Dogecoin, the virtual currency that originally started as an internet meme more than seven years ago, has surged more than 85% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.13. Its market cap is now over $17 billion. CNN reports: The currency has soared more than 2,000% from the start of the year, and has a big fan in Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets about it have on occasion driven up Dogecoin's value. Dogecoin has also enjoyed something of a cult status on Reddit, where a popular group -- not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind GameStop's rally -- decided earlier this year to propel its value "to the moon." Dogecoin soared over 600% in the wake of that push. The latest surge in crypto prices comes as Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency company to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Koreans must learn how to work alongside machines if they want to thrive in a post-pandemic world where many jobs will be handled by artificial intelligence and robots, according to the country's labor minister. "Automation and AI will change South Korea faster than other countries," Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jae-kap said in an interview Tuesday. "Not all jobs may be replaced by machines, but it's important to learn ways to work well with machines through training."

While people will have to increase their adaptability to work in a fast-changing high-tech environment, policy makers will also need to play their part, Lee said. The government needs to provide support to enable workers to move from one sector of the economy to another in search of employment and find ways to increase the activity of women in the economy, he added. The minister's remarks underline the determination of President Moon Jae-in's government to press ahead with a growth strategy built around tech even if it risks alienating the country's unions -- an important base of support for the ruling camp -- in the short term. "New jobs will be created as technology advances," Lee said. "What's important in policy is how to support a worker move from a fading sector to an emerging one." The government is looking to help with this transition by expanding its employment insurance program to 21 million people, or more than 40% of the population, by 2025. "The program is part of a government initiative to provide financial support in the form of insurance for every worker in the country, whether they are artists, freelancers or deliverymen on digital platforms," adds Bloomberg.

"Separately, the government is providing stipends for young people to encourage them to keep searching for work, as their struggle to stay employed amid slowing economic growth has been made tougher by the pandemic."

Space.com writes: Tank battles and history will collide this month as the makers of the free-to-play game "World of Tanks" honors the legacy of famed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for the 60th anniversary of his historic launch into space... "World of Tanks" developer Wargaming has launched its "To The Stars!" event, which recruits Gagarin into the game along with Vostok 1 themed goodies for players. The event launched Wednesday (April 7 ) and runs through April 19. Gagarin will be an in-game commander, dressed in his iconic orange flight suit, who will represent the U.S.S.R. nation.

"World of Tanks" creators worked with Gagarin's daughter, Galina Gagarina, to launch a commemorative website for the 60th anniversary of Vostok 1. You can see that "To The Stars! website here, where players can also track their progress in the event.

"Yuri Gagarin proved that humans can live and operate in space. His flight encouraged and gave hope to all those who dreamed of this! It kickstarted the deep understanding of humanity's role in preserving and developing our cosmic home — Earth," Galina Gagarin said in a statement. "I'm happy to know that, through the millions-strong audience of World of Tanks, the memory of mankind's first foray into space will be preserved for years to come!"
The press release promises a "shower of cosmic activities," including return of "Gravity Force Mode" between April 12 and April 18 with a new ability that "allows tanks to jump up and operate in the air."

And the Wargaming/MS-1 team behind the mobile tank game "World of Tanks Blitz" commemorated Gagarin's historic flight by launching a tank model into the stratosphere.

The moon is just 27% the size of earth. So long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares an interesting question from Science Alert.

"If you were to hop in a spaceship, don a spacesuit and go on an epic lunar hike, how long would it take to walk all the way around it? " During the Apollo missions, astronauts bounced around the surface at a casual 1.4 mph (2.2 km/h), according to NASA. This slow speed was mainly due to their clunky, pressurized spacesuits that were not designed with mobility in mind. If the "moonwalkers" had sported sleeker suits, they might have found it a lot easier to move and, as a result, picked up the pace...

At this new hypothetical max speed, it would take about 91 days to walk the 6,786-mile (10,921 km) circumference of the moon. For context, it would take around 334 days to walk nonstop (i.e., not stopping to sleep or eat) around the 24,901-mile (40,075 km) circumference of Earth at this speed, although it is impossible to do so because of the oceans.

