Hello, hello, my dear space lovers!
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Now, are you ready? 5,4,3,2,1...lift-off!
A key day for space tourism
Today is the day for Branson! He and his team will be flying to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 spaceplane and opening up a new era of space tourism (if everything goes well, of course!). You can watch it live here starting at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) - Go, Virgin Galactic!
New astronomy wonders
This week astronomers have found two very interesting and unexpected discoveries. The first one is that there is a massive collection of more than 100 black holes INSIDE THE MILKY WAY! Yes, you heard it right, and they are "eating” a cluster of stars just 80,000 light-years away from us.
The second big discovery was made thanks to the Kepler telescope: for the first time, scientists have identified free-floating planets, the size of Earth, flying alone in deep space, not orbiting around any host star. Learning more and more as we keep looking to the stars…
Talking about telescopes, the James Webb Space Telescope is now go for launch later this year (FINALLY), and check this out: the Australians are building MAVIS, a ground-based telescope that promises to see further and clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope. Imagine that! Better capabilities than a space telescope with all the benefits of easy access and maintenance of a ground-based telescope. Looking forward to it!
The most challenging flight (yet)
The Martian helicopter Ingenuity completed its 9th flight. The most difficult, fast, long, and challenging flight ever tried on another planet.
It crossed an area of sand dunes that is completely dangerous for the rover to even get close to, it took color pics of the area that wouldn’t have been possible without a helicopter and then landed after flying a distance of 625 meters. Look at the map of all the flights and compare it with the previous ones. Amazing achievement!
Life or not life?
What a week for astrobiology!
A new study said that due to the very little water concentration in Venus's atmosphere, life as we know it is not possible in Venus’ clouds. To me, the key sentence is “AS WE KNOW IT”, but yes, there won’t be anything similar to life on Earth when we get there very soon.
And then, boom! A study shows that methane detected on Enceladus could be a sign of life. Enceladus, the Saturnian Moon that has a large liquid water ocean below its icy crust, is producing too much methane, and this could be indicating that microbes are feeding on vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Quoting the team: “Obviously, we are not concluding that life exists in Enceladus' ocean, but we can't discard the 'life hypothesis' as highly improbable.”
Sadly, there’s no planned mission to Enceladus at the moment…but could this discovery change that? Crossing fingers...
SpaceX updates
It’s been a while since the last update about SpaceX but three pieces of news about the company are especially interesting this week. First of all, the massive 70-meter tall booster, the largest rocket booster ever built, is now at the launch pad, ready to start tests and launch preparations for a first orbital test flight later this summer. It’s going to be a spectacle worth watching.
Then, a couple of very interesting updates coming directly from Musk: the first is that after reaching the milestone of ten flights reuse of the Falcon booster, the company is now targeting between 20 and 30 flights per rocket booster. This would totally change the economics of the industry (without having to wait for the Starship…which is orders of magnitude better) by lowering down the price to get to orbit even more.
And talking about Starship, Musk has been talking about the multiple purposes this massive spacecraft could have, not only as a way of transporting people and cargo to orbit, Moons and Mars but also as a space platform: as a way to build cheap stations connecting several Starships one to another, a platform to build space telescopes, a way to collect space debris… so much exciting potential in there!
The video of the week
Yeap, my newsletter, my rules! :D This week I won’t recommend a picture but a video. I am very impressed by this video with a recreation of the first Moon walk, step by step, in 5 minutes. You can see how the astronauts moved around the spacecraft, explored, dare to go further, and then returned… amazing work!
Newsletter recommendation
If you're interested in learning about other futuristic topics and seeing beautiful data visualizations, take a look at "To the Stars with Data", another free weekly newsletter where @Joe Lisle explores the future of humanity on Earth and amongst the stars. Very interesting. Check it out!
Launches
Oh my god, no launches this week! What are we going to do??? XD
No worries, the following one is going to be massive with Blue Origin’s New Shepard first crewed launch and the new Russian module Nauka heading to the International Space Station.
And that’s it for today! :)
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Cheers from sunny Spain! :)
Juan, the Curious Astronaut