Space

The United States government is looking into launching commercial rockets from sea-based launch sites, but some ocean advocacy experts say the move is part of a larger trend of allowing the spaceflight industry to use the ocean as a dumping ground. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Tuesday (July 7) announced a Request for Information (RFI) to look into launching rockets and…

The U.S. Space Force has acquired one of its first publicly acknowledged offensive weapons, one that can blast adversary satellites with beams of electromagnetic radiation to disrupt their signals without physically damaging them. The system, known as Meadowlands, was developed by L3 Harris. It is an electromagnetic warfare system, meaning it is designed to disrupt, deny or degrade an…

How do you stop a large, threatening asteroid on its way to Earth? A new Chinese paper, investigating the issue, suggests a “pre-excavation detonation” could be the solution if there’s enough warning time. There may be millions of asteroids in our solar system, with a tiny percentage of them posing a possible, very tiny threat to our planet. NASA and many other entities keep an eye on the…

PASADENA, California — NASA’s new alien-hunting telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), will be serviceable out in space (and it will have gamma-ray detectors, to boot). Do you remember seeing NASA’s space shuttle astronauts working on the Hubble Space Telescope out in space? Well, it will likely be robots this time around, but NASA is planning for HWO to be serviceable, which…