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.

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. military's Space Force branch celebrated its one-year anniversary Friday by announcing that its members would now be known as "guardians". But the name was not universally greeted with respect and appreciation. Gizmodo announced the news with a headline which read "Space Force Personnel Will Be Called 'Guardians' Because Sure, Whatever," in an article which jokingly asks how this will affect the other ranks of this branch of the military. "Does someone get promoted from Guardian to Sentinel to Space Paladin to Tython, The Secessionist King Of Mars or something?" (Their article also suggests other names the U.S. military could have considered — like "moon buddies" or "rocketeers" — even at one point proposing "starship troopers".)

Forbes wrote that "The mockery arrived instantly and in great rivers..." But there was an interesting observation from a British newspaper (which is in fact, named The Guardian). "As the Associated Press put it, delicately: 'President-elect Joe Biden has yet to reveal his plans for the space force in the next administration.'" In fact, New York magazine called the new name for members of Space Force the "strongest case yet for its demise," in an article headlined "Abolish the Space Force." ("Maybe 'stormtrooper' was too obvious...")

In an apparent bid to be taken more seriously, on Friday the Space Force also shared an official anniversary greeting they'd received from Lee Majors, the actor who'd played a cybernetically-enhanced Air Force colonel in the 1970s action series The Six Million Dollar Man (who, in later seasons, befriended Bigfoot and the alien community who'd brought him to earth).

But Mashable added sympathetically that "It's been a long year, though. If people want to draw some nerdy joy from a U.S. military branch inadvertently referencing comic books and video games, let them have their fun."

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: In the first return of a lunar sample since the Soviets in 1976, the Chang'e 5 spacecraft landed Thursday in Inner Mongolia with 2 kilograms of material drilled from as much as two meters below the surface... On December 3, the ascent stage took off from the moon with the sample, docking with the orbiter three days later. After jettisoning the ascent stage the orbiter returned to Earth and was recovered December 17.

Here's a (fairly bad) video of the drilling and sample acquisition, and a video of the recovery, with an IR camera shot showing the hot lander and what appears to be a fox running past.
China's 23-day mission makes it only the third country to return samples from the moon, reports the South China Morning Post, while the drill sites are "believed to be much younger than that of the locations sampled by the Americans and the Russians..." Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday said space exploration knew no limits and called for new interplanetary exploration to turn China into a major power in space and realise national rejuvenation, as well as the peaceful use of space... The lander vehicle of the Chang'e 5 also for the first time unfolded a Chinese five-star national flag on the moon and will hold it there permanently, as it was abandoned after being used as a launch pad for the ascending vehicle...

With the successful completion of the mission, the Chang'e lunar programme aims to land Chinese astronauts on the nearest celestial body by 2030, and set up a permanent research space on the south pole of the moon in the future. China's space ambition goes beyond the moon. It sent a probe to Mars in July, and is preparing to launch a Chinese space station next year.

CNN reports: If it wasn't abundantly clear that content is king, especially in the Covid-19 era, Disney hammered that point home Thursday when it previewed dozens of new series and movies for its Disney+ streaming service. And investors are loving it. Shares of Disney jumped 13% Friday to a new all-time high. The stock is now up more than 20% this year, an impressive feat given that the pandemic has wreaked havoc on Disney's theme park business and forced its movie studios to delay big releases in theaters.

Investors are clearly betting that the streaming strength will offset any lingering weakness in other areas of the House of Mouse empire: Disney raised its forecast for subscriber growth and is upping prices for Disney+. Wall Street analysts rushed to upgrade Disney following Thursday's event. At least 13 analysts boosted their price targets on the stock Friday morning. While Disney initially predicted it would have 60-90 million subscribers by 2024, they're now predicting 230-260 million, CNN reported earlier this week. "The sheer scale of content announced on Thursday was a loud reminder to the rest of the streaming world that Disney+ had an amazing year, acting as a lifeboat to a company ravaged by coronavirus, and that Disney is fully committed to the future of streaming."

