign companies amid tensions with the U.S.

    The Tesla CEO complimented China’s technological advances and visited the Tesla gigafactory in Shanghai.

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  • Virgin Orbit shuts down after bankruptcy sale to Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch and Vast’s Launcher

    Virgin Orbit shuts down after bankruptcy sale to Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch and Vast’s Launcher

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    The modified Boeing 747 plane, named “Cosmic Girl”, will take off from Spaceport Cornwall in southwest England.

    Hugh Hastings / Stringer / Getty Images

    Bankrupt rocket company Virgin Orbit is shutting down, after selling its facility leases and equipment to a trio of aerospace companies in an auction, the company confirmed on Tuesday.

    “As Virgin Orbit embarks on this path, the management and employees would like to extend their heartfelt gratitude to all stakeholders,” the company said in a statement.

    related investing news

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    “Virgin Orbit’s legacy in the space industry will forever be remembered. Its groundbreaking technologies, relentless pursuit of excellence, and unwavering commitment to advancing the frontiers of air launch have left an indelible mark on the industry,” the company added.

    Spun out of Virgin Galactic in 2017 by founder Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Orbit reached rarefied air by flying multiple missions. But difficulty raising funds, and slow execution, brought the once multi-billion dollar company to bankruptcy and ultimately shut down.

    Sold in pieces

    The rocket for the company’s second demonstration mission undergoing final assembly at its factory in Long Beach, California.

    Virgin Orbit

    Monday’s auction bids amount to about $36 million in total. Virgin Orbit’s six or so rockets that were in various stages of manufacturing assembly, and its intellectual property, have yet to be sold, a Virgin Orbit spokesperson confirmed.

    Rocket Lab successfully bid $16.1 million for the company’s headquarters in Long Beach, California, which is about 140,000 square feet, the spokesperson said. Although founded in New Zealand, Rocket Lab was already a neighbor of Virgin Orbit, with a headquarters and facilities in the Long Beach area. Additionally, Rocket Lab’s purchase includes assets such as 3D-printers and a specialty tank welding machine.

    Stratolaunch was awarded its $17 million “stalking horse” bid for Virgin Orbit’s 747 jet. A Stratolaunch spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC, said the company “continually evaluates ways to increase our capacity to meet the imperative for testing hypersonic technologies via leap-ahead flight demonstrations.”

    “We will share more news about the sale as it becomes available,” Stratolaunch noted.

    Launcher, a subsidiary of Vast Space, is purchasing the company’s facility in Mojave, California — as well as some machinery, equipment and inventory — for $2.7 million. Virgin Orbit’s Mojave leases include infrastructure such as rocket-engine test stands and an aircraft hangar.

    A liquidation company, Inliper, is purchasing the company’s office equipment for $650,000.

    Rocket Lab and Launcher did not immediately respond to CNBC requests for comment.

    Sign up here to receive weekly editions of CNBC’s Investing in Space newsletter.

    Previously in the bankruptcy process, Virgin Orbit agreed to the terms of Stratolaunch’s bid, which was to purchase the 747 jet “Cosmic Girl” and other aircraft assets. Stratolaunch has been developing its own airborne system, the world’s largest airplane called “Roc,” as a platform for hypersonic flight testing.

    Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy protection on April 4 after the company failed to secure a funding lifeline and laid off nearly its entire workforce. The auction outcome falls short of Virgin Orbit’s goal in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, which was to find a wholesale buyer that would keep the company’s assets and intellectual property intact.

    The bankruptcy court is set to approve the sales in a hearing on Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET.

    Here's what led Virgin Orbit to bankruptcy

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  • Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

    Mysterious rumblings were recorded in Earth’s stratosphere | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Giant solar balloons were sent 70,000 feet up in the air to record sounds of Earth’s stratosphere — and the microphones picked up some unexpected sounds.

    The stratosphere is the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, and its lower level contains the ozone layer that absorbs and scatters the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, according to NASA. The thin, dry air of the stratosphere is where jet aircraft and weather balloons reach their maximum altitude, and the relatively calm atmospheric layer is rarely disturbed by turbulence.

    Daniel Bowman, principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, was inspired in graduate school to explore the soundscape of the stratosphere after being introduced to the low-frequency sounds that are generated by volcanoes. Known as infrasound, the phenomenon is inaudible to the human ear.

    Bowman and his friends had previously flown cameras on weather balloons “to take pictures of the black sky above and the Earth far below” and successfully built their own solar balloon.

    He proposed attaching infrasound recorders to balloons to record the sounds of volcanoes. But then he and his adviser Jonathan Lees of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “realized that no one had tried to put microphones on stratospheric balloons for half a century, so we pivoted to exploring what this new platform could do,” Bowman said. Lees is a professor of Earth, marine and environmental sciences who researches seismology and volcanology.

    The balloons can take sensors twice as high as commercial jets can fly.

