According to NASA, the OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully collected 121.6 grams, or almost 4.3 ounces, of rock and dust from the asteroid Bennu. Universe Today reports: These samples have been a long time coming. The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) was approved by NASA back in 2011 and launched in September 2016. It reached its target, the carbonaceous Apollo group asteroid 101955 Bennu, in December 2018. After spending months studying the asteroid and reconnoitring for a suitable sampling location, it selected one in December 2019. After two sampling rehearsals, the spacecraft gathered its sample on October 20th, 2020. In September 2023, the sample finally returned to Earth.

For OSIRIS-REx to be successful, it had to collect at least 60 grams of material. With a final total that is double that, it should open up more research opportunities and allow more of the material to be held untouched for future research. NASA says they will preserve 70% of the sample for the future, including for future generations. The next step is for the material to be put into containers and sent to researchers. More than 200 researchers around the world will receive samples. Many of the samples will find their way to scientists at NASA and institutions in the US, while others will go to researchers at institutions associated with the Canadian Space Agency, JAXA, and other partner nations. Canada will receive 4% of the sample, the first time that Canada's scientific community will have direct access to a returned asteroid sample.

Texas-based Intuitive Machines' inaugural moon mission began early Thursday morning, heading toward what could be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years. From a report: Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander launched from Florida on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, beginning the IM-1 mission. "It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines. The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore," Intuitive Machines vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a press conference.

The IM-1 lander, named "Odysseus" after the mythological Greek hero, is carrying 12 government and commercial payloads -- six of which are for NASA under an $118 million contract. NASA leadership emphasized before the launch that "IM-1 is an Intuitive Machines' mission, it's not a NASA mission." But it marks the second mission under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver science projects and cargo to the moon with increasing regularity in support of the agency's Artemis crew program. The agency views CLPS missions as "a learning experience," NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science mission directorate, Joel Kearns, told press before the launch.
UPDATE: See their first images transmitted from space....

Technology made its mark on the Super Bowl ads this year. Microsoft purchased a long inspirational ad for Copilot, ending with the tagline "Your everyday AI companion." (Although another message made the opposite point. "With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands," an announcer says ironically -- while the ad shows the minions from Despicable Me 4.)

Google's ad showed how its Pixel 8 smartphone helps people with vision problems take photos. T-Mobile touted its internet service.

And for some reason CrowdStrike's ad about its endpoint security software took place in the Old West...

VW ended an ad looking at its history with a shot of its new electric vehicle, the ID.Buzz minivan, while Kia had its own heart-tugging ad touting their electric EV9.

And Pfizer ran a minute-long ad showing the history of medical progress, culminating with a pointer to their new domain, LetsOutdoCancer.com.

Even NASA got into the action, releasing a video showing an astronaut catching a pass in zero gravity. ("Including its solar panels, the Space Station is the same size as a regulation football field.")

And some people even tried watching the Super Bowl on their new Apple Vision Pro...

NASA's nearly $1 billion PACE mission launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early this morning, successfully making it to polar orbit -- a first for NASA since 1960. "When it's up and running, PACE will make key observations of Earth's atmosphere and climate and allow scientists to assess the health of our oceans like never before," notes Space.com. From the report: PACE, by the way, is the first U.S. government mission to launch to a polar orbit from Florida since Nov. 30, 1960. On that day, a Thor Able Star rocket took off on such a trajectory but failed, raining debris down on Cuba, some of which apparently killed a cow. Rather than risk further incidents, the U.S. decided to conduct all of its subsequent polar launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base) in California -- until now. That said, PACE wasn't the first mission of any type to launch to polar orbit from Florida's Space Coast in six decades: SpaceX had completed 11 such commercial missions before sending PACE on its way.

PACE's handlers will now work to get the 10.5-foot-long (3.2 meters) spacecraft and its various subsystems up to speed. After this checkout period, the satellite can begin its science work. That work will be done by three instruments. One of them, a spectrometer called the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), will map out the ocean's many hues in great detail and an unprecedented range, from near-infrared wavelengths all way to the ultraviolet. These colors are determined by the interaction of sunlight with particles in seawater, such as the chlorophyll produced by photosynthetic plankton, the base of the marine food web. So OCI will reveal quite a bit about the health and status of ocean ecosystems, according to PACE team members.