Besides the two new Star Wars series announced this week, Disney also announced several new series based on Marvel comic book characters:

• "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "WandaVision"

• Samuel L. Jackson (as Nick Fury) in "Secret Invasion"

• Don Cheadle as War Machine in "Armor Wars"

• More Marvel-based shows about Hawkeye, Moon Knight, "Ironheart" Riri Williams, She Hulk, and Ms. Marvel

• A series of shorts titled "I Am Groot" and a "Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special"

Other newly-announced Disney+ shows include:

• A live action Pinocchio starring Tom Hanks
• A reboot of "The Mighty Ducks" starring Emilio Estevez

The Verge reports that a power component failed on the Orion deep-space crew capsule that NASA hopes to launch (unmanned) from its Space Launch System (or SLS) in late 2021, in a mission called Artemis 1.

The problem? It's buried deep within one of the spacecraft's power/data units (or PDUs) within the adapter that connects the capsule to its power/propulsion trunk "service module," so there's no easy way to fix it: As many as nine months would be needed to take the vehicle apart and put it back together again, in addition to three months for subsequent testing, according to the presentation. Lockheed has another option, but it's never been done before and may carry extra risks, Lockheed Martin engineers acknowledge in their presentation. To do it, engineers would have to tunnel through the adapter's exterior by removing some of the outer panels of the adapter to get to the PDU. The panels weren't designed to be removed this way, but this scenario may only take up to four months to complete if engineers figure out a way to do it. A third option is that Lockheed Martin and NASA could fly the Orion capsule as is. The PDU failed in such a way that it lost redundancy within the unit, so it can still function. But at a risk-averse agency like NASA, flying a vehicle without a backup plan is not exactly an attractive option...

If engineers choose to remove Orion from its service module, the capsule's first flight on the SLS may be delayed past its current date of November 2021. But the SLS has experienced its own set of delays: it was supposed to fly for the first time in 2017 but hasn't done so yet. It's not clear if the SLS itself will make the November 2021 flight date either; a key test of the rocket coming up at the end of the year has been pushed back, with no new target date set. So it's possible that Lockheed Martin and NASA can fix Orion before the SLS is ready to fly.

Any further delays to Artemis I add uncertainty to NASA's lunar landing timeline. NASA is hoping to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024, though many experts are skeptical that such a mission can be pulled off in time. Artemis I is vulnerable to other possible delays, but the component failure adds one more level of uncertainty to when the Orion and SLS combo will get off the ground.

Friday on Instagram Jeff Bezos shared footage from NASA's test of Blue Origin's BE-7 engine, which he described approvingly as "a high-performance, additively manufactured liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen lunar landing engine with 10,000 lbf [pound-force] of thrust — deep throttling down to 2,000 lbf for a precise landing on the Moon."

The test brings the program's cumulative test time up to 1,245 seconds, reports Reuters: Blue Origin leads a "national team" as the prime contractor that it assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander. That team includes Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper. Blue Origin has vied for lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with rival billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX and Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win a contract to build NASA's next human lunar landing system to ferry humans to the moon in the next decade.

In April, NASA awarded a lunar lander development contract to Blue Origin's team worth $579 million, as well as two other companies: SpaceX which received $135 million to help develop its Starship system and Leidos-owned Dynetics which won $253 million. NASA is poised to pick two of the three companies "in early March" 2021 to continue building their lander prototypes for crewed missions to the moon beginning in 2024, an agency spokeswoman has said.

"A Mysterious Object Is Hurtling Towards Earth, and Scientists Don't Know What It Is," read Newsweek's headline on Monday, describing an object projected to pass 31,605 miles from earth. (One astronomer told them that was roughly 13% of the average distance between the earth and the moon).

But then a computer model calculated its past trajectories through space, according to the director for NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). "One of the possible paths for 2020 SO brought the object very close to Earth and the Moon in late September 1966," he said in a statement. "It was like a eureka moment when a quick check of launch dates for lunar missions showed a match with the Surveyor 2 mission."

On Wednesday NASA described how a team led by Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor/planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, tried to prove what they'd seen was a 54-year-old booster rocket: Through a series of follow up observations, Reddy and his team analyzed 2020 SO's composition using NASA's IRTF and compared the spectrum data from 2020 SO with that of 301 stainless steel, the material Centaur rocket boosters were made of in the 1960's. While not immediately a perfect match, Reddy and his team persisted, realizing the discrepancy in spectrum data could be a result of analyzing fresh steel in a lab against steel that would have been exposed to the harsh conditions of space weather for 54 years. This led Reddy and his team to do some additional investigation.