    “On our solar balloons, we have recorded surface and buried chemical explosions, thunder, ocean waves colliding, propeller aircraft, city sounds, suborbital rocket launches, earthquakes, and maybe even freight trains and jet aircraft,” Bowman said via email. “We’ve also recorded sounds whose origin is unclear.”

    The findings were shared Thursday at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago.

    A recording shared by Bowman from a NASA balloon that circled Antarctica contains infrasound of colliding ocean waves, which sounds like continual sighing. But other crackles and rustling have unknown origins.

    Listen to the sounds of the stratosphere

    Solar balloons captured a multitude of sounds in the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, including colliding ocean waves — as well as sounds with unidentified origins.

    Source: Daniel Bowman/Sandia National Laboratories

    In the stratosphere, “there are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour on some flights, but the source of these is completely unknown,” Bowman said.

    Bowman and his collaborators have conducted research using NASA balloons and other flight providers, but they decided to build their own balloons, each spanning about 19.7 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) across.

    The supplies can be found at hardware and pyrotechnic supply stores, and the balloons can be assembled on a basketball court.

    “Each balloon is made of painter’s plastic, shipping tape, and charcoal dust,” Bowman said via email. “They cost about $50 to make and a team of two can build one in about 3.5 hours. One simply brings it out to a field on a sunny day and fills it up with air, and it will carry a pound of payload to about 70,000 ft.”

    The charcoal dust is used inside the balloons to darken them, and when the sun shines on the dark balloons, the air inside them warms up and becomes buoyant. The inexpensive and easy DIY design means the researchers can release multiple balloons to collect as much data as possible.

    “Really, a group of high schoolers with access to the school gym could build a solar balloon, and there’s even a cellphone app called RedVox that can record infrasound,” Bowman said.

    Bowman estimated that he launched several dozen solar balloons to collect infrasound recordings between 2016 and April of this year. Microbarometers, originally designed to monitor volcanoes, were attached to the balloons to record low-frequency sounds.

    The researchers tracked their balloons using GPS, since they can travel for hundreds of miles and land in inconvenient locations.

    The longest flight so far was 44 days aboard a NASA helium balloon, which recorded 19 days worth of data before the batteries on the microphone died. Meanwhile, solar balloon flights tend to last about 14 hours during the summer and land once the sun sets.

    The advantage of the high altitude reached by the balloons means that noise levels are lower and the detection range is increased — and the whole Earth is accessible. But the balloons also present challenges for researchers. The stratosphere is a harsh environment with wild temperature fluctuations between heat and cold.

    “Solar balloons are a bit sluggish, and we’ve wrecked a few on bushes when trying to launch them,” Bowman said. “We’ve had to hike down into canyons and across mountains to get our payloads. Once, our Oklahoma State colleagues actually had a balloon land in a field, spend the night, and launch itself back in the air to fly another whole day!”

    Lessons learned from multiple balloon flights have somewhat eased the process, but now the greatest challenge for researchers is identifying the signals recorded during the flights.

    “There are many flights with signals whose origin we do not understand,” Bowman said. “They are almost certainly mundane, maybe a patch of turbulence, a distant severe storm, or some sort of human object like a freight train — but it’s hard to tell what is going on sometimes due to the lack of data up there.”

    Sarah Albert, a geophysicist at Sandia National Laboratories, has investigated a “sound channel” — a conduit that carries sounds across great distances through the atmosphere — located at the altitudes Bowman studies. Her recordings have captured rocket launches and other unidentified rumblings.

    Sandia National Laboratories geophysicists (from left) Daniel Bowman and Sarah Albert display an infrasound sensor and the box used to protect the sensors from extreme temperatures.

    “It may be that sound gets trapped in the channel and echoes around until it’s completely garbled,” Bowman said. “But whether it is near and fairly quiet (like a patch of turbulence) or distant and loud (like a faraway storm) is not clear yet.”

    Bowman and Albert will continue to investigate the aerial sound channel and try to determine where the stratosphere’s rumbles are originating — and why some flights record them while others don’t.

    Bowman is eager to understand the soundscape of the stratosphere and unlock key features, like variability across seasons and locations.

    It’s possible that helium-filled versions of these balloons could one day be used to explore other planets like Venus, carrying scientific instruments above or within the planet’s clouds for a few days as a test flight for larger, more complex missions.

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  • Hundreds of rockets fired at Israel amid deadly IDF airstrikes in Gaza | CNN

    Hundreds of rockets fired at Israel amid deadly IDF airstrikes in Gaza | CNN

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    Gaza and Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    Israel’s army and Palestinian militants exchanged heavy cross-border fire on Wednesday, with hundreds of rockets launched from Gaza towards Israel after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out deadly strikes on what it says are Islamic Jihad organization targets along the strip.

    The latest violence came after Israeli military airstrikes earlier in the week killed three leaders of the Palestinian militant group and 10 other Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza and led to threats of retaliation.

    In a new update early Thursday, the IDF said it had targeted another Islamic Jihad commander who was a “central figure” in the Palestinian militant group.