Obviously, it's not possible to walk nonstop for 91 days, so the actual walk around the moon would take much longer.
Of course, it's not that easy, with ongoing solar radiation, extreme temperatures, and the need to walk around mile-deep craters. Aidan Cowley, a scientific adviser at the European Space Agency, also pointed out to Live Science that you'd need a support vehicle following you with food, water, and oxygen (which could also double as shelter, "kind of like portable mini-bases."). But he also identified another issue: This type of mission would also require a huge amount of endurance training because of the demands of exercising in low gravity on your muscles and cardiovascular system. "You'd have to send an astronaut with ultra-marathon-level fitness to do it," Cowley said. Even then, walking at a top speed would be possible only for around three to four hours a day, Cowley said. So, if a person walked at 3.1 mph (5 km/h) for 4 hours a day, then it would take an estimated 547 days, or nearly 1.5 years to walk the moon's circumference, assuming your route isn't too disrupted by craters and you can deal with the temperature changes and radiation.

However, humans won't have the technology or equipment to accomplish such a feat until at least the late 2030s or early 2040s, Cowley said. "You'd never get an agency to support anything like this," Cowley said. "But if some crazy billionaire wants to try it, maybe they can pull it off."

A new NASA mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission due for launch this summer, aims to launch a spaceship that will directly punch an asteroid. Motherboard reports: The mission's target is an asteroid system called Didymos, which contains two space rocks that orbit each other. In late 2022, DART will forcefully impact the smaller asteroid in this system, a tiny moon called Dimorphos, so that scientists can assess the feasibility of knocking any space rocks that threaten Earth off course in the future. [...] DART will pioneer a subtler form of planetary defense, in which the trajectory of an asteroid is changed by a very small amount that becomes significant over time. Late next year, the mission will crash into Dimorphos at about seven kilometers per second. Shortly before the collision, the spacecraft will deploy a small satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency that is tasked with watching "the mess we make," [said Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the investigation team lead for DART].

Observations from the Italian satellite, as well as from powerful telescopes on Earth, will reveal just how much Dimorphos was affected by the crash. Rivkin and his colleagues expect the change in orbital speed to be small -- about one millimeter per second -- which would add up to a shortening of the orbital period by about 10 minutes. But even this very slight shift would be enough to redirect the trajectory of a hazardous asteroid that threatened Earth, provided scientists have a lead-time of a decade or two before the projected impact.

The mammoth cargo ship blocking one of the world's most vital maritime arteries was wrenched from the shoreline and set partially afloat again early on Monday morning, raising hopes that traffic could soon resume in the Suez Canal and limit the economic fallout of the disruption. From a report: Salvage teams, working on both land and water for five days and nights, were ultimately assisted by forces more powerful than any of the machines rushed to the scene to assist in the rescue: the moon the tides. As water levels swelled overnight, the hours spent digging and excavating millions of tons of earth around the Ever Green paid dividends as the ship slowly regained buoyancy, according to officials. Images on social media showed tugboat crews celebrating the victory in the predawn hours.

It appeared to be the culmination of one of the largest and most intense salvage operations in modern history, with the smooth functioning of the entire global trading system hanging in the balance. Each day the canal was blocked put global supply chains another day closer to a full-blown crisis. Vessels packed with the world's goods -- including cars, oil, livestock and laptops -- usually flow through the waterway with ease, supplying much of the globe as they traverse the quickest path from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the East Coast of the United States. With concerns the salvage operation could take weeks, some ships decided not to wait, U-turning to take the long way around the southern tip of Africa, a voyage that could add weeks to the journey and cost more than $26,000 a day in fuel costs. Traffic is beginning to resume.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Saturn's frigid moon Titan has long intrigued scientists searching for life in the Solar System. Its surface is coated in organic hydrocarbons, and its icy crust is thought to cover a watery ocean. An asteroid or comet slamming into the moon could theoretically mix these two ingredients, according to a new study, with the resulting impact craters providing an ideal place for life to get started.

The idea is "very exciting," says Lea Bonnefoy, a planetary scientist and Titan expert at the University of Paris. "If you have a lot of liquid water creating a temporary warm pool on the surface, then you can have conditions that would be favorable for life," she says. And, "If you have organic material cycling from the surface into the ocean, then that makes the ocean a bit more habitable."

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead NASA, settling on a longtime booster of the space program to lead the agency's return to the moon, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: If confirmed by the Senate, Nelson would lead the space agency as it partners with the new crop of private space companies to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars. A Senate staffer and a second source familiar with the decision told POLITICO that the administration has picked Nelson, and that the announcement will come on Friday. Both sources spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement. Nelson, 78, who himself spent six days in orbit when he flew to space in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, served as the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee during his 18 years in Congress, where he was instrumental in establishing many of NASA's current priorities.

