The Crew-7 mission successfully docked with the ISS this morning at 9:16AM PT, bringing four new crew members to the station.
Video from the docking procedure shows the capsule approaching the station while in Earth orbit, then footage from the capsule as it made its final approach. It’s perfect Sunday viewing.
The Starship launch that destroyed its launch pad and scattered detritus for miles in Boca Chica, Texas in May reportedly left biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service in private disbelief, reported Bloomberg yesterday.
Concrete chunks had left craters a foot deep and were strewn across tidal flats, almost four acres of state park were burned, and seven bobwhite quail eggs and a collection of blue land crabs had been incinerated.
The FAA seeks the dismissal of a related lawsuit filed against it in May by environmental groups and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas.
There are plenty of pollution blind spots that ground monitors miss. So NASA launched a powerful new instrument in April to track air pollution from space. The new tool, called TEMPO, monitors three smog-forming pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. NASA released the first data maps from TEMPO today. They show pollution building up over major cities in North America, including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC.
India could make history today — if the Vikram lander successfully lands (this time), it’ll be the first nation to ever reach the Moon’s south pole, a little-explored region believed to contain water ice. Russia’s Luna-25 mission crashed just days ago attempting to reach the same location.
The lander is expected to touch down at 8.34AM ET.
We linked to the big Ronan Farrow profile of Elon Musk in the New Yorker earlier, but this part really caught my eye: Trump-appointed former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine decrying the government’s total reliance on SpaceX.
“At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”
The whole thing really is worth a read.
[The New Yorker]
The New York Times reports that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, FBI, and Air Force have issued a “broad warning” to firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin saying to look out for foreign actors, like Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies, who they believe are trying to infiltrate their networks and steal data.
The report notes that in 2020, the United Launch Alliance said a Chinese firm attempted to infiltrate its supply chain, and last year the Russian military reportedly hacked into Viasat satellites.
[The New York Times]
After entering lunar orbit over the weekend, India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft captured its first images of the Moon’s crater-filled surface. The rover is expected to touch down on the lunar surface later this month, which hopefully means more cool Moon pictures are to come.
The company will launch two of its internet satellites into space aboard Boeing’s Atlas V rocket instead of the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket as previously planned, Reuters reports.
Amazon is making the change because it wants its satellites in space sooner. While technical issues delayed the Vulcan’s launch until later this year, putting the satellites on the Atlas V pushes up the expected launch date to September 26th.