    “We just targeted Ali Ghali, the commander of Islamic Jihad’s Rocket Launching Force, as well as two other Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza,” the IDF said in a tweet, adding that Ghali was “responsible for the recent rocket barrages launched against Israel.”

    Israel has been bombarding the Islamic Jihad’s operatives and infrastructure, using unmanned drones for surveillance as it monitors militant preparations to propel rockets, IDF chief spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Wednesday.

    At least six Palestinians were killed in Wednesday’s airstrikes, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said, revising down its earlier count.

    Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement that runs Gaza, issued a statement Wednesday strongly suggesting that its forces were releasing rockets towards Israel, shortly after the IDF said firmly it believed Hamas was not doing so.

    “The Palestinian resistance with all its factions, led by the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, is participating now in a unified manner by teaching the enemy a lesson that it will not forget and confirming that Palestinian blood is not cheap,” said the statement, issued by Muhammad al-Buraim, an official in the joint resistance committees in Palestine.

    The statement appeared designed to reject an assertion by IDF chief spokesman Hagari that the IDF saw only Islamic Jihad, not Hamas, firing rockets.

    Nearly 500 rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel in the recent barrage, according to the IDF, as of 9:30 p.m. local time. Of those, 153 were intercepted by Israeli missile defenses and 107 fell short, landing in Gaza.

    The IDF said fighter jets and helicopters targeted over 40 rocket and mortar shells launchers belonging to Islamic Jihad terrorist across the Gaza Strip, adding that it is continuing to target launchers and additional posts belonging to the militant organization.

    Civilians in Israel have been asked to act according to the special instructions posted on the National Emergency Portal.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials Wednesday downplayed the idea that a ceasefire with Islamic Jihad was imminent, with Netanyahu saying: “The campaign is not over yet.”

    National Security Council chair Tzachi Hanegbi said that rumors of a ceasefire were “premature,” while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant struck a slightly more optimistic note, saying: “I hope we’ll bring it to an end soon, but we’re ready for the option that it will be prolonged.”

    Over half a million Israelis were in or near shelters, the IDF spokesman Hagari said just after 2 p.m. local time (7 a.m. ET) on Wednesday.

    Medics transport a victim to Shifa Hospital following the deadly Israeli airstrikes launched into Gaza on Tuesday.

    International leaders have condemned the hostilities. The United Nations Secretary-General urged all parties to exercise “maximum restraint” over the escalation of violence in Gaza, a statement by Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the Secretary-General, said on Wednesday.

    “The Secretary General condemns the civilian loss of life, including that of children and women, which he views as unacceptable and must stop immediately,” the statement said.

    “Israel must abide by its obligations under international humanitarian law, including the proportional use of force and taking all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of military operations. “

    The statement continued to say the Secretary-General also condemns the “indiscriminate launch” of rockets from Gaza into Israel, adding it “violates international humanitarian law and puts at risk both Palestinian and Israeli civilians.”

    Qatar has been engaged in “intensive and continuous calls” to stop Israel’s “brutal aggression” on the Gaza Strip to avoid “more losses,” the spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Majed Al-Ansari said in a statement on Wednesday.

    Meanwhile, Egyptian state-affiliated XtraNews said there are “intensive efforts” to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, citing Egyptian sources, without clarifying which parties have been communicated with. The news was carried on Egyptian state newspaper’s Al Ahram’s online website.

    Hamas said in a statement that the head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniya, spoke with officials from Egypt, Qatar and the UN.

    Rockets fired from Gaza into Israel streak across the sky on Wednesday.

    The Ministry of Health in Gaza said one person was killed in Wednesday’s attack. It named him as Muhammad Yusuf Saleh Abu Ta’ima, 25, and said he was killed in the bombing east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

    A CNN producer in Gaza reported explosions in Khan Younis, Rafah and northern Gaza.

    Shortly after, he saw at least six rockets fired from Gaza towards Israel. Sirens warning of incoming rockets sounded in the southern Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon and the Lachish area, all near the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said. Sirens later sounded in Tel Aviv, Israel’s main city on the Mediterranean coast, warning of potential incoming rocket fire.

    Several locations in Israel suffered direct hits by rockets from Gaza, authorities said, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. A rocket landed near buildings and caused extensive damage in Ashkelon, pictures distributed by Israel Fire & Rescue Authority showed. A building in Kibbutz Nir Am also was hit, and a rocket landed in the garden of a house in Sderot.

    One of the three Islamic Jihad commanders killed on Tuesday was working on capabilities to launch rockets from the West Bank toward Israel, IDF chief spokesman Hagari said at the time.

    Rockets have never been fired from the West Bank into Israel.

    Islamic Jihad confirmed three of its commanders were killed in the overnight operation along with their wives and children.

    The commanders killed were Jihad Shaker Al-Ghannam, secretary of the Military Council in the al Quds Brigades; Khalil Salah al Bahtini, commander of the Northern Region in the al Quds Brigades; and Ezzedine, one of the leaders of the military wing of the al Quds Brigades in the West Bank, the group said.