NASA is counting down to what should be the final major test of the massive rocket it is building to put the first woman and the next man on the moon. From a report: More than 700,000 gallons of supercold propellant will fill up the tanks of the 212-foot tall core stage so that it can fire its four engines without actually blasting off. The goal is to simulate what will happen during its first launch, a mission to send a capsule with no crew around the moon and back. That lunar mission is currently targeted for November, says NASA's acting administrator Steve Jurczyk, who notes that this rocket "is going to be the most powerful rocket ever developed." The window for the rocket test opens on Thursday, March 18, at 3 pm EDT, and the core stage of the rocket is set up at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. In a firing test earlier this year, one of the rocket's engines had a failure that forced an early shutdown after only 67 seconds.

"We can understand exactly what happened in the first test and what cut it short," says Jurczyk, who explains that one test parameter had been set too narrowly and that's now been fixed. "Start up on the first test went really well, and so we're reasonably confident we're going to have a good test this week." The test should last around eight minutes, to simulate the entire flight profile of this rocket stage, he explains, but the minimum of what they'd like to see is around 4 minutes. If all goes well, the rocket will move on to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rest of the launch hardware is already waiting. Under the Trump administration, the agency had been aiming to get boots on the lunar surface by 2024, which would have been in a second term if the former president had been re-elected. That deadline was a goal that most in the space community felt was unrealistic. These days, NASA admits that there's no way to get people to the moon that quickly, given the recent appropriations given by Congress.

CBS News reports: Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week...

Establishing the ark would involve sending the 6.7 million samples to the moon in multiple payloads, then storing them in a vault beneath the surface, where they would be safe. The idea is to store the ark within a network of lava tubes — about 200 of which were discovered beneath the moon's surface in 2013... These tubes have remained untouched for three to four billion years, and scientists suggest they could provide much-needed protection from solar radiation, meteors or temperature changes on the surface. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said.

Based on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species — totaling 335 million samples — would take about 250 rocket launches. That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. "It's not crazy big," Thanga said. "We were a little bit surprised about that."

The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules.
"What amazes me about projects like this is that they make me feel like we are getting closer to becoming a space civilization," said the University of Arizona doctoral student leading the thermal analysis for the project, "and to a not-very-distant future where humankind will have bases on the moon and Mars."

Russia and China have signed an agreement to build and work on an "International Scientific Lunar Station" orbiting the Moon, the countries' space agencies announced Tuesday. From a report: The space powers had been in talks for months as Russia mulled over whether it would participate in NASA's Gateway program, a rival lunar space station to be built by a coalition of other countries in the next decade. The International Scientific Lunar Station that Russia and China will work on is "a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon," Roscosmos said in a statement. It will be designed to support a variety of research experiments "with the possibility of long-term unmanned operation with the prospect of a human presence on the moon," the statement said.

Like NASA, China has been courting international support for its own plans to put infrastructure on the Moon. It's also sent several robotic Chang'e missions to the Moon, including the first landing on the Moon's far side and a swift sample retrieval mission in December. The lunar space station agreement, signed virtually between China's space chief Zhang Kejian and Russia's space chief Dmitry Rogozin, marks the latest development in Beijing's efforts to explore the Moon alongside rivals like NASA, which is barred from working with China under a law passed by Congress in 2011.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Wednesday launched a search for eight people to join him as the first private passenger on a trip around the moon with Elon Musk's SpaceX. He had originally planned to invite artists for the weeklong voyage slated for 2023. Reuters reports: The rejigged project will "give more people from around the globe the chance to join this journey. If you see yourself as an artist, then you are an artist," Maezawa said. The first stage of the application process runs to March 14. The entrepreneur, who sold his online fashion business Zozo Inc to SoftBank in 2019, is paying the entire cost of the voyage on SpaceX's next-generation reusable launch vehicle, dubbed the Starship.

"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...

NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.

Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review: Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn't spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region called Cygnus X-1. (We now know the cosmic rays are produced by black holes. Back then, scientists disagreed about what it was: Stephen Hawking famously bet physicist Kip Thorne that this signal was not from a black hole, but he conceded in 1990.) Now, some 57 years later, scientists have learned that the black hole at Cygnus X-1 is much more massive than first believed -- forcing us to once again rethink how black holes form and evolve. This time, the observations were taken from Earth's surface. "To some extent, the result was serendipitous," says James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia, the lead author of the new study, published in Science. "We had not initially set out to remeasure the distance and black hole mass, but when we had analyzed our data, we realized its full potential."

