Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, during Ramadan prayers early Wednesday, arresting hundreds of Palestinians and sparking retaliatory rocket fire from militants in Gaza.
Footage shared on social media showed Israeli officers striking screaming people with batons inside the darkened building. Eyewitnesses told CNN that police had smashed doors and windows to enter the mosque and deployed stun grenades and rubber bullets once inside. Video shared by Israeli police show forces holding riot shields up as fireworks were launched back at them, ricocheting off the walls.
Israeli police said in a statement that its forces entered al-Aqsa after “hundreds of rioters and mosque desecrators (had) barricaded themselves” inside.
“When the police entered, stones were thrown at them, and fireworks were fired from inside the mosque by a large group of agitators,” according to the statement.
The Palestinian Red Crescent in Jerusalem said at least 12 people were injured during clashes in and around the mosque, and at least three of the injured were transferred to hospital, some with injuries from rubber bullets.
The Red Crescent added that at one point its ambulances were targeted by police and were prevented from reaching the injured.
The incident drew condemnation from across the Arab and Muslim world. Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the Israeli police actions “in the strongest terms,” and called on Israel to immediately remove its forces from the mosque. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the “storming” of the mosque by police, saying it had caused “numerous injuries among worshipers and devotees” and was “in violation of all international laws and customs.”
Police said they arrested and removed more than 350 people in the mosque, and that one Israeli police officer was wounded in the leg by stones.
Images shared on social media showed dozens of detained people lying facedown on the floor of the mosque with their legs and arms bound behind their backs, and others with their hands tied being led into a vehicle.
Al-Aqsa has seen hundreds of thousands of worshipers offer prayers during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this year. Jews are set to celebrate Passover on Wednesday evening.
Over the last two weeks, there have been calls by Jewish extremist groups to slaughter goats at the mosque compound as part of an ancient Passover holiday ritual that is no longer practiced by most Jews. A greater number of Muslim worshipers stayed in the mosque after calls came to prevent those attempts.
Last week, a Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli police at the entrance of the compound. Palestinian and Israeli sources disputed the circumstances that led to the killing of 26-year-old Muhammad Al-Osaibi.
The mosque compound, frequently a flashpoint in tensions, is home to one of Islam’s most revered sites but also the holiest site in Judaism, known as the Temple Mount.
The compound reopened for prayers shortly after.
In a statement Wednesday, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh condemned the actions of the Israeli police, saying: “What is happening in Jerusalem is a major crime against worshipers.”
“Israel does not want to learn from history, that al-Aqsa is for the Palestinians and for all Arabs and Muslims, and that storming it sparked a revolution against the occupation,” Shtayyeh added.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Wednesday that nine rockets were fired from Gaza Strip toward Israel after the incident in Jerusalem.
“Following the previous report regarding the sirens which sounded in Sderot, five rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory,” said the IDF. “Four of them were intercepted by the aerial defense array.”
The IDF also said four additional rockets launched from Gaza toward Israel but landed in open space.
“Following the additional sirens that sounded in the surroundings of the Gaza Strip, four rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip that landed in open areas. No interceptors were launched according to protocol,” the IDF added.
Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, said in a statement that “the current Israeli occupation’s crimes at the al-Aqsa mosque are unprecedented violations that will not pass.”
Later on Wednesday, the Israeli military said its fighter jets had struck weapons manufacturing and storage sites in the Gaza Strip belonging to Hamas.
“This strike was carried out in response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory earlier,” it said in a statement.
Last year was the deadliest for both Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and for Israelis in nearly two decades, CNN analysis of official statistics on both sides showed.
And this year has seen a violent beginning, too. At least 90 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics. In addition to suspected militants being targeted by Israeli forces, the dead include Palestinians killing, wounding or attempting to kill Israeli civilians, people clashing with Israeli security and bystanders, CNN records show.
In the same period, at least 15 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, CNN records show – 14 civilians and a police officer who was hit by friendly fire after being stabbed by a Palestinian teenager while inspecting bus passengers.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, center, stands with the crew of the Artemis II mission, from left: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch.
NASA TV
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday announced the four astronauts who will fly on the agency’s upcoming mission around the moon, currently scheduled for late 2024.
Known as the Artemis II mission, the spaceflight will carry three Americans and one Canadian: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch from NASA, and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
Wiseman is the mission’s commander and Glover is the pilot, while Hansen and Koch are mission specialists.
Artemis II follows the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which completed a nearly month-long journey around the moon late last year. The Artemis program represents a series of missions with escalating goals. The third – tentatively scheduled for 2025 – is expected to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era.
The Artemis II mission will launch on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, with the Orion capsule carrying the astronauts on a 10-day journey to the moon and back. While Artemis II won’t land on the moon, it will make a near pass above the surface and demonstrate the Orion spacecraft’s ability to transport people safely.
Four astronauts — including three Americans and one Canadian — will be tapped by NASA to complete a generation-defining mission to the moon’s orbit, returning humans to deeper into the solar system than has been reached in five decades.
On Monday, the public will finally learn the crew members’ names.
Scheduled to launch in 2024, Artemis II will be the program’s first crewed mission to orbit the moon, flying farther into space than any humans since the Apollo program. It will pave the way for the Artemis III crew to walk on the moon in 2025, all aboard the world’s most powerful rocket and at a price tag that by then will approach $100 billion.
Following months of closed-door decision making, NASA officials plan to unveil the names of the crew members in a ceremony scheduled for Monday at 11 am ET.
Though officials have remained tight-lipped about their choices, CNN previously spoke with nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts to pull back the curtain on the secretive selection process.
Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009, is at the top of the list, according to CNN’s prior reporting.
Wiseman served as chief of the astronaut office until November 2022. While the chief is not permitted to fly while holding the post, they are able to wrangle the best flight assignments upon stepping down, an “acknowledged perk” of the job, according to former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.
Before stepping down as astronaut chief, Wiseman was also responsible for the decision to broaden the pool of astronauts eligible to fly in order to include himself. While NASA had initially deemed 18 astronauts to be the “Artemis Team” and eligible to fly on moon missions, Wiseman expanded the group of candidates to all 41 active NASA astronauts.
People familiar with the process also told CNN that along with Wiseman, there are a handful of other candidates atop the list:
Randy Bresnik, 55, is also a decorated naval aviator and test pilot who flew combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has flown two missions to the International Space Station: one on the Space Shuttle, another on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Bresnik is often mentioned as a top contender for Artemis because, since 2018, he has overseen the astronaut office’s development and testing of all rockets and spacecraft that will be used in the Artemis missions.
Anne McClain, 43, is a decorated army pilot and West Point graduate who flew more than 200 combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and went on to graduate from the US Naval Test Pilot School in 2013, the same year she was selected to be a NASA astronaut. After launching on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2018, she spent more than 200 days at the International Space Station and served as the lead of two spacewalks.
Stephanie Wilson is the most senior astronaut on this list. The 56-year-old joined NASA’s 1996 astronaut class, and she served as a mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights, including the first flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.
Christina Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks. She holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for multiple NASA mission. She’s also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay that could well prepare her for the intensity of a moon mission.
Jessica Meir is 45-year-old biologist with a doctorate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She was a member of a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission in 2002, which involved spending days in an underwater research facility, and, in 2016, completed a two-week caving mission in Italy.
Rounding out the Artemis II crew will be one astronaut from Canada, terms that were cemented in a 2020 treaty between the two countries.