    Hagari said the operation had been planned since last Tuesday, when Islamic Jihad fired more than 100 rockets toward Israel following the death of its former spokesman while on hunger strike in an Israeli prison.

    But, the IDF did not have the “operational conditions” until overnight Tuesday.

    The IDF launched a further strike on Tuesday, saying its air force targeted “a terrorist squad” belonging to Islamic Jihad in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

    The Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza said two people were killed and two others injured in that attack east of Khan Younis, although they have yet to identify them, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 15 on Tuesday.

    Gaza is one of the most densely packed places in the world, an isolated coastal enclave of almost two million people crammed into 140 square miles.

    Governed by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, the territory is largely cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade of Gaza’s land, air and sea dating back to 2007. Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border crossing, Rafah.

    Israel has placed heavy restrictions on the freedom of civilian movement and controls the importation of basic goods into the narrow coastal strip.

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  • SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit

    SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit

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    The SpaceX Starship lifts off from the launchpad during a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on April 20, 2023. 

    Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images

    Elon Musk expects SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on its Starship rocket development this year, as the company pushes to build on its first launch earlier this month.

    “My expectation for the next flight would be to reach orbit,” Musk said, speaking during a discussion on Twitter Spaces on Saturday.

    While SpaceX does secondary rounds about twice a year, to give employees and other company shareholders a chance to sell stock, Musk said the company does “not anticipate needing to raise funding” to further bolster the Starship program and its other ventures.

    “To my knowledge, we do not need to raise incremental funding for SpaceX,” Musk said.

    As for the dramatic first fully stacked Starship rocket launch on April 20,” the SpaceX CEO said, “The outcome was roughly in what I expected, and maybe slightly exceeding my expectations.”

    Sign up here to receive weekly editions of CNBC’s Investing in Space newsletter.

    SpaceX has multiple further prototypes in various stages of assembly and aims to launch the next attempt at reaching space with the towering rocket within a few months.

    “The goal of these missions is just information. Like, we don’t have any payload or anything — it’s just to learn as much as possible,” Musk said.

    He put the probability of reaching orbit with a Starship flight this year at “probably” 80%, but espoused that he thinks there is a “100% chance of reaching orbit within 12 months.”

    Launch review

    Starship launches for the first time on its Super Heavy booster from Texas on April 20, 2023.

    SpaceX

    The Starship flight got off the launchpad and achieved several milestones, but Musk gave more details on a variety of the problems the rocket suffered.

    The rocket took off with only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines ignited at the base of the Super Heavy booster. Musk said SpaceX “chose not to start” three engines, as they were not “healthy enough to bring them to full thrust. Starship slid laterally off the launchpad as it climbed into the sky, which Musk said was “because of the engine failures.”

    About 27 seconds into the flight, SpaceX “lost communications” with another engine — an incident that happened “with some kind of energetic event” that removed the heat shield around several other engines. “Things really hit the fan” around 85 seconds into the launch, when SpaceX lost “thrust vector control” — or the ability to steer the rocket.

    Additionally, Musk reported that it took about 40 seconds for the rocket’s AFTS (Autonomous Flight Termination System, which destroys the vehicle in the event it flies off course) to kick in, which SpaceX will need to correct before the next launch attempt.

    The strongest part of the rocket’s performance was how well it held together, including passing through a launch milestone called “Max Q,” or the moment when atmospheric pressure is strongest on the rocket.

    “The vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected, as we can tell from the vehicle actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact,” Musk said.

    Looking forward, Musk said SpaceX has “made so many improvements” to future prototypes. The company needs to ensure “that we don’t lose thrust vector control” with the next launch.

    ‘Rock tornado’

    Members of the public walk through a debris field at the launch pad on April 22, 2023, after the SpaceX Starship lifted off on April 20 for a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.

    Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images

    Back on the ground, Musk said the booster created a “rock tornado” underneath the rocket as it was lifting off. While SpaceX has not seen “evidence that the rock tornado actually damaged engines or heat shields in a material way,” Musk noted that the company “certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the launch pad’s concrete and create a crater in its wake.

    “One of the more plausible explanations is that … we may have compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked,” Musk said.

    A priority for the next flight will be starting the 33 Raptor engines “faster and get off the pad faster,” Musk said. It took about five seconds for SpaceX to start the engines and launch the rocket, which Musk noted “is a really long time to be blasting the pad.” The company aims to cut that time in half for the next attempt.

    A dust cloud grows underneath Starship as the rocket launches on its Super Heavy booster from Texas on April 20, 2023.

    SpaceX

    Photos of the aftermath have shown the violent result of the Super Heavy booster’s engines. A report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the launch flung concrete and metal “thousands of feet away” and created a cloud of dust and pulverized concrete that fell as far as 6.5 miles from the launch site.