Black holes are objects so massive that not even light, let alone physical matter, is supposed to escape its gravitational pull. Yet sometimes one inexplicably spews jets of radiation and ionized matter into space. Miller-Jones and his team wanted to investigate how matter is sucked into and expelled from black holes, so they took a closer look at Cygnus X-1. They observed the black hole for six days using the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of 10 radio telescopes sited across North America from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The resolution is comparable to what would be required to spot a 10-centimeter object on the moon, and it's the same technique that the Event Horizon Telescope used to snap the first photo of a black hole. Using a combination of measurements involving radio waves and temperatures, the team modeled the precise orbits of both Cygnus X-1's black hole and the massive supergiant star HDE 226868 (the two objects orbit each other). Knowing the orbits of each object allowed the team to extrapolate their masses -- in the case of the black hole, 21 solar masses, which is about 50% more than once thought.

Microsoft will connect its cloud computing Azure Space platform to the Spaceborne Computer-2, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise product promising to "deliver edge computing and [artificial intelligence] capabilities to the International Space Station (ISS)." Space.com reports: Spaceborne Computer-2 will launch to space Feb. 20 aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo craft that will also deliver tons of other supplies, experiments and food for the station's Expedition 64 astronauts. An Antares rocket will launch the Cygnus NG-15 cargo mission from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Spaceborne Computer-2's mission could last two or three years. Once the computer is up and running in orbit, researchers will be able to use the Azure cloud system to do intensive processing or to transmit results back to the device. The computer is based on HPE's Edgeline Converged Edge system designed to operate in harsh environments.

Growing plants in space, modeling dust storms on Earth to assist with Mars mission planning, and doing ultrasound medical imaging for astronaut health care are some of the many fields that the collaboration will address, the companies said in a press release. "The combined advancements of Spaceborne Computer-2 will enable astronauts to eliminate longer latency and wait times associated with sending data to-and-from Earth, to tackle research, and gain insights immediately for a range of projects," the release added.

The new project builds on the lessons learned from a predecessor proof-of-concept device, called Spaceborne Computer. This flew to the space station for a one-year mission in 2017 to investigate computer reliability in space, amid a harsh environment that includes high radiation and zero gravity. "The goal was to test if affordable, commercial off-the-shelf servers used on earth, but equipped with purposefully-designed software-based hardening features, can withstand the shake, rattle and roll of a rocket launch to space, and once there, seamlessly operate on the ISS," the press release said, adding the predecessor mission was a success. "Additionally, gaining more reliable computing on the ISS is just the first step in NASA's goals for supporting human space travel to the moon, Mars and beyond where reliable communications is a mission critical need," the release noted.

Friday the 71-year-old former lead singer of the band Kiss tweeted "I bought Dogecoin...six figures," to his 922,000 followers, along with other supportive tweets.

Saturday rap artist Snoop Dogg tweeted an image of "Snoop Doge" to his 19.2 million followers.

Later Elon Musk tweeted a picture from the Lion King with Musk's head appearing on a monkey holding up a monkey with Gene Simmons' head, holding up a monkey with Snoop Dogg's head, holding up a Shiba Inu dog (symbolizing Dogecoin). The text of the tweet to his 45.9 million followers: "So... it's finally come to this..." (He also later tweeted "Dogecoin to the Moooonn".)

Hours later Bloomberg reported that Dogecoin "rose 46% in the last 24 hours to 7.4 cents as of 1 p.m. in New York on Sunday," citing data from CoinMarketCap. In fact, Dogecoin is now approaching its all-time high, with a market value of $9.5 billion, making it the world's 10th-largest cryptocurrency. ("Bitcoin has also rallied this week, topping a record of $40,000, before paring gains.")

Business Insider calls Dogecoin a "meme-based cryptocurrency," noting it's "benefited" from the mania driven by Reddit's WallStreetBets. But they also point its year-to-date returns were about 1,032.91% (according to CoinDesk calculations).

"In a world gone mad with a pandemic and social upheaval, cryptocurrencies are having a moment," writes the Chicago Tribune: [Dogecoin] bubbled along for years at well under a penny, but in 2018 leapt to a high of nearly 2 cents as part of a larger cryptocurrency bubble. It didn't last — within a day it was worth less than 1 cent again — but that set a pattern in which everyone from TikTokkers to Musk could make the price jump with some online attention, all the while egged on by investors cheering, "To the moon!" Still, it took the recent stock run-up to catapult the currency to an unprecedented pinnacle, as commenters begged each other not to sell to keep the price high...