The Canadian Space Agency’s currently has a cadre of just four astronauts, but among them, Jeremy Hansen has generated the most buzz, according to CNN’s reporting. Hansen was selected to be an astronaut almost 14 years ago, but he’s still waiting for his first flight assignment. The 47-year-old fighter pilot recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.
NASA has also previously committed to selecting a crew with racial, gender and professional diversity.
Those criteria have not historically been the case for high-profile missions. Going back to the Gemini era, astronauts selected for inaugural crewed missions have been only White and male, and typically come from a background as a military test pilot — a profile notably characterized in the 1979 book “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe.
That has held true through NASA’s most recent inaugural crewed flight, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station in 2020, which included former military test pilots Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.
And it may hold mostly true for the Artemis II mission as well: Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named.
However, if Wiseman, a White man, is selected, that means the other spots will almost certainly need to go to at least one woman and at least one person of color.
The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million-mile voyage to lap the moon that concluded in December. The space agency deemed that mission a success and is still working to review all the data collected.
If all goes to plan, Artemis II will take off around November 2024. The crew members, strapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will launch atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The journey is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew out beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, though the exact distance is yet to be determined.
The “exact distance beyond the Moon will depend on the day of liftoff and the relative distance of the Moon from the Earth at the time of the mission,” NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton said via email.
After circling the moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA has vowed will put the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface. It will also mark the first time humans have touched down on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
The Artemis III mission is expected to take off later this decade. But much of the technology the mission will require, including spacesuits for walking on the moon and a lunar lander to ferry the astronauts to the moon’s surface, is still in development.
NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, though the space agency’s inspector general has already said delays will likely push the mission to 2026 or later.
Virgin Orbit crew poses at the opening bell ceremony as a 70 foot model rocket with satellites is placed in front of the NASDAQ in Times Square of New York City, United States on January 7, 2022.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Not too long ago, Virgin Orbit was in rarified air among U.S. rocket builders, and executives were in New York celebrating its public stock debut.
The scene was true to the marketing pizazz that has helped Sir Richard Branson build his Virgin empire of companies, showcasing with a rocket model in the middle of Times Square.
The deal, facilitated by a so-called blank check company, gave Virgin Orbit a valuation of nearly $4 billion. But that moment in December 2021 – when the craze surrounding public offerings centered on special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, was dying out – previewed the pain to come.
Now, Virgin Orbit is on the brink of bankruptcy. The company on Thursday halted operations and laid off nearly all of its staff. Its stock was trading around 20 cents Friday, leaving it with a market value of about $74 million.
When Virgin Orbit closed its SPAC deal, it raised less than half of the nearly $500 million expected due to high shareholder redemptions, shortening its runway. With the broader markets turning against riskier yet-unprofitable assets like many new space stocks, Virgin Orbit shares began a steady slide, further limiting its ability to raise substantial outside investment.
Branson, Virgin Orbit’s largest stakeholder, was unwilling to fund the company further, as CNBC previously reported. Instead, he began hedging against his 75% equity stake through a series of debt rounds. That debt gives the flashy British billionaire first priority of Virgin Orbit assets in the event of the now-impending bankruptcy.
While Virgin Orbit touted a flexible and alternative approach to launch small satellites, the company was unable to reach the rate of launches necessary to generate the revenue it sorely needed.
Virgin Orbit’s technical staff acquitted themselves well over the company’s brief existence, but were ultimately undone in by its leaders’ financial mismanagement. It’s a story too often told in the history of the space industry: Exciting, or even innovative, technologies do not necessarily equal great businesses.
It became one of a few U.S. rocket companies to successfully reach orbit with a privately developed launch vehicle. It launched six missions since 2020 — with four successes and two failures — through an ambitious and technically difficult process known as “air launch,” with a system that uses a modified 747 jet to drop a rocket mid-flight and send small satellites into space.
But Virgin Orbit had dug a nearly $1 billion hole, flying missions just twice a year while its payroll expenses climbed. The company’s leadership was aware of the deteriorating situation and lack of progress, and even considered changes last summer to make the business more lean. But no clear or dramatic plan came to fruition – leading to Thursday’s fall.
This story collects insights from CNBC’s discussions with company insiders and industry investors over the past several weeks, as well as from regulatory disclosures, to explain where things went wrong for Virgin Orbit. Those people asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss internal or competitive matters.
A Virgin Orbit spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
The company’s 747 jet “Cosmic Girl” releases a LauncherOne rocket in mid-air for the first time during a drop test in July 2019.
Greg Robinson / Virgin Orbit
Virgin Orbit was spun-off from Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, in 2017, after a team within the latter sister company saw potential in using an aircraft as a platform to launch satellites. While “air launching” satellites was not a novel idea to Virgin Orbit, the company aimed to surpass the air-launched Pegasus rocket – developed by Orbital Sciences, which is now owned by Northrop Grumman –for a fraction of the cost per mission.
Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Virgin Orbit flew most of its missions out of the Mojave Air and Space Port. The exception to that was its most recent launch, which took off from Spaceport Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Virgin Orbit had been working with other governments to provide launches by flying out of airports around the world, signing agreements with Japan, Brazil, Australia and the island of Guam.
The advertised flexibility and potential of Virgin Orbit’s approach attracted quite a bit of attention from leaders in the U.S. national security community. Following meetings with top Pentagon brass in 2019, Branson proclaimed that Virgin Orbit is “about the only company in the world that could replace [satellites] in 24 hours” during a military conflict.
At the time, the Air Force’s acquisition lead, Will Roper, said he was “very excited about small launch” after meeting with Branson. He said the U.S. military had “huge money to invest” in buying rocket launches.
The company had hoped to launch its debut mission as early as 2018, but that goal kept moving every six months or so. Eventually, Virgin Orbit launched its first mission in May 2020, which failed shortly after the rocket was released from the jet. It got to orbit successfully for the first time in January 2021.
Given the company’s burn rate near $50 million a quarter, Virgin Orbit was targeting profitability once it got beyond a launch rate, or cadence, of a dozen missions per year. When it went public, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart told CNBC that the company was aiming to launch seven rockets in 2022, to build on that momentum.
At the same time, Virgin Orbit was already in a deep financial hole – with a total deficit of $821 million at the end of 2021, due to steady losses since its inception. While Virgin Orbit had aimed to launch seven missions last year, that number was steadily guided down quarter after quarter, closing out 2022 with just two completed lunches – the same as the year before.
Some people within the company who had been critical of Virgin Orbit’s execution pointed to several executives’ backgrounds at Boeing, which has had its share of space-related snags over the years.
Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart had spent 34 years at Boeing, where he was previously the vice president of its government space systems. COO Tony Gingiss joined Virgin Orbit from satellite broadband company OneWeb, but before that had spent 14 years in Boeing’s satellite division. And Chief Strategy Officer Jim Simpson had also spent more than eight years in Boeing’s satellite division before joining Virgin Orbit.
As one person emphasized, the company launched the same amount of rockets in a year with a staff of 500 as it did with a workforce of over 750 people. Others complained of a lack of cross-department coordination, with projects and spending done in silo of each other – leading to a disconnect in schedules.
Two people mentioned wastefulness in ordering materials. For example: The company would buy enough expensive items with limited shelf-life to build a dozen or more rockets, but then only build two, meaning it would have to throw away millions of dollars’ worth of raw materials away.
When Virgin Orbit announced an employee furlough March 15, people familiar with the situation said the company had about half a dozen rockets in various states of production in its Long Beach factory.
