The crew of the Galactic 01 mission has returned safely after their brief trip to space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity vehicle. A successful end to the company’s first commercial flight at least finally puts it on the board in the race between SpaceX and Virgin Galactic for commercial spaceflight after SpaceX took a paid crew to the Space Station last year.
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spacecraft is already getting a ride from its mothership that’s boosting the company’s first commercial flight crew along their trip. The livestream is scheduled to begin at 11AM ET, and you can see it below.
That’s SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s assessment of the potential success of its next Starship flight, according to Ars Technica. The last flight ended explosively.
In October 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told The Verge in an interview that NASA was “getting ready to fly” the electric X-57. Unfortunately it never will, reports Popular Science:
NASA said today in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky.
NASA said the fix would take too long to implement, but says the project’s game-changing lessons “have contributed to the industry.” The agency is currently working with Boeing on a more fuel-efficient aircraft design.
[Popular Science]
Data from NASA’s Cassini probe shows signatures of phosphorous in a subsurface ocean on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. According to planetary scientist Frank Postberg of Freie Universität Berlin, “It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth.”
Six years after its mission ended with a dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, the list of Cassini discoveries keeps growing. You can read the scientist’s paper here or check out this video from a few years ago explaining how Cassini collected those particles.
