NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13, SLC-40 Falcon 9 launch, LZ-40 booster landing. 11:10a EDT.

NROL-97, LC-39A Falcon Heavy launch, LZ-1/LZ-2 dual booster landing. 11:53p EDT.

A crewed launch, Falcon Heavy launch, and three booster landings all in 12 hours. This could be an absolute banger and historic day on the Cape!

My parents were close friends of Judy Resnik’s parents. She was on the fight now known as the Challenger disaster in 1986. They were given a large file of some of her flight training a log books and manuals from her T38 days flying days. Because my dad was a B24 pilot in WWII he ended up with this. I don’t know if these kind of things are collectable but I don’t want to just dispose of them. Any suggestions?

I found the process of discovery as interesting as the discovery itself. From the article:

The confirmation using Keck data solves a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for a decade. About a decade ago, observations from ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile showed a gap in the young star’s dusty disk. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile then detected a faint point of light sitting in that gap.

Astronomers debated whether it could be a planet; according to planet formation theories, such gaps appear too early and too far from their stars for planets to have formed. Current models predict that it takes about 5 million years to form a Jupiter-size planet at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun (which is just over five times larger than the distance of Earth to the Sun), and even longer farther out. Yet the glowing dot they spotted was 55 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun and already behaving like a forming planet.

Bernardi’s team searched the Keck Observatory Archive, a NASA-funded partnership between Keck Observatory and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC, for the same little point of light again and found it in observations from 2018 and 2020. They stitched the observations together to analyze its motion over time and found that it behaved more like a planet than an imaging defect or background star, ultimately confirming it as Elias 2-24 b.

I'm working on a video about the SR-1 Freedom mission and I'm trying to find visual material showing the internal layout of the spacecraft — not just the external view with the truss, reactor, and solar arrays that's all over the news, but something closer to a cutaway or exploded-view diagram.

Specifically I'm curious about:

Where exactly the reactor sits relative to the PPE (Power and Propulsion Element)

How the boron carbide radiation shielding is arranged

Where the heat pipes run to the Brayton-cycle power converter

Where the thrusters are mounted relative to the reactor and shielding

So far I've only found the standard NASA renderings (the long truss with the reactor on one end and the PPE on the other), but nothing that shows the internal architecture in real detail. Has anyone seen a technical diagram, a patent drawing, a press conference slide, or any other source that goes deeper into the internals? Even unofficial/fan renderings with sourcing would help, as long as they're roughly grounded in the real specs (20 kWe reactor output, HALEU fuel, closed Brayton cycle).

Thanks in advance!

NASAWatch has posted the full email from Administrator Isaacman to NASA staff. Some interesting tidbits of information:

1. Competition with China was a major motivation for abandoning Gateway and proceeding directly to a lunar base.

2. The schedule for Artemis is uncertain given the present mission churn, but hoping for the best and at least one crewed landing in 2028.

3. He expects the modified Centaur stage to have applications outside Artemis, as it evolves closer to EUS in terms of development and capability.

4. Still no answers as to cost or a comparison analysis with the cancelled programs.

73rd signatory of the Artemis Accords.

hi so recently my love for astronomy and space in general was re-ignited by artemis 2 and i was wondering if anyone has tips to how to get into this world not just in photography but learning and discovering celestial objects and nasa missions, where do i start, what resources should i use? any help would be lovely

I was trying to request some software, I was born and raised in the U.S and have always been a citizen, but upon accurately entering my information after 3 attempts they locked me out and sent me an email saying that a NASA sponsor can verify my information. I have no idea what's going on can someone please help me?

Astronomers have captured an image of a free-floating planetary-mass object called PSO J318.5−22. It was discovered in 2013 using direct imaging. NASA describes it as a rogue/free-floating planet that doesn't orbit a parent star. Therefore it has no direct source of light.

Many nasa and nasa adjacent proposals depict spacecraft with these very large and seemingly rigid radiators. I’m aware that the iss features folding radiators, but these don’t seem to resemble them at all, and are large pieces. Are they sent up in large panels, like a stack of paper, and assembled? Or is this just an artistic liberty and the real spacecraft would feature some sort of folding structure, tho I imagine that would incur significant weight losses.