As the lack of a financial lifeline made the situation increasingly more desperate, multiple Virgin Orbit employees voiced frustration with how Hart communicated the company’s position – and even more so with the lack of clarity after the furlough.
The day of the initial pause in operations, people described company leadership running around frantically while many employees stood around waiting for word on what was happening. One person emphasized the tumultuous and sudden furlough happened because executives tried to keep the company alive as long as possible. Several employees expressed disappointment with Hart holding the March 15 all-hands meeting virtually, speaking from his office rather than face-to-face, and not taking any questions after announcing the pause in operations.
That frustration continued after the pause, with employees confused by the lack of specifics about which investors were speaking to Virgin Orbit leadership. Thursday’s update that a deal fell through came as little surprise to a workforce that was largely in limbo. Many were already hunting for new jobs.
The rocket for the company’s second demonstration mission undergoing final assembly at its factory in Long Beach, California.
Virgin Orbit
A pivot in Virgin Orbit’s strategy became apparent and necessary shortly after it went public.
Virgin Orbit aimed to raise $483 million through its SPAC process, but significant redemptions meant it raised less than half of that, bringing in $228 million in gross proceeds. The funds it did raise came from the minority of SPAC shareholders who stuck around, as well as private investments from Virgin Group, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Boeing, and AE Industrial Partners.
Unlike its sister company Virgin Galactic, which built its cash reserves to more than $1 billion through stock and debt sales after going public in October 2019, Virgin Orbit did not build its cash coffers. And that meant leadership should have buckled down and made changes to run the company in a more lean way, one person emphasized, to rebuild momentum.
And then Virgin Orbit’s apparent strength in the national security sector began to falter. Despite half of its missions flying Space Force satellites, the company lost out to competitor Firefly Aerospace for a launch contract under the “Tactically Responsive Space” program. Awarded in October, the mission seemed right up Virgin Orbit’s alley, especially since the prior mission under that Space Force program flew on the similarly air-launched Pegasus rocket.
As the financial situation worsened, a few bankers who spoke to CNBC wondered why the search for a deal was dragging on. According to one banker, Virgin Orbit could raise anywhere from $10 million to $15 million quickly to stop-gap the situation while it found a larger buyer. Another investor estimated that Virgin Orbit had about $270 million in net tangible assets, further sweetening the potential for a wholesale deal even despite its plunging market value.
A white knight seemed to appear last week in the form of Matthew Brown, who discussed making an 11th-hour deal with Virgin Orbit, to reportedly inject as much as $200 million into the company. However, within days, the talks fell apart. The company continued to discussions with another, unnamed investor this past week.
But in the words of Hart on Thursday, Virgin Orbit was “not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company.”
And while the 675 employees laid off Thursday likely have strong job prospects, Virgin Orbit seems now destined for bankruptcy.
Virgin Orbit flew its modified Boeing 747 airplane “Cosmic Girl” with the company’s LauncherOne rocket under its wing for the first time on November 18, 2018.
Virgin Orbit
Virgin Orbit is returning a “small” team to work on Thursday, according to a company-wide email obtained by CNBC, as it aims to prepare for its next rocket launch even as its future remains in doubt.
“Any viable path for our operations will require us to successfully launch,” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart wrote in the email to employees.
related investing news
Hart described this as a “first step” in an “incremental resumption of operations,” while Virgin Orbit is extending the unpaid furlough and pause in operations for the rest of than more than 750 person company “through at least Monday.”
“We’ve made some important progress this week, but there is still work to be done,” Hart wrote.
The modified 737 aircraft “Cosmic Girl” lifts off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California carrying a LauncherOne rocket on June 30, 2021.
Virgin Orbit
A Virgin Orbit spokesperson confirmed in a statement to CNBC that the company is returning a subset of its employees on Thursday, but declined to specify how many are resuming work. Hart’s email said the staff returning will “focus on critical areas for our next mission,” including work on testing and installing the rocket’s engines. Reuters first reported the partial work resumption.
Virgin Orbit developed a system that uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft’s wing mid-flight. But the company’s last mission suffered a mid-flight failure, with an issue during the launch causing the rocket to not reach orbit and crash into the ocean.
In an update last week, Virgin Orbit said its internal investigation is nearly complete, with the rocket for its next launch featuring modifications and “in final stages of integration and test.”
Hart in his email wrote that Virgin Orbit is “facing uncertainty and I know that is very uncomfortable,” noting that employees not returning to work yet can continue to use vacation or sick days to help cover the unpaid time.
Rolls-Royce has been working on a Micro-Reactor program “to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon.”
Lorenzo Di Cola | Nurphoto | Getty Images
LONDON — The UK Space Agency said Friday it would back research by Rolls-Royce looking at the use of nuclear power on the moon.
In a statement, the government agency said researchers from Rolls-Royce had been working on a Micro-Reactor program “to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon.”
The UKSA will now provide £2.9 million (around $3.52 million) of funding for the project, which it said would “deliver an initial demonstration of a UK lunar modular nuclear reactor.”
The new money builds upon £249,000 provided by the UKSA to fund a study in 2022.
“All space missions depend on a power source, to support systems for communications, life-support and science experiments,” it said.
“Nuclear power has the potential to dramatically increase the duration of future Lunar missions and their scientific value.”
Read more about energy from CNBC Pro
Rolls-Royce is set to work with a range of organizations on the project, including the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Nuclear AMRC, and the University of Oxford.
“Developing space nuclear power offers a unique chance to support innovative technologies and grow our nuclear, science and space engineering skills base,” Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said.
Bate added that Rolls-Royce’s research “could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human presence on the Moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment.”
According to the UKSA, Rolls-Royce — not to be confused with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, which is owned by BMW — is aiming “to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.”
The news out of the U.K. comes at a time when NASA is pushing ahead with its Artemis program, which is focused on creating what it calls a “sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars.”
NASA is working with international and commercial partners on Artemis. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.
The four astronauts whomake up the Crew-5 team aboard the International Space Station began their return trip home Saturday morning, marking the end of a five-month stay in space.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule disembarked from the space station at 2:20 am ET, beginning the final leg of the astronauts’ journey. The spacecraft is set to splash downoff Florida at around 9:02 p.m. ET Saturday.
Rescue ships will be awaiting the team’s arrival, ready to haul the capsule out of the ocean and allow the crew to disembark, giving the astronauts their first breath of fresh air in nearly 160 days. Shortly afterward, the crew will depart for NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The four crew members — NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, astronaut Koichi Wakata of JAXA, or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — launched to the space station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule this past October. They’ve spent the past few months carrying out research experiments and keeping up with maintenance of the two-decade-old orbiting laboratory.
Mann, a registered member of the Wailacki tribe of the Round Valley reservation, became the first Native American woman to travel intoorbit. Like the other astronauts, she devoted timeon her journey to public outreach, some of which focused on inspiring Indigenouschildren. During one outreach event in November 2022, Mann showed off adream catcher — a traditional totem for Native Americans meant to ward off bad dreams — that she took with her to the space station.
“I am very proud to represent Native Americans and my heritage,” Mann told reporters before launch. “I think it’s important to celebrate our diversity and also realize how important it is when we collaborate and unite, the incredible accomplishments that we can have.”