    On Saturday, Musk said “the pad damage is actually quite small” and should “be repaired quickly.” He estimated the needed repairs mean SpaceX will be “probably ready to launch in six to eight weeks.” SpaceX will replace some of the propellant tanks near the launchpad. The 500-foot tall tower “is in good shape,” with “no meaningful damage” even though it was struck by “some pretty big chunks of concrete.”

    Musk believes the biggest hurdle to flying again “is probably requalification” of the AFTS that destroyed the rocket, since “it took way too long” to detonate.

    SpaceX is moving forward with a plan to put steel plates, which will be cooled by a water system, underneath the launch tower for the next Starship rocket.

    Environmental activists and researchers have raised alarms about the cloud of pulverized concrete and dust that the launch created. Musk argued that the debris was “not toxic at all,” but said that “we don’t want to do that again.”

    “To the best of our knowledge there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we’re aware of,” Musk said.

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  • Space Force chief says U.S. is facing a ‘new era’ of threats beyond Earth

    Space Force chief says U.S. is facing a ‘new era’ of threats beyond Earth

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    US Space Force General B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, testifies about the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget request during a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 14, 2023. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

    Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

    When Gen. Chance Saltzman took the stage for his keynote at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this week, his message was simple: The U.S. is in a new era of space activity.

    “The threats that we face to our on-orbit capabilities from our strategic competitors has grown substantially,” Saltzman, the U.S. Space Force’s second-ever chief of space operations, said in a CNBC interview after the speech. “The congestion we’re seeing in space with tracked objects and the number of satellite payloads, and just the launches themselves, have grown at an exponential rate.”

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    “I want to make sure that we are thinking about our processes and procedures differently,” he said in an interview for CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast, his first broadcast interview since becoming the service’s highest-ranking military official last November.

    The message comes at a key moment as space rapidly commercializes and a heightened geopolitical backdrop increasingly sees threats extending beyond Earth to a domain for which rules of engagement remain unclear. 

    Follow and listen to CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast, hosted by Morgan Brennan, wherever you get your podcasts.

    Military experts say space is likely to be the front line in any future conflicts – a battlefield that could extend to the private sector and impact civilians in real time. Look no further than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example: Recall the unprecedented cyberattack on the European communications network of U.S. satellite operator Viasat just as Russian soldiers mobilized to cross sovereign boundaries.

    Saltzman said the space-based tactics of adversaries like Russia and China run the gamut, from the communications jamming of the GPS constellation; to lasers and “dazzlers” that interfere with cameras on-orbit to prevent imagery collection; to anti-satellite missiles like the one Russia tested in late 2021.

    “We’re seeing satellites that actually can grab another satellite, grapple with it and pull it out of its operational orbit. These are all capabilities they’re demonstrating on-orbit today, and so the mix of these weapons and the pace with which they’ve been developed are very concerning,” he said.

    It speaks to why, despite a wave of fervent debate, the Space Force was briskly stood up in 2019 as the first new branch of the U.S. armed services in seven decades.

    To respond to evolving threats and secure space assets more quickly, Saltzman is looking to further augment the service’s capabilities to make satellite constellations more resilient and acquire more launch services by tapping into a burgeoning cadre of commercial space players.

    Case in point: the Space Force’s recently announced procurement strategy for more launch services. The new “dual-lane acquisition approach” is intended to create more opportunities for rocket startups to compete for national security launch contracts.

    With business to be awarded next year, the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 is estimated to run into the billions of dollars and is expected to draw bids from the likes of Rocket Lab, Relativity Space and Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin, among others. Phase 2 awards went to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

    An expanding budget helps, too. While still just a fraction of the country’s overall defense budget, the Space Force’s $30 billion request for fiscal 2024 represents a 15% increase from this year’s enacted levels.

    “This is a team sport and none of us is going to be successful going in alone,” Saltzman said.

    “Manifest Space,” hosted by CNBC’s Morgan Brennan, focuses on the billionaires and brains behind the ever-expanding opportunities beyond our atmosphere. Brennan holds conversations with the megamoguls, industry leaders and startups in today’s satellite, space and defense industries. In “Manifest Space,” sit back, relax and prepare for liftoff.

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  • Elon Musk sets low expectations before first SpaceX launch of Starship, most powerful rocket ever built | CNN

    Elon Musk sets low expectations before first SpaceX launch of Starship, most powerful rocket ever built | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Just a few months after NASA introduced the world to the most powerful rocket ever flown to orbit, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is prepared to set off its own creation — which could pack nearly twice the power of anything flown before.

    SpaceX’s vehicle, called Starship, is currently sitting on a launch pad at the company’s facilities on the southern Texas coastline. The company is targeting liftoff at 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) on Monday, although it has the ability to take off anytime between 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) and 9:30 a.m. CT (10:30 a.m. ET).

    “I guess I’d like to just set expectations low,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a Twitter “Spaces” event for his subscribers Sunday evening. “If we get far enough away from launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the pad.”