Ja'Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Chicago mayoral candidate who said he has "many thousands" of Dogecoins, sees the currency as a way for people without much money or financial expertise to get in the game with hedge funds and billionaires. "I like how these groups are coming together to really talk about what it means to play in cryptocurrency or stocks, to play in the market," he said. "It's great to see the bottom 99% come together to figure out how they can achieve wealth together and bridge that economic gap a bit."

But Eric Budish, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who studies cryptocurrencies, warned they are particularly vulnerable to bubbles because they are not tied to economic fundamentals in the way a stock price (ideally) reflects a company's earnings. As long as everyone holds, he said, the price will indeed go up. The problem is you can never be sure you've picked the right time to cash out. "When people try to sell, the price will come down," he said. "That means everybody wants to sell first. Nobody wants to be the last guy selling, and that's sort of the essence of a pump and dump...."

Nelson Morales, a Beach Park, Illinois, data center engineer who runs a Facebook group called Cryptocurrency of Greater Chicago, has his doubts about the currency. He worries about inexperienced investors getting drawn into a "dangerous, roulette-style pump" that could end with a disastrous crash.

Still, that hasn't stopped him from putting $50 of his own into Dogecoin. "I just want to have a canary in the tunnel," he said. "The canary's still alive. I'm impressed."

Friday the U.S. military released 400 other names it considered for Space Force's soliders (before settling on the word "guardians.")

Politico writes that the names were "crowdsourced" from the U.S. military's space workforce, and "Troops clearly had fun with their submissions, which included Space Cadet, Spacies, Anti-Gravity Gang, Homo Spaciens and Spacefolk." But the Space Force had more science fiction-inspired names it could have picked. Fleet Officer, Stormtrooper and Trekkies were both among the suggested names...

Many in the public still confuse NASA's civil space mission with the Space Force's national security focus, and a name like Ground-Based Astronauts or Apollonauts, harkening back to the space agency's moon landing program, would not help... One suggestion was Skywalker, though members of the Space Force at least in the short-term will be Earth-bound to operate the nation's GPS constellation and provide early missile warning.

Though the Space Force's workforce is expected to be highly-skilled in technical fields, its members may not have taken kindly to one suggestion: Geek...

Others perhaps took the suggestion process too literally, with one suggestion just saying "nothing because you wouldn't hear it in space anyway."
The UPI reminds readers that the U.S. Space Force "is now a full military branch that was allocated $15.4 billion in the 2021 budget and enlisted 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel who were all reassigned from the defunct Air Force Space Command."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration will keep Space Force... "They absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration. And we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force," Psaki said Wednesday at a White House news briefing...

Many experts were not surprised that President Joe Biden will keep Space Force as its own branch of the military because it would take an act of Congress to abolish it when it now has bipartisan support as a valuable tool in future military efforts....
The UPI also got this comment from a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The name is funny; it sounds like something that Trump just dreamed up," said Young. "But it's been talked about in national security circles for over a decade now. It's something that's just going to be important to have going forward."

And a co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution tells them bluntly that "The Space Force is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem, and that problem is the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by countries like Russia and China."

"NASA's rocket charged with taking the agency back to the moon fired its four main engines Saturday afternoon, but the test in Mississippi was cut short after a malfunction caused an automatic abort," reports Florida Today...

"We did get an MCF on engine four," a control room member said less than a minute into the test fire, using an initialism that stands for "major component malfunction...." The engines fired for 12 more seconds after the exchange before an automatic shutdown was called. The test was meant to last eight minutes — the full duration needed for the booster during its Artemis program liftoff — but only ran less than two minutes.

Prime contractor Boeing previously said the test would need to run at least 250 seconds, or more than four minutes, for teams to gather enough data to move forward with transport to Kennedy Space Center and launch sometime before the end of the year. An exact plan moving forward, which could mean a second test and delay before transport to Florida, had not yet been released by Saturday evening.
Or, as the Guardian reports, "It was unclear whether Boeing and Nasa would have to repeat the test, a prospect that could push the debut launch into 2022."

In a press conference tonight, a NASA official specifically addressed the question of whether or not a launch this year was still feasible. "I think it's still too early to tell. I think as we figure out what went wrong, we're going to know what the future holds. And right now we just don't know...