Kikina’s participation in this flight came as part of a ride-sharing agreement by NASA and Roscosmos in July 2022. Despite geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia as the war in Ukraine has escalated, NASA has repeatedly said its partnership with Roscosmos is vital to continuing the space station’s operations and the valuable scientific research carried out on board.
The journey marked the first trip to space for Mann, Cassada and Kikina.
Wakata previously flew on NASA’s space shuttle flightsand Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. This trip was the Japanese astronaut’s fifth spaceflight mission.
The nine Aeon engines of the Terran 1 rocket ignite briefly before shutting down during a launch attempt on Mar. 11, 2023.
Relativity Space
3D-printing specialist Relativity Space postponed its debut launch on Saturday, stopping one of its attempts in the final second of the countdown after igniting the rocket’s engines.
Relativity’s system triggered a launch abort with just 0.5 seconds remaining before liftoff, which shut down the rocket’s engines after briefly firing up.
The company’s Terran 1 rocket is attempting from LC-16, a launchpad at the U.S. Space Force’s facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission is called “Good Luck, Have Fun,” and aims to successfully reach orbit and demonstrate the viability of the company’s ambitious manufacturing approach.
The company’s Terran 1 rocket stands on its launchpad at LC-16 in Cape Canaveral, Florida during a launch attempt on Mar. 11, 2023.
John Kraus / Relativity Space
Relativity made multiple attempts to launch during a three hour window – and worked through a variety of obstacles, including estimated high winds the upper atmosphere and a boat that came too close to the launch range – before calling a “scrub” for the attempt, meaning it is postponed to a later day.
“Thanks for playing,” Relativity’s launch director Clay Walker said on the company’s webcast.
Saturday marked the second day that Relativity has attempted to debut Terran 1. On Wednesday, a ground equipment valve malfunctioned, which affected the temperature of the propellant that was being pumped into the rocket, but the company said before Saturday’s attempts that it has since fixed the valve issue.
Relativity said the rocket looked “healthy” after an initial review of data. In a series of tweets, the company said that one abort was caused by the rocket’s automatic software, which was then updated, and another abort was due to slightly low fuel pressure in its upper stage.
While many space companies utilize 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, Relativity has effectively gone all-in on the approach. The company believes its approach will make building orbital-class rockets much faster than traditional methods, requiring thousands less parts and enabling changes to be made via software. The Long Beach, California-based venture aims to create rockets from raw materials in as little as 60 days.
Terran 1 stands 110 feet high, with nine engines powering the lower first stage, and one engine powering the upper second stage. Its Aeon engines are 3D-printed, with the rocket using liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas as its two fuel types. The company says that 85% of this first Terran 1 rocket was 3D-printed.
The company’s Terran 1 rocket stands on its launchpad at LC-16 in Cape Canaveral, Florida ahead of the inaugural launch attempt.
Trevor Mahlmann / Relativity Space
Relativity prices Terran 1 at $12 million per launch. It’s designed to carry about 1,250 kilograms to low Earth orbit. That puts Terran 1 in the “medium lift” section of the U.S. launch market, between Rocket Lab’s Electron and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in both price and capability.
Wednesday’s debut for Terran 1 is not carrying a payload or satellite inside the rocket. The company emphasized the launch represents a prototype.
In a series of tweets before the mission, Ellis shared his expectations for the mission: He noted that reaching a milestone of maximum aerodynamic pressure about 80 seconds after liftoff would be a “key inflection” point for proving the company’s technology.
BlackSky at New York Stock Exchange, September 13, 2021.
Source: NYSE
Satellite imagery specialist BlackSky announced fourth-quarter results on Tuesday that show the company further trimming losses and securing an additional military contract.
“2022 was a foundational year for BlackSky,” CEO Brian O’Toole said in a statement, adding that “this high level of execution has put us on a path to achieving positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 of 2023.”
The company has 14 operational satellites in orbit, with plans to launch two more on a Rocket Lab mission this month.
BlackSky posted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $4.6 million for the fourth quarter, down 68% from the same period a year earlier and lower than the $6.5 million loss it reported for the third quarter. Revenue rose 69% year over year to $19.4 million.
The company had $75 million in cash on hand at the end of the fourth quarter and announced plans to raise more funds through a sale of 16.4 million shares of common stock to “a syndicate of new and existing institutional investors.” BlackSky expects the private placement to close on Wednesday, generating about $29.5 million in gross proceeds.
Shares of BlackSky rose about 3% in premarket trading Tuesday from its previous close of $1.93. The stock is up nearly 25% this year, but remains well below its public debut in September 2021 of nearly $11 a share.
Japan’s maiden launch of its new flagship space rocket ended in failure on Tuesday when controllers issued a destruct command just 15 minutes after liftoff, the country’s space agency said.
“A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission,” a statement from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.
A report from public broadcaster NHK said the second stage of the H3 rocket did not ignite.
The rocket, which took off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, was carrying the Advance Land Observation Satellite-3 (ALOS-3), a ground-mapping and imaging orbiter that the space agency said was planned to become a key tool in disaster management efforts.
ALOS-3 “would cover all of the land areas of not only Japan but also across the whole world,” it said.
Tuesday’s failure occurred on JAXA’s second attempt to launch the H3. On February 17, two secondary booster engines strapped to the side of the space vehicle did not ignite on the launch pad and the H3 failed to take off.
The space agency has touted the H3 as the successor to Japan’s H-2A and H-2B rockets, with flexible configurations based on what it would need to lift into orbit. It has previously touted the expected ability of the H3 to launch both government and commercial missions.
JAXA said the H3 would be more economical than many other launch vehicles because its uses “commercial-off-the-shelf products of other domestic industries such as the automobile industry rather than products exclusive to space use.”
“With several configurations, the H3 offers performance and price suitable for purposes of each satellite,” it said, adding that it was looking for regular launches over the long term.
“We are aiming to create an operational world where Japanese industrial base can be underpinned by steadily launching the H3 six times or so annually for 20 years,” JAXA said.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the prime contractor for the rocket. NHK reported that JAXA and Mitsubishi have spent more that $1.5 billion on the project since its inception nine years ago.
A long-exposure photograph shows SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-6 mission in the company’s
Joel Kowsky / NASA
SpaceX launched four people to the International Space Station from Florida as Elon Musk’s company begins the final of the original six missions it was awarded by NASA.
Known as Crew-6, the mission for NASA will bring the group up to the space station for a six-month stay in orbit. The mission is SpaceX’s sixth operational crew launch for NASA to date and the company’s ninth human spaceflight to date.
“If you enjoyed your ride, please don’t forget to give us five stars,” SpaceX mission control called out after the capsule reached orbit.
“That was fantastic, thank you,” Crew-6 commander Stephen Bowen responded.
Crew-6 launched a little after midnight on Thursday morning, beginning a just over 24-hour journey to the ISS. The mission brings the number of astronauts SpaceX has launched to 34, including both government and private missions, since its first crewed launch in May 2020.
The Crew-6 astronauts before launch, from left: Russian cosmonaut
SpaceX
The crew is made of two Americans, one Russian and one Emirati: NASA astronauts Warren Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi.
SpaceX launched the astronauts in its Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. Both the rocket and capsule are reusable, with the latter flying on its fourth mission to date.
After a last-minute delay during SpaceX’s first launch attempt on Monday, a data review identified a clogged filter in a ground system as the cause of an apparent issue in the fluid that ignites the rocket’s engines. SpaceX replaced the filter and completed verification steps to make Thursday’s launch.
SpaceX developed its Crew Dragon spacecraft and fine-tuned its Falcon 9 rocket under NASA’s competitive Commercial Crew program, competing against Boeing’s Starliner capsule. But Boeing’s capsule remains in development, with costly delays pushing back the start of operational Starliner flights.
NASA awarded SpaceX with additional missions, for a total of 14, compared with Boeing’s six.
BARCELONA, Spain — South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom is planning to launch a flying taxi service in 2025 and expects it to generate “significant” revenue going forward, a senior executive told CNBC.
Last year, SK Telecom and U.S. firm Joby Aviation inked a tie-up to develop air taxis for the South Korean market. Joby Aviation is a maker of so-called electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles. These electric flying vehicles are a seen by advocates as a way to transport people around dense cities and avoid traffic.
The South Korean government is pushing forward with trying to commercialize air taxis by 2025.
SK Telecom and Joby Aviation are looking to take advantage of the government backing. Ha Min-yong, chief development officer of SK Telecom, told CNBC in an interview Sunday that the company’s air taxi service will be made available commercially “sometime in the middle of 2025,” before expanding to other areas like logistics.
“So by 2025, if we are able to prove that the service quality is acceptable to the general public with the safety and also security, then they [the government] will allow the operator to expand the area of the service, including logistics and tourism as well as medical-related services,” Ha told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain.
SK Telecom is looking to expand its business beyond being a traditional mobile carrier and has its sights set on new areas such as artificial intelligence and flying taxis. These aircraft will require connecting to next-generation 5G networks to operate and fly, eventually autonomously. That’s where SK Telecom’s area of expertise comes in.
SK Telecom has partnered with U.S. firm Joby Aviation to bring flying taxis to South Korea in 2025. SK Telecom is looking to diversify its business model to new areas including urban air mobility and artificial intelligence.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
While this form of transport is at an early stage, consultancy Roland Berger forecasts that there will be nearly 160,000 unpiloted electrical drones in use worldwide by 2050. They will generate an annual revenue of nearly $90 billion, the company says.
SK Telecom wants a slice of the pie and Ha said that if all goes well, air taxis could be a big revenue driver for the company, “but not immediately.”
“So for the next at least five [to] seven years, we need to make sure that the service that we are going to offer to, you know, society and community is safe enough,” Ha said.
“Once it’s accepted very well by the community and society, then we believe that it will generate a significant amount of revenue.”
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the companys Crew Dragon spacecraft vents fuel prior to a scrubbed launch from pad 39A for the Crew-6 mission at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 27, 2023.
Chandan Khanna | Afp | Getty Images
NASA and SpaceX early on Monday postponed the launch of two U.S. astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a United Arab Emirates crewmate minutes before they were due to lift off from Florida on a flight to the International Space Station.
The U.S. space agency and SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, cited a technical glitch concerning the flow of ignition fluid used to help start the spacecraft’s engines.
The countdown had seemed to be progressing smoothly until about two and a half minutes before blastoff, when NASA announced on its live webcast that the launch of the four crew members on a six-month science mission would be postponed.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule had been scheduled for liftoff at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The first backup launch opportunity for the mission was set for early Tuesday, about 24 hours from the initial attempt to get the rocket off the ground.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX immediately said how long it might actually take before they would be ready to try again. Eleventh-hour launch scrubs are fairly routine in the highly complex and risky endeavor of human spaceflight.
Had Monday’s launch been a success, it was expected to take the crew about 25 hours to reach their destination at the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Designated Crew 6, the mission will carry the sixth long-duration ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the Musk’s California-based company began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
Russia is gearing up to launch a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station that will replace a capsule that sprang a coolant leak in December, leaving two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut without a ride home.
Liftoff of the capsule, called the Soyuz MS-23, is expected to occur out of Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:24 p.m. ET, which is 5:24 a.m. Fridaylocal time. NASA will air coverage of the event beginning at 7 p.m. ET Thursday.
The uncrewed spacecraft will spend two days in orbit, maneuvering toward the orbiting laboratory. It’s expected to dock with the Poisk module — which is on the space station’s Russian-run portion — just after 8 p.m. ET Saturday.
The Soyuz MS-23 will be the return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, all of whom traveled to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-22 capsule in September.
About two months into the three men’s journey, the MS-22 experienced a coolant leak, leaving the cabin at temperatures deemed unsafe for the crewmates. The Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA quickly worked to establish plans to send areplacement vehicle. Roscosmos officials said they had determined that the leak resulted from a small hole caused by an impact with a micrometeoroid.
Plans to launch the rescue vehicle, however, were drawn into question when a Russian cargo ship, called Progress, experienced a similar coolant leak after docking with the space stationon February 11. Three days later, Roscosmos had said in a post on the social media site Telegram, that it would delay the Soyuz MS-23 launch until at least March while the agency investigated the cause of the Progress vehicle’s coolant leak.
On Tuesday,however, Roscosmos said in an updated Telegram post that it had determined the cause of the Progress spacecraft leak was “external influences.”
“The Russians are continuing to take a very close look at both the Soyuz and the Progress coolant leaks,” Dana Weigel, the space station’s deputy manager for NASA, said during a Wednesday briefing.
“They formed a state commission that is assessing the anomalies,” she added, noting that the team is analyzing potential causes from the time the capsules launched through their journey in orbit.
Originally, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara were expected to launch to the space station on March 16 aboard MS-23.
Instead, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s time will be extended on the space station until they can return to Earth aboard Soyuz MS-23 later this year. That return could happen in September, according to a report from Russia state-run media outlet TASS.
If that timeline holds, the three crewmates will have extended their expected six-month stay in space to about one year.
When asked about the extended stay, Joel Montalbano, the space station’s program manager for NASA, said the crew remains in good health and there is no reason to expedite their journey home.
The crew is “willing to help wherever we ask,” Montalbano said during a January 11 news conference. “They’re excited to be in space, excited to work and excited to do the research that we do on orbit. So they are ready to go with whatever decision that we give them.”
He added,“I may have to fly some moreice cream to reward them.”
The launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft comes just days before NASA and SpaceX will launch their Crew-6 mission. Expected to lift off early Monday morning, Crew-6 will carry NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg as well as Sultan Alneyadi, an astronaut with the United Arab Emirates, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Shortly afterthose four arrive at the space station, NASA’s Crew-5 astronauts will return home from their five-month staythere aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.NASA officials said this week that the coolant leaks experienced on the Soyuz and Progress vehicles would not have any impact on the SpaceX missions and that no similar issues were discovered on Crew Dragon vehicles.
A Palestinian man was killed and 13 were injured in an Israeli raid in Nablus early Monday, Palestinian health officials said, in what Israeli authorities said was an operation to arrest suspects in the fatal shooting of an Israeli soldier last year.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health said Amir Ihab Bustami, 21, “was shot by the Israeli occupation soldiers and killed at dawn today in Nablus.”
Six people were wounded by live bullets during the raid in Nablus and seven others were injured “as a result of the army’s pursuit of them,” the Palestinian Red Crescent said. The agency said one person was hospitalized, and that they had also handled 75 cases of tear gas inhalation.
The Israeli military said the overnight raid was in response to the killing of Ido Baruch in an attack near the settlement of Shavei Shomron in the occupied West Bank on October 11, 2022.
“[Israeli forces] apprehended the assailants Obkamel Guri and Asama Tuille, from Nablus, who carried out the shooting attack during which Staff Sergeant Ido Baruch was killed,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Monday. “The forces also apprehended three additional suspects who were with the assailants.”