"PACE's unprecedented spectral coverage will provide the first-ever global measurements designed to identify phytoplankton community composition," NASA officials wrote in a PACE mission description. "This will significantly improve our ability to understand Earth's changing marine ecosystems, manage natural resources such as fisheries and identify harmful algal blooms." The satellite's other two instruments are polarimeters. They'll measure how the oscillation of light in a plane, known as its polarization, is affected by passage through the ocean, clouds and aerosols (particles suspended in the atmosphere). "Measuring polarization states of UV-to-shortwave light at various angles provides detailed information on the atmosphere and ocean, such as particle size and composition," NASA officials wrote in the mission description.

Citing congressional budget gridlock, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced that it will lay off 530 employees, or about 8% of its workforce. SpaceNews reports: In a statement, JPL said it would lay off about 530 employees, as well as 40 contractors, after exhausting other efforts to reduce costs given potential spending reductions for NASA and specifically for Mars Sample Return (MSR), a major program for the Pasadena, California-based center. "After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of a [fiscal year 2024] appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs," JPL stated.

"While we still do not have an FY24 appropriation or the final word from Congress on our Mars Sample Return (MSR) budget allocation, we are now in a position where we must take further significant action to reduce our spending," JPL Director Laurie Leshin wrote in a memo. "In the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn't need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait."

The second of a pair of close flybys adds to the treasure trove of data that scientists have about Jupiter's volcanic moon. From a report: On Saturday, NASA's Juno orbiter got a second close-up with Io, Jupiter's third-largest moon and the most volcanic world of our solar system. The Juno spacecraft, which arrived at the gas giant in 2016, is on an extended mission to explore Jupiter's rings and moons. Its latest flyby, which complemented the mission's first close approach on Dec. 30, yielded even more views of the moon's hellish landscape.

Io's violent expulsions of sulfur and additional compounds give the moon its orange, yellow and blue hues. The process is similar to what happens around the volcanoes of Hawaii or the geysers in Yellowstone National Park, according to Scott Bolton, a physicist at the Southwest Research Institute who leads the Juno mission. "That must be what Io is like -- on steroids," he said. He added that it probably smells like those places, too.

Released on Sunday, the most recent shots of Juno are already ripe for discovery. Dr. Bolton saw on the surface of Io what appears to be a double volcanic plume spewing into space -- something that Juno has never caught before. Other scientists are noticing new lava flows and changes to familiar features spotted in past space missions like the Galileo probe, which made numerous close flybys of Io in the 1990s and 2000s. "That's the beauty of Io," said Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University who is not part of the Juno mission, but collaborates with the team on Io observations. Unlike our own moon, which remains frozen in time, Dr. Radebaugh said, "Io changes every day, every minute, every second."

The "technology building blocks" for space solar are already available, reports Clean Technica. "It's just a matter of scaling, systems integration, and adjustments for space-hardiness."

And several groups are looking at it — including the U.S. Space Force To help push costs down, the California Institute of Technology has proposed a sandwich-type solar module that integrates solar harvesting along with conversion to a radio frequency into one compact package, accompanied by a built-in antenna. Last month researchers at the school wrapped up a months-long, in-space test of different types of solar cells. Another approach is illustrated by the Michigan startup Virtus Solis, an industry partner of the University of Bristol. Last June the company and the school received £3.3 million in funding from the UK Net Zero Innovation program, for developing an open-source model for testing the performance of large, centralized antennas in space. "The concept depends upon the use of gigascale antenna arrays capable of delivering over 2GW of power from space onto similar gigascale antenna arrays either at sea or on the ground," the school explained.

As for how such a thing would be launched into space, that's where the U.S. Space Force comes in. Last August, the Space Force awarded a small business contract to the U.S. startup Orbital Composites. The company is tasked with the mission of developing its patented "quantum antenna" and in-space fabrication tools for secure communications in space applications, including space-to-space as well as space-to-Earth and vice versa. The basic idea is to let 3D printing doing much of the work in space. According to Orbital, in-space fabrication would save more than 100 times the cost of applying conventional fabrication methods to large-scale orbiting antennas. "By harnessing the potential of In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), the company eyes the prospect of creating significantly larger space antennas," Orbital Composites explains. "By fabricating antennas in space, larger and more complex designs are possible that eliminate the constraints of launch and rocket fairings...."