    He added: “There’s a good chance that it gets postponed since we’re going to be pretty careful about this launch.”

    It will be SpaceX’s first attempt to launch a fully assembled Starship vehicle, building on a years-long testing campaign.

    Musk has talked about Starship — making elaborate presentations about its design and purpose — for half a decade, and he frequently harps on its potential for carrying cargo and humans to Mars. Musk has even said that his sole purpose for founding SpaceX was to develop a vehicle like Starship that could establish a human settlement on Mars.

    Additionally, NASA has already awarded SpaceX contracts and options worth several billions of dollars to use Starship to ferry government astronauts to the surface of the moon under the space agency’s Artemis program.

    The inaugural flight test will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.

    Starship consists of two parts: the Super Heavy booster, a gargantuan rocket that houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which sits atop the booster during launch and is designed to break away after the booster expends its fuel to finish the mission.

    The massive Super Heavy rocket booster will give the first blast of power at liftoff.

    Less than three minutes after takeoff, it’s expected to expend its fuel and separate from the Starship spacecraft, leaving the booster to be discarded in the ocean. The Starship will use its own six engines, blazing for more than six minutes, to propel itself to nearly orbital speeds.

    The vehicle will then complete a partial lap of the planet, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere near Hawaii. It’s expected to splash down off the coast about an hour and a half after liftoff.

    Starship’s ultimate success or failure immensely consequential. Not only is it crucial to SpaceX’s future as a company — it also underpins the United States government’s ambitions for human exploration.

    But it’s not all riding on this inaugural test flight. SpaceX has long established its willingness to embrace mishaps, mistakes and explosions in the name of refining the design of its spacecraft.

    In the lead-up to the first launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, which held the title of most powerful rocket before NASA’s SLS took flight last year, Musk foresaw only a 50-50 chance of success.

    “People (came) from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Musk told CNN at the time.

    The inaugural Falcon Heavy launch was ultimately successful.

    Development of Starship has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Testing began years ago with brief “hop tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company began with brief flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before evolving to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions as the company attempted to land them upright.

    One suborbital flight test in May 2021, however, ended in success.

    SpaceX workers on February 8 make final adjustments to Starship's orbital launch mount, and the booster's matrix of Raptor engines within, ahead of the company's engine test.

    Since then, SpaceX has also been working to get its Super Heavy booster prepared for flight. The massive, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

    Fully stacked, Starship and Super Heavy stand about 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

    SpaceX has been waiting more than a year to get FAA approval for this launch attempt.

    The company, and federal regulators tasked with certifying SpaceX launches won’t pose risks to people or property in the area surrounding the launch site, have faced significant pushback from the local community, including from environmental groups.

    But the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, announced Friday, April 14, that it granted the company’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket out of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas.

    “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.

    During a call with reporters last week, an FAA official, who declined to be named for publication, said that the agency has been overseeing SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the works, even as the company prepares for launch.

    The FAA official said government personnel will be on the ground to ensure SpaceX complies with its license during the test launch.

    SpaceX’s contract with NASA to use Starship for the space agency’s Artemis III moon landing later this decade leaves much of Starship’s development work to SpaceX. A $2.9 billion deal, inked in April 2021, was awarded to SpaceX over several competitors. It was later expanded to include a second lunar landing mission in 2027.

    NASA has been working over the past year to hash out a work flow between the space agency and SpaceX. It’s a dynamic the two organization have had to iron out in previous SpaceX-NASA projects, including an ongoing partnership that uses SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

    A moon mission, however, involves more powerful and complex hardware.

    NASA is not, however, involved in planning the flight profile for this test flight or directing SpaceX on what to do, according to Lisa Hammond, NASA’s associate program manager of the Human Landing System at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    Hammond did not share a specific checklist of tests or flights that NASA hopes to see before Starship is entrusted with a moon landing mission.

    “I would not put it with a number,” she said, adding that the Artemis II mission, slated for next year, will see humans fly atop the SLS rocket after only one uncrewed test flight.

    “The confidence comes in the design, the confidence comes in the safety of the vehicle for the crew,” Hammond said.

    SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell previously said she hopes the company will conduct more than 100 orbital test flights of Starship before putting humans on board, as the company will need to do in order to help NASA carry out its moon landing with the Artemis III mission, slated for 2025.

    “I think that would be a great goal,” Shotwell said Wednesday, when asked whether that target was still feasible. “I don’t think we will do 100 flights of Starship next year, but maybe (in) 2025 we will do 100 flights.”

    NASA’s current timeline targets 2025 for the first lunar landing mission, which will see astronauts transfer from their Orion capsule, which will launch atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, and into a Starship spacecraft already in lunar orbit. It will be the Starship vehicle that ferries the crew down to the lunar surface.

    It’s not clear, however, if 2025 is feasible. NASA’s inspector general has already suggested it is not. Delays, according to comments from the inspector general in March 2022, could revolve around Starship.