The Israeli forces exchanged fire with the suspects and confiscated two rifles at an apartment in Nablus, the IDF said, adding that two of the suspects were injured during the raid.
Lion’s Den, a Palestinian militant group that emerged in Nablus last year, claimed responsibility for the killing of Baruch. The group put out a statement Monday saying it had lured Israeli soldiers into an ambush in Nablus and killed them, but there was no evidence to support that claim. The IDF said no Israeli injuries were reported in the raid.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli forces “surrounded one of the residential buildings” in Nablus and heavy gunfire and an explosion were heard.
Separately, the Israeli military launched airstrikes in Gaza, targeting “an underground complex” belonging to Hamas for manufacturing rockets, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement early Monday. The airstrikes came after a rocket was launched from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, which the IDF said was intercepted.
Hamas confirmed in a statement that one of its sites was hit in West Gaza on Monday. Israeli warplanes “launched about 10 air raids targeting a site of the resistance,” al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said in a statement early Monday, adding that there were no casualties.
Following the strikes, four rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel, according to a later statement by the IDF that said it struck Hamas military posts in response.
In China’s eyes, the newest superpower battlefield sits between 12 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface in a thin-aired layer of the atmosphere it calls “near space.”
Lying above the flightpaths of most commercial and military jets and below satellites, near space is an in-between area for spaceflight to pass through – but it is also a domain where hypersonic weapons transit and ballistic missiles cross.
China has paid close attention to other countries’ developments in this region, which has been hailed by Chinese military experts as “a new front for militarization” and “an important field of competition among the world’s military powers.”
In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decades-old technology to utilize this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles. They include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons – similar to the one identified over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.
China maintains the balloon is a civilian research airship, despite claims by US officials that the device was part of an extensive Chinese surveillance program.
While questions remain about that incident, an examination of Chinese state media reports and scientific papers reveal the country’s growing interest in these lighter-than-air vehicles, which Chinese military experts have touted for use toward a wide range of purposes, from communication relay, reconnaissance and surveillance to electronic countermeasures.
Chinese research on the high-altitude balloons dates back to the late 1970s, but over the past decade there’s been renewed focus on using older technology equipped with new hardware as major powers around the world have bulked up their capabilities in the sky.
“With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the PLA Air Force to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities” as early as 2014, and military experts have designated “near space” as a crucial link in the integration.
Searches on CNKI, China’s largest online academic database, show Chinese researchers, both military and civilian, have published more than 1,000 papers and reports on “near space,” many of which focus on the development of “near space flight vehicles.” China has also set up a research center to design and develop high-altitude balloons and stratospheric airships, or dirigibles, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government think tank.
One particular area of interest is surveillance. While China already deploys a sprawling satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.
Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.
In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explains how near-space lighter-than-air vehicles can surveil and take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.
In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, highlighted the progress by the US, Russia and Israel in developing these vehicles, adding China has also made its own “breakthroughs.”
An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.
Another scientist on the team told the newspaper that compared with satellites, stratospheric airships are better for “long-term observation” and have a range of purposes from disaster warning and environmental research to wireless network construction and aerial reconnaissance.
It’s also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that’s been leveraged for military reconnaissance as far back as the late 18th century, when French forces employed a balloon corps.
The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.
“This isn’t just a China thing. The US, and other nations as well, have been working on and developing high-altitude aerostats, balloons and similar vehicles,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a research center serving the US Air Force.
“They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”
China also appears acutely aware of the potential for other countries to use balloons to spy.
In 2019, a documentary series on China’s border defense forces produced by a state-owned television channel featured an incident where the PLA Air Force spotted and shot down a suspected high-altitude surveillance balloon that “threatened (China’s) air defense safety.”
The documentary did not provide further detail about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published last April by researchers in a PLA institute noted air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2017.
Other experts have pointed to the potential use of balloons in data collection that can aid China’s development of hypersonic weapons that transit through near space.
“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
Chinese state media reports show China has also used balloons to test advanced hypersonic vehicles. In 2019, state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon lifting off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft,” which according to Chinese media reports, can fly at a wide range of speeds, up to five times the speed of sound.
US intelligence officials believe the Chinese balloon identified over the US in recent days is part of an extensive, Chinese military-run surveillance program involving a fleet of balloons that has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Beijing on Thursday said the assessment was “likely part of the US’ information and public opinion warfare” against China. It has maintained that the device identified over the US is civilian in nature, and linked it to “companies,” though it declined to provide more information on which entity manufactured the balloons.
Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.
A US military commander on Monday acknowledged that the US has a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental US undetected during the previous administration.
An FBI team is working on understanding more about the equipment reclaimed from the balloon shot down over the sea – including what kind of data it could collect and whether it could transmit that in real time.
CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.
“At the end of the day responses and (tactics, techniques, and procedures) from the US and other countries on how they react, or fail to – all of that has value to China and the PLA.”
News that the Pentagon is monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in the skies over the continental United States raises a series of questions – not least among them, what exactly it might be doing.
US officials have said the flight path of the balloon, first spotted over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a “number of sensitive sites” and say they are taking steps to “protect against foreign intelligence collection.”
But what’s less clear is why Chinese spies would want to use a balloon, rather than a satellite to gather information.
This is not the first time a Chinese balloon has been spotted over the US, but this seems to be acting differently to previous ones, a US defense official said.
“It is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time, this time around, [and is] more persistent than in previous instances. That would be one distinguishing factor,” the official said.
Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries, said Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer.
But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.
Or at least until now.
Recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics mean the floating intelligence platforms may be making a comeback in the modern spying toolkit.
“Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, Layton said.
Blake Herzinger, an expert in Indo-Pacific defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said despite their slow speeds, balloons aren’t always easy to spot.
“They’re very low signature and low-to-zero emission, so hard to pick up with traditional situational awareness or surveillance technology,” Herzinger said.
And balloons can do some things that satellites can’t.
“Space-based systems are just as good but they are more predictable in their orbital dynamics,” Layton said.
“An advantage of balloons is that they can be steered using onboard computers to take advantage of winds and they can go up and down to a limited degree. This means they can loiter to a limited extent.
“A satellite can’t loiter and so many are needed to criss-cross an area of interest to maintain surveillance,” he said.
According to Layton, the suspected Chinese balloon is likely collecting information on US communication systems and radars.
“Some of these systems use extremely high frequencies that are short range, can be absorbed by the atmosphere and being line-of-sight are very directional. It’s possible a balloon might be a better collection platform for such specific technical collection than a satellite,” he said.
Retired US Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, echoed those thoughts.
“They could be scooping up signals intelligence, in other words, they’re looking at our cell phone traffic, our radio traffic,” Leighton told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Intelligence data collected by the balloon could be relayed in real time via a satellite link back to China, Layton said.
Analysts also noted that Montana and nearby states are home to US intercontinental ballistic missile silos and strategic bomber bases.
US officials say they have taken actions to ensure the balloon cannot collect any sensitive data. They decided against shooting it down because of the risk to lives and property by falling debris.
And if the US could bring down the balloon within its territory without destroying it then the balloon might reveal some secrets of its own, Layton added.
But maybe there are no secrets or spying involved. This could be just an accident, with the balloon blown off course or Chinese operators losing control of it somehow.
“There’s at least some possibility that this was a mistake and the balloon ended up somewhere Beijing didn’t expect,” Herzinger said.
For its part, China says it’s looking into things.
“We are aware of reports [of the balloon] and are trying to understand the circumstances and verify the details of the situation,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Friday. “I’d like to stress that before it becomes clear what happened, any deliberate speculation or hyping up would not help handling of the matter.”
In the fervor-filled days leading up to the November 16 launch of the long-awaited Artemis I mission, an uncrewed trip around the moon, some industry insiders admitted to having conflicting emotions about the event.
On one hand, there was the thrill of watching NASA take its first steps toward eventually getting humans back to the lunar surface; on the other, a shadow cast by the long and costly process it took to get there.
“I have mixed feelings, though I hope that we have a successful mission,” former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao said in an opinion roundtable interview with The New York Times. “It is always exciting to see a new vehicle fly. For perspective, we went from creating NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years. This program has, in one version or another, been ongoing since 2004.”
There have been numerous delays with the development of the rocket at the center of the Artemis I mission: NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever flown — and one of the most controversial. The towering launch vehicle was originally expected to take flight in 2016. And the decade-plus that the rocket was in development sparked years of blistering criticism targeted toward the space agency and Boeing, which holds the primary contract for the SLS rocket’s core.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) repeatedly called out what it referred to as Boeing’s “poor performance,” as a contributing factor in the billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued SLS.
“Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance,” one 2018 report from NASA’s OIG, the first in a series of audits the OIG completed surrounding NASA’s management of the SLS program, read. And a report in 2020 laid out similar grievances.
For its part, Boeing has pushed back on the criticism, pointing to rigorous testing requirements and the overall success of the program. The OIG report also included correspondence from NASA, which noted in 2018 that it “had already recognized the opportunity to improve contract performance management” and agreed with the report’s recommendations.
Despite all the heated debate that has followed SLS, by all accounts, the rocket is here to stay. And officials at NASA and Boeing said its first launch two months ago was practically flawless.
“I worked over 50 Space Shuttle launches,” Boeing SLS program manager John Shannon told CNN by phone. “And I don’t ever remember a launch that was as clean as that one was, which for a first-time rocket — especially one that had been through as much as this one through all the testing — really put an exclamation point on how reliable and robust this vehicle really is.”
The Artemis program manager at NASA, Mike Sarafin, also said during a post-launch news conference that the rocket “performed spot-on.”
But with its complicated history and its hefty price tag, SLS could still face detractors in the years to come.
Many have questioned why SLS needs to exist at all. With the estimated cost per launch standing at more than $4 billion for the first four Artemis missions, it’s possible commercial rockets, like the massive Mars rocket SpaceX is building, could get the job done more efficiently, as the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, Casey Dreier, recently observed in an article laying out both sides of the SLS argument.
(NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that the $4 billion per-launch cost estimate includes development costs that the space agency hopes will be amortized over the course of 10 or more missions.)
Boeing was selected in 2012 to build SLS’s “core stage,” which is the hulking orange fuselage that houses most of the massive engines that give the rocket its first burst of power at liftoff.
Though more than 1,000 companies were involved with designing and building SLS, Boeing’s work involved the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket.
That process began over a decade ago, and when the Artemis program was established in 2019, it gave the rocket its purpose: return humans to the moon, establish a permanent lunar outpost, and, eventually, pave the path toward getting humans to Mars.
But the SLS is no longer the only rocket involved in the program. NASA gave SpaceX a significant role in 2021, giving the company a fixed-price contract for use of its Mars rocket as the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface after they leave Earth and travel to the moon’s orbit on SLS. SpaceX’s forthcoming rocket, called Starship, is also intended to be capable of completing a crewed mission to the moon or Mars on its own. (Starship, it should be noted, is still in the development phases and has not yet been tested in orbit.)
Boeing has repeatedly argued that SLS is essential and capable of performing tasks that other rockets cannot.
“The bottom line is there’s nothing else like the SLS because it was built from the ground up to be human rated,” Shannon said. “It is the only vehicle that can take the Orion spacecraft and the service module to the moon. And that’s the purpose-built design — to take large hardware and humans to cislunar space, and nothing else exists that can do that.”
Starship, meanwhile, is not tailored solely to NASA’s specific lunar goals. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked for more than a decade about his desire to get humans to Mars. More recently, he has said Starship could also be used to house giant space telescopes.
Yet, another reason critics remain skeptical of SLS is because of its origins. The rocket’s conception can be traced back to NASA’s Constellation program, which was a plan to return to the moon mapped out under former President George W. Bush that was later canceled.
But the SLS has survived. Many observers have suggested a big reason was the desire to maintain space industry jobs in certain Congressional districts and to beef up aerospace supply chains.
Much of the criticism levied against SLS, however, has focused on the actual process of getting the rocket built.
At one point in 2019, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine considered sidelining the SLS rocket entirely, citing frustrations with the delays.
“At the end of the day, the contractors had an obligation to deliver what NASA had contracted for them to deliver,” Bridenstine told CNN by phone last month. “And I was frustrated like most of America.”
Still, Bridenstine said, when his office reviewed the matter, it found “there were no options that were going to cost less money or take less time than just finishing the SLS” — and the rocket was never ultimately sidelined. (Bridenstine noted he was also publicly critical of delayed projects led by SpaceX and others.)
The SLS rocket ended up flying its first launch more than six years later than originally intended. NASA had allocated $6.2 billion to the SLS program as of 2018, but that price tag more than tripled to $23 billion as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society.
Those escalating costs can be traced back to the type of contracts that NASA signed with Boeing and its other major suppliers for SLS. It’s called cost-plus, which puts the financial burden on NASA when projects face cost overruns while still offering contractors extra payments, or award fees.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Science last year, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the cost-plus contracting method, calling it a “plague.”
More in vogue are “fixed-price” contracts, which have a firm price cap, like the kind NASA gave to Boeing and SpaceX for its Commercial Crew Program.
In an interview with CNN in December, however, Nelson stood by cost-plus contracting for SLS and Orion, the vehicle that is designed to carry astronauts and rides atop the rocket to space. He said that without that type of contract, in his view, NASA’s private-sector contractors simply wouldn’t be willing to take on a rocket designed for such a specific purpose and exploring deep space. Building a rocket as specific and technically complex as SLS isn’t a risk many private-sector companies are anxious to take on, he noted.
“You really have difficulty in the development of a new and very exquisite spacecraft … on a fixed-price contract,” he said.
“That industry is just not willing to accept that kind of thing, with the exception of the landers,” he added, referring to two other branches of the Artemis program: robotic landers that will deliver cargo to the moon’s surface and SpaceX’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract. Both of those will use fixed-price — often referred to as “commercial” — contracts.
“And even there, they’re getting a considerable investment by the federal government,” Nelson said.
Still, government watchdogs have not pulled punches when assessing these cost-plus contracts and Boeing’s role.
“We did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part. There’s poor planning and poor execution,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during testimony before the House’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics last year. “We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using…worked to the contractor’s — rather than NASA’s — advantage.”
Shannon, the Boeing executive, acknowledged in an interview that Boeing and SLS have faced loud detractors, but he said that the value of the drawn out development and testing program would become evident as SLS flies.
“I am extremely proud that NASA — even though there were significant schedule pressures — they could set up a test program that was incredibly comprehensive,” he said. “The Boeing team worked through that test process and hit every mark on it. And you see the results. You see a vehicle that is not just visually spectacular, but its performance was spectacular. And it really put us on the road to be able to do lunar exploration again, which is something that’s very important in this country.”