If you're guessing that a hookup between Virtus and Orbital is in the works, that's a good guess. On February 1, at the SpaceCOM conference in Orlando, Florida, Virtus Solis let slip that it is working with Orbital Composites on a space solar pilot project. If all goes according to plan, the project will be up and running in 2027, deploying Virtus's robot-enabled fabrication system with Orbital's 3D printing. As of this writing the two companies have not posted details, but Space News picked up the thread. "The 2027 mission is designed to showcase critical power-generation technologies including in-space assembly of solar panels and transmission of more than one kilowatt to Earth," Space News explained. "The news release calls the 2027 mission "a precursor to large-scale commercial megawatt-class solar installations in space by 2030...."

To be clear, Orbital's press release about its new Space Force quantum antenna contract does not mention anything in particular about space solar. However, the pieces of the puzzle fit. Along with the Virtus and Grumman connections, in October of 2022 Orbital won a small business contract through SpaceWERX, the Space Force's innovative technologies funding arm, to explore the capabilities of ISAM systems.
"SpaceWERX comes under the umbrella of the U.S. Air Force's AFWERX innovation branch, which has developed a program called SSPIDR, short for Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project," the article points out. (While Virtus believes most space-based solar power systems could deliver megawatt hours of electricity at prices comparable to today's market.)

"Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback," reports Mashable, "with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon." Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... "Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...

The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."

Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."

NASA is starting to take its first steps toward opening a commercial pathway to Mars. From a report: This week, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a new solicitation to the industry titled "Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies." This is a request for proposals from the US space industry to tell NASA how they would complete one of four private missions to Mars, including delivering small satellites into orbit or providing imaging services around the red planet.

"The Mars Exploration Program Draft Plan through the next two decades would utilize more frequent lower cost missions to achieve compelling science and exploration for a larger community," the document states. "To realize the goals of the plan, government and US industry would partner to leverage current and emerging Earth and lunar products and commercial services to substantially lower the overall cost and accelerate leadership in deep space exploration."

NASA will pay proposers $200,000 for a study of one of the reference missions or $300,000 for a maximum of two studies. The space agency said it intends to award "multiple" contract awards. In its 496-page solicitation, NASA outlines four "design reference missions" that companies can bid on. Basically, the space agency is asking companies how they would go about fulfilling these tasks.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has been selected by Starlab to launch its private space station into orbit. "SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches, and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." Space.com reports: Today's announcement didn't give a target launch date. But NASA and Starlab's developers want the four-person commercial station to be up and running before 2030, when the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to cease operations (though that retirement date is apparently not set in stone). [...] The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of hauling up to 150 tons to low Earth orbit. It will send the fully outfitted Starlab up in just one launch, as Taylor noted above.

"Starlab's single-launch solution continues to demonstrate not only what is possible, but how the future of commercial space is happening now," Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, said in the same statement. "The SpaceX team is excited for Starship to launch Starlab to support humanity's continued presence in low Earth orbit on our way to making life multiplanetary," Ochinero added.

The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..." First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane — about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall — will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation...

Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits.
"Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out.

Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily.

"At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy." "This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Björn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets."

"Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds."

However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor...

"Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"A photo of Japan's robotic moon lander shows that though the spacecraft did make the quarter-million-mile journey to the lunar surface, it landed upside down..." reports Mashable. Because of the lander's now-apparent inverted position, its solar panels weren't oriented correctly to generate power, according to the space agency. The team elected to conserve power by shutting down the spacecraft about 2.5 hours after landing.

What's perhaps as surprising as the photo of the lander is how it was taken. Two small rovers separated from the crewless mothership just prior to touchdown. It was one of these baseball-sized robots that was able to snap the image of the spacecraft with its head in the moondust. The rover, built with the help of Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy, is a sphere that splits in half to expose a pair of cameras that point front and back. The two hemispheres also become the rover wheels. "The company is perhaps most famous for originally creating the Transformers, the alien robots that can disguise themselves as machines," said Elizabeth Tasker, who provided commentary on the moon landing in English on Jan. 20.

The space agency still isn't entirely sure what went wrong. At about 55 yards above the ground, the spacecraft performed an obstacle avoidance maneuver, part of the pinpoint-landing demonstration. Just prior to this step, one of the two main engines stopped thrusting, throwing the lander's orientation off. JAXA is continuing to investigate what caused the