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  • Virgin Orbit was a promising company that could never find a working business model

    Virgin Orbit was a promising company that could never find a working business model

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    Virgin Orbit started as a program of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2012, before being spun off into a separate company five years later.

    In the private space race, Virgin Orbit contended its method of launching its rockets — known as “air launch” — was more flexible than traditional launch pads used by competitors like Rocket Lab, Astra and SpaceX.

    The company employed a modified Boeing 747 jet that it called “Cosmic Girl” to carry its LauncherOne rocket to about 35,000 feet of altitude before dropping it.

    From there, the rocket would fire its engines and fly off into space.

    “By launching from an aircraft, Virgin could take off from almost any airport around the world and turn these airports into space ports,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Analytics.

    Henry noted that the Virgin Orbit’s last launch was from the United Kingdom, and that the company was in discussions to launch in Japan and Brazil.

    “They were offering to different countries the ability to, in a sense, have a sovereign launch capability, because the rocket would take off from their home soil,” Henry said.

    But Virgin Orbit was dogged by delays. The company originally hoped to launch its debut mission in 2018, but didn’t get off the ground until May of 2020. The demonstration mission failed shortly after the rocket was released. In total, the company launched six missions, four of which were successful and two of which failed, including the last one in January.

    Virgin Orbit’s biggest deal was a 39-launch contract signed with satellite maker OneWeb in 2015. OneWeb ultimately pulled out of the deal without conducting a single launch.

    “A challenge for the company, and for any launch company, is having an anchor customer, somebody who you can depend on to routinely buy a decent number of launches,” Henry said. “Virgin Orbit did not have an anchor customer.”

    In late March, Virgin Orbit said it was laying off the majority of its workforce and ceasing operations “for the foreseeable future” after failing to secure a funding lifeline. Days later, the company filed for bankruptcy.

    Watch the video to find out more about what led to Virgin Orbit’s collapse. 

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  • SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, receives government approval for launch | CNN

    SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, receives government approval for launch | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    SpaceX has cleared the final regulatory hurdle standing before the inaugural launch of its Starship rocket — the most powerful rocket ever constructed.

    The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, announced Friday that it granted the company’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket out of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas. The vehicle, which has already undergone preflight ground testing, is poised to take off as soon as Monday.

    “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.

    Earlier Friday, the FAA issued an air traffic restriction for the area surrounding the launch. The Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, orders planes and other air traffic to steer clear of the launch area — which lies due East of Brownsville, Texas — on Monday between 7 a.m. and 10:05 a.m. CT (8 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. ET).

    This will be SpaceX’s first attempt to put Starship into orbit, building on a yearslong testing campaign to work out the design of the rocket.

    SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked about Starship for about a decade, making elaborate presentations about its design and describing it as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX’s founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time.

    Additionally, NASA has already awarded SpaceX contracts and options — worth more than $3 billion — to use Starship to ferry government astronauts to the surface of the moon under the space agency’s Artemis program.

    The inaugural flight test will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will reach orbital speeds and travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.

    Starship consists of two parts: the Super Heavy booster, a gargantuan rocket that houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which sits atop the booster during launch and is designed to break away after the booster expends its fuel to finish the mission.

    On this flight, the rocket booster will be discarded into the ocean shortly after liftoff. In future flights, however, SpaceX plans to recover the vehicle by guiding it to an upright landing back at the launch site. The Starship spacecraft will complete nearly one full lap of the planet, ending its flight with a splashdown off Hawaii.

    Development of Starship has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Testing began years ago with brief “hop tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company began with brief flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before evolving to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions as the company attempted to land them upright.

    One suborbital flight test in May 2021, however, ended in success.

    SpaceX workers on February 8 make final adjustments to Starship's orbital launch mount, and the booster's matrix of Raptor engines within, ahead of the company's engine test.

    Since then, SpaceX has also been working to get its Super Heavy booster prepared for flight. The massive, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

    Fully stacked, Starship and Super Heavy stand about 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

    SpaceX has been waiting more than a year to get FAA approval for an orbital launch attempt.

    The company, and federal regulators tasked with certifying SpaceX launches won’t pose risks to people or property in the area surrounding the launch site, have faced significant pushback from the local community, including from environmental groups.

    In June, the FAA granted SpaceX one key approval for launching Starship, though it laid out a list of “mitigating actions” the company would need to take before the first launch.

    During a call with reporters this week, an FAA official, who declined to be named for publication, said that the agency has been overseeing SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the works, even as the launch license is issued.

    The FAA official said government personnel will be on the ground to ensure SpaceX complies with its license during the test launch.

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  • SpaceX cleared by FAA to launch first orbital Starship flight

    SpaceX cleared by FAA to launch first orbital Starship flight

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    A Starship prototype is seen stacked on top of a Super Heavy booster at the company’s launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.

    SpaceX

    The Federal Aviation Administration issued a Starship launch license to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a crucial final regulatory step that clears the company to attempt an orbital launch of its towering rocket for the first time.