But the rocket is still facing criticism. During a Congressional hearing with the House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee in March 2022, NASA’s Inspector General said that current cost estimates for SLS were “unsustainable,” gauging that the space agency will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program from 2012 through September 2025.
Martin, the NASA inspector general, specifically pointed to Boeing as one of the contractors that would need to find “efficiencies” to bring down those costs as the Artemis program moves forward.
In a December 7 statement to CNN, Boeing once again defended SLS and its price point.
“Boeing is and has been committed to improving our processes — both while the program was in its developmental stage and now as it transitions to an operational phase,” the statement read, noting the company already implemented “lessons learned” from building the first rocket to “drive efficiencies from a cost and schedule perspective” for future SLS rockets.
“When adjusted for inflation, NASA has developed SLS for a quarter of the cost of the Saturn V and half the cost of the Space Shuttle,” the statement noted. “These programs have also been essential to investing in the NASA centers, workforce and test facilities that are used by a broad range of civil and commercial partners across NASA and industry.”
The successful launch of SLS was a welcome winning moment for Boeing. Over the past few years, the company has been mired in controversy, including ongoing delays and myriad issues with Starliner, a spacecraft built for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and scandal after scandal plaguing its airplane division.
Now that the Artemis I mission has returned safely home, NASA and Boeing can turn to preparing more of the gargantuan SLS rockets to launch even loftier missions.
SLS is slated to launch the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a journey around the moon, in 2024. From there, SLS will be the backbone of the Artemis III mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in five decades and a series of increasingly complex missions as NASA works to create its permanent lunar outpost.
Shannon, the Boeing SLS program manager, told CNN that construction of the next two SLS rocket cores is well underway, with the booster for Artemis II on track to be finished in April — more than a year before the mission is scheduled to take off. All of the “major components” for a third SLS rocket are also completed, Shannon added.
For the third SLS core and beyond, Boeing is also moving final assembly to new facilities Florida, freeing up space at its manufacturing facilities to increase production, which may help drive down costs.
Shannon declined to share a specific price point for the new rockets or share any internal pricing goals, though NASA is expected to sign new contracts for the rockets that will launch the Artemis V mission and beyond, which could significantly change the price per launch.
Nelson also told CNN in December that NASA “will be making improvements, and we will find cost savings where we can,” such as with the decision to use commercial contracts for other vehicles under the Artemis program umbrella.
How and whether those contracts bear out remain to be seen: SpaceX needs to get its Starship rocket flying, a massive space station called Gateway needs to come to fruition, and at least some of the robotic lunar landers designed to carry cargo to the moon will need to prove their effectiveness. It’s also not yet clear whether those contracts will result in enough cost savings for the critics of SLS, including NASA’s OIG, to consider the Artemis program sustainable.
As for SLS, Nelson also told reporters December 11, just after the conclusion of the Artemis I mission, that he had every reason to expect that lawmakers would continue to fund the rocket and NASA’s broader moon program.
“I’m not worried about the support from the Congress,” Nelson said.
And Bridenstine, Nelson’s predecessor who has been publicly critical SLS, said that he ultimately stands by SLS and points out that, controversies aside, it does have rare bipartisan support from its bankrollers.
“We are in a spot now where this is going to be successful,” Bridenstine said last month, recalling when he first realized the Artemis program had support from the right and left. “All of America is going to be proud of this program. And yes, there are going to be differences. People are gonna say well, you should go all commercial and drop SLS…but at the end of the day, what we have to do is we have to bring together all of the things that are the best programs that we can get for America and use them to go to the moon.”
Galactic Energy, a rocket startup in China, launched five satellites into orbit on Monday, boosting the private company’s ambition to become the Chinese rival to SpaceX.
Galactic Energy’s Ceres-1 rocket lifted off Monday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, sending five commercial satellites into their intended orbits, the Beijing-based company said in a statement on the same day.
The five satellites will be used for telecommunication, weather forecasts and scientific research for government agencies in the country, the company added.
The mission marks the fifth launch of the Ceres-1 rocket — a small solid fuel orbital rocket designed by the company, Galactic Energy said. So far, it has successfully put 19 commercial satellites into space, setting a record for a private Chinese firm.
“It sounds the trumpet for us to start a high-density orbital launch in 2023,” it said, adding that it plans to complete 8 to 10 missions for this year.
Galactic Energy conducted the first Ceres-1 launch on November 7, 2020, which makes it the second Chinese private company to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit. A Beijing-based startup, i-Space, was the first to do so in 2019.
Many Chinese commercial satellite launch providers are currently using small solid-propellant rockets like Ceres. But some firms are developing or testing reusable liquid-propellant rocket engines, which allow precise control of the thrust after ignition.
Last year, Galactic Energy successfully tested itsliquid-propellant Welkin engine for its next-generation rockets. Its founder Liu Baiqi said that they want to build the Chinese version of the Merlin engine, which was developed by SpaceX.
Founded in 2018, Galactic Energy has received several rounds of financing from private equity investors and venture capitalists, worth more than $250 million in total. Major investors include the investment arm of Aviation Industry Corporation of China, a state-owned aerospace and defense conglomerate.
China’s commercial space industry has expanded rapidly since 2015, when the government began encouraging private companies to enter the space sector. Before that, launching rockets and satellites had been the monopoly of state-owned aerospace companies.
Over the past few years, more than 170 private companies have entered the space industry, according to a 2020 research report by Future Space Research, a research institute based in Beijing.
Officials at NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, are working to decide how to bring home several people at the International Space Station after a Russian Soyuz spacecraft sprang a leak last week.
None of the seven people currently on board the ISS — including three Roscosmos cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts and one astronaut with Japan’s space agency — were ever in any dangeras a result of the leak, officials have noted. But it’s not yet clear whether the spacecraft will be able to make a trip back home with its crew on board.
The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft ferried NASA’s Frank Rubio and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, to the space station on September 21. It was scheduled to bring them back to Earth in March. But Roscosmos is now evaluating whether to fly its next Soyuz mission to the ISS empty and move the launch up two to three weeks so that the spacecraft can serve as a rescue vehicle for Rubio, Prokopyev, and Petelin if Soyuz MS-22 is deemed not safe enough for the crew. If Roscosmos goes with that plan, the next Soyuz mission could lift off in February, according to Montalbano.
The leak on the Soyuz MS-22, which is currently attached to the ISS at one of the orbiting laboratory’s eight docking ports, was identified on December 14. It forced the delay of a planned spacewalk by two cosmonauts last week, and live images during a NASA broadcast showed liquid spewing out from the spacecraft.
Roscosmos determined that the leak occurred on an external cooling loop of the Soyuz. The leak is not expected to cause any external corrosion or damage to the exterior of the ISS, Montalbano noted, saying the leaked coolant “boils up very quickly” as it’s exposed.
It’s not yet clear was caused the leak, which has been traced to a small hole that could have been caused by a collision with a piece of space debris, a mechanical problem or some other issue, according to Montalbano.
Space debris was, however, the certain cause of a one-day delay for a spacewalk planned by the United States. Two astronauts were slated to venture out on Wednesday to install a new solar array to the space station’s exterior, but the ISS had to maneuver out of the way of a piece of spaceborne garbage. The debris was determined to be a piece of an old Russian rocket.
The ISS was able to maneuver successfully, and the US spacewalk kicked off Thursday morning without issue.