"Not everything went according to script today, but we got a lot of great data, a lot of great information. I have absolutely total confidence in the team to figure out what the anomaly was, figure out how to fix it, and then get after it again... Depending on what we learn, we might not have to do it again."

They added that there was no sign of engine damage, and emphasized to reporters another way to view the significance of this afternoon's event. "A rocket capable of taking humans to the moon, was firing, all four engines at the same time." And they also stressed that this afternoon's result was not a failure -- but a test. "When you test, you learn things..."

"We're going to make adjustments, and we're going to fly to the moon. That's what the Artemis program is all about, that's what NASA is all about, and that's what America is all about. We didn't get everything we wanted, and yeah, we're going to have to make adjustments. But this was a test, and this is why we test.

"If you're expecting perfection on a first test, then you've never tested before."

"The date is set," NASA had tweeted Friday, thanking its partners Boeing Space and Aerojet Rocketdyne for Saturday's "hot fire" test of the SLS's core stage.

"One of NASA's main goals for 2021 is to launch Artemis I, an uncrewed moon mission meant to show the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket can safely send humans to our lunar neighbor," reported CNET. "But first, NASA plans to make some noise with a fiery SLS test on Saturday."

Below is the original report that schwit1 had shared from Space.com: It's a critical test for NASA and the final step in the agency's "Green Run" series of tests to ensure the SLS rocket is ready for its first launch... In the upcoming hot-fire engine test, engineers will load the Boeing-built SLS core booster with over 700,000 gallons of cryogenic (that's really cold) propellant into the rocket's fuel tanks and light all four of its RS-25 engines at once. The engines will fire for 485 seconds (a little over 8 minutes) and generate a whopping 1.6 million pounds of thrust throughout the test...

Following the success of this hot fire test and subsequent uncrewed missions to the moon, "the next key step in returning astronauts to the moon and eventually going on to Mars," Jeff Zotti, the RS-25 program director at Aerojet Rocketdyne said during the news conference. NASA's SLS program manager John Honeycutt agreed.

"This powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency in the country's deep space mission to the moon and beyond," he said.

AmiMoJo quotes Universe Today: Other worlds aren't the only difficult terrain personnel will have to traverse in humanity's exploration of the solar system. There are some parts of our own planet that are inhospitable and hard to travel over. Inner Mongolia, a northern province of China, would certainly classify as one of those areas, especially in winter. But that's exactly the terrain team members from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC) had to traverse on December 16th to retrieve lunar samples from the Chang'e-5 mission. What was even more unique is that they did it with the help of exoskeletons.

Strangely enough, the workers wearing the exoskeletons weren't there to help with a difficult mountain ascent, or even pick up the payload of the lunar lander itself (which only weighed 2 kg). It was to set up a communications tent to connect the field team back to the main CASTC headquarters in Beijing. The exoskeletons were designed to help people carry approximately twice as much as they would be able to. Local state media described a single person carrying 50kg over 100m of the rough terrain without becoming tired. Setting up communications equipment isn't all the exoskeletons are good for though. They were most recently used by Chinese military logistics and medical staff in the Himalayas, where the country has been facing down the Indian military over a disputed line of control.

America's next president takes office in three weeks and two days. What changes should he make to America's space program? An opinion writer at Bloomberg tackles the question: Donald Trump badly wanted to be the president who sent Americans back to the moon. Instead, his administration has presided over Artemis, a lunar-landing program plagued by "uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight," according to a new watchdog report. Pieces of the program, including the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, are billions of dollars over budget, years past deadline and poised to eat into NASA's more promising projects. As a result, the U.S. space agency will almost certainly miss its goal of landing Americans on the moon again by 2024. President-elect Joe Biden inherits the task of deciding what to do next.

- He should focus on what has made the U.S. space program distinctive in recent years: the power of private competition...

- The government bears all the risk of missed deadlines and rising costs. A more efficient alternative is fixed-price contracts, in which a company keeps as profit whatever's left over after it completes its assigned task. Beginning in 2006, NASA has used such contracts to boost the development of private space companies capable of reaching the International Space Station. The initiative has worked far better than anyone could've expected. In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions. Today, the rocket delivers hardware and astronauts for companies and space agencies around the world. Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives....

Currently, there are a number of Artemis elements being developed under fixed-price contracts, including future lunar landers. The new administration should use a similar approach with as many aspects of the project as possible, thereby harnessing the efficiency and inventiveness of private competition.