    “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements. The license is valid for five years,” FAA said in a statement.

    SpaceX, with the FAA license now in hand, aims to launch Starship as soon as Monday from its private facility in Texas along the Gulf Coast.

    “SpaceX is targeting as soon as Monday, April 17 for the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas. The 150-minute test window will open at 7:00 a.m. CT,” SpaceX said in a statement.

    Sign up here to receive weekly editions of CNBC’s Investing in Space newsletter.

    The company recently stacked Starship prototype 24 on Super Heavy booster prototype 7 in preparation for the launch. Together they stand nearly 400 feet high. SpaceX in February completed a test firing of the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 Raptor engines at its base, in one of the final technical steps toward the launch.

    SpaceX for several years has been building up to the first orbital flight test of its Starship rocket, with company leadership stressing the experimental nature of the launch. While SpaceX had hoped to conduct the first orbital Starship launch as early as summer 2021, delays in progress and regulatory approval have pushed back that timeline.

    The rocket is set to lift off from SpaceX’s development facility near Brownsville, Texas, before heading east across the Gulf of Mexico, according to 2021 filings that revealed the flight plan. The ultimate goal of the mission is to reach orbit, with the rocket aiming to travel most of the way around the Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.

    Starship is designed to carry cargo and people beyond Earth and is critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a nearly $3 billion contract from the space agency in 2021 to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander.

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  • Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

    Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

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    Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    Dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, the Israeli military said, in a major escalation that comes amid regional tensions over Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

    Some 34 rockets were launched from Lebanese territory into Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, with the majority intercepted but six landing in Israel.

    It was the largest such attack since a 2006 war between the two countries left around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis dead.

    Videos posted on social media showed rockets streaking through the skies over northern Israel, and the sounds of explosions in the distance.

    The country closed its northern airspace in the wake of the barrage. No deaths were reported, and it is not yet known which group in Lebanon launched the rockets.

    Israel said it would “decide on the place and time” of its response, an IDF defense official who asked not to be named told CNN. An Israeli military spokesman said they believed a Palestinian militant group was behind the attack, not the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

    The Lebanese army confirmed a number of a rockets were launched from the country’s south, but did not detail who had fired them. It said on Twitter that a unit had found “missile launchers and a number of rockets intended for launch” in the vicinity of the Lebanese towns of Zibqin and Qlaileh, and was “currently working to dismantle them.”

    Hezbollah has not yet commented on the incident. It comes a day after Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, arrived in Beirut for meetings with Hezbollah officials.

    Tensions are sky-high in the region after Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on two separate occasions Wednesday, as Palestinian worshipers offered prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.

    Footage from inside the mosque showed Israeli officers beating people with their batons and rifle-butts, then arresting hundreds of Palestinians. Israeli police said they entered the mosque after “hundreds of rioters” tried to barricade themselves inside.

    The incident, which was met with widespread condemnation from the Arab and Muslim world, sparked retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.

    Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told CNN “we are at a very dangerous moment.”

    “What we see unfolding on the Lebanese border is obviously a consequence, a reaction to what we saw happening in al-Aqsa [mosque].” Safadi said.

    Trails from rockets can be seen over the skies of northern Israel in this video screengrab, as authorities raised concerns over increased tensions between Israel and Lebanon.

    Lebanon and Israel are considered enemy states, but a truce between them has largely held since the 2006 war.

    There have been several small-scale rocket attacks from Lebanon in recent years that have prompted retaliatory strikes from Israel. Few casualties were reported in those incidents, with the largest death toll in an exchange of fire in 2015 that left two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper dead. Palestinian factions in Lebanon were believed to be behind those rocket attacks.

    The 2006 conflict was the biggest flare-up between Lebanon and Israel since 1982. Around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis died in an exchange of fire that involved a nationwide Israeli aerial assault, and a naval and aerial blockade. Hezbollah fired many rounds of rockets reaching deep into Israeli territory during the conflict.

    The Israeli military pinned the blame for the rockets on either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht saying the IDF assumed that “Hezbollah knew about it, and Lebanon also has responsibility.”

    But he emphasized several times that the IDF viewed the attack as having come from a Palestinian source, and that it did not represent a widening of the conflict to actors outside of the direct Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising hopes that tensions could be ratcheted down after the incident.

    The Lebanese foreign ministry also said it was ready to cooperate with the United Nations and take steps to “restore calm and stability” in the south, while calling on “the international community to put pressure on Israel to stop escalation,” the state-owned National News Agency reported.

    The IDF has been concerned for some time about an escalation on the Lebanese border, and hosted a high-level seminar in the spring of 2022 to brief journalists and policy makers about it.

    The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday’s escalation of violence between Lebanon and Israel was “extremely serious.”

    UNIFIL also said it has directed its personnel stationed at the border between the two countries to move to air raid shelters, as a “common practice.”

    The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the continuing violence and we urge all sides to avoid further escalation.”

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