"We knew that if we wanted to compare apples to apples, we'd need to try to get spectral data from another Centaur rocket booster that had been in Earth orbit for many years to then see if it better matched 2020 SO's spectrum," said Reddy. "Because of the extreme speed at which Earth-orbiting Centaur boosters travel across the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to lock on with the IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set."

However, on the morning of Dec. 1, Reddy and his team pulled off what they thought would be impossible. They observed another Centaur D rocket booster from 1971 launch of a communication satellite that was in Geostationary Transfer Orbit, long enough to get a good spectrum. With this new data, Reddy and his team were able to compare it against 2020 SO and found the spectra to be consistent with each another, thus definitively concluding 2020 SO to also be a Centaur rocket booster...
So what happens next? 2020 SO made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1, 2020 and will remain within Earth's sphere of gravitational dominance — a region in space called the "Hill Sphere" that extends roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet — until it escapes back into a new orbit around the Sun in March 2021.

As NASA-funded telescopes survey the skies for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth, the ability to distinguish between natural and artificial objects is valuable as nations continue to explore and more artificial objects find themselves in orbit about the Sun.

Astronomers will continue to observe this particular relic from the early Space Age until it's gone.

Ben Bova "was the author of more than 120 works of science fact and fiction," according to Wikipedia, and was also a six-time winner of the Hugo Award. "He was also president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America."

Tor.com reports Bova has passed "due to complications from COVID-19 and a stroke..." Born in 1932, Bova brought experience to the science fiction genre that few authors could match: he worked as a technical editor for the U.S.'s Project Vanguard, the first effort on the part of the country to launch a satellite into space in 1958. Bova went on to work as a science writer for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, which built the heat shields for the Apollo 11 module, putting man on the Moon and ensuring that science fiction would continue to increasingly define the future.

It was around that time that Bova began writing and publishing science fiction. He published his first novel, The Star Conquerors, in 1959, and followed up with dozens of others in the following years, as well as numerous short stories that appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Analog Science Fact and Fiction, Galaxy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and others. In 1971, he took over the helm of Analog following the death of its long-running editor, John W. Campbell Jr. — a huge task, given Campbell's influence on the genre to that point... From there, he became the first editor of Omni Magazine until 1982, and consulted on television shows such as The Starlost and Land of the Lost.

While Bova wrote an episode of The Land of the Lost, his best-known works "involved plausible sciences about humanity's expansion into the universe, looking at how we might adapt to live in space..." notes Tor.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction argues that "the straightforwardness of Bova's agenda for humanity may mark him as a figure from an earlier era; but the arguments he laces into sometimes overloaded storylines are arguments it is important, perhaps absolutely vital, to make."

China's Chang'e spacecraft has lifted off from Oceanus Procellarum at 10:10 EST Thursday, carrying with it the first fresh lunar samples since 1976. Space.com reports: Six minutes later, the ascent spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, marking a huge milestone in the Chang'e 5 mission to return lunar samples to Earth. The ascent vehicle's job now is to meet up with the Chang'e 5 orbiter while still circling the moon, and then transfer its precious cargo to a return capsule for the journey home. That next stage is an extremely challenging rendezvousing and docking between the small ascent vehicle and the Chang'e 5 orbiter while orbiting the moon. The activity needs to be automated due to the time delay in communicating across the roughly 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) between the Earth and the moon.

The two spacecraft will begin a final approach sometime on Saturday (Nov. 5)and complete the docking 3.5 hours later. If all goes well, China will then prepare for the final leg of the journey to deliver the first lunar samples to Earth in 44 years. The lunar samples won't be coming home immediately however. The Chang'e 5 spacecraft will need to wait in lunar orbit for a number of days for a narrow window in which to fire its engines and head for Earth.

The careful timing of this trans-Earth injection maneuver will allow the orbiter to deliver the reentry module to Earth at the precise time in order to land in Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia -- the same site used by the China National Space Administration to return astronauts home aboard Shenzhou spacecraft. The journey back to Earth will last 112 hours -- just over four and a half days -- before the reentry attempt. As spacecraft returning from the moon are traveling faster than those reentering from low Earth orbit, such as trips from the International Space Station, the Chang'e 5 reentry module will bounce off the atmosphere once to help it slow down before taking a final, fiery plunge to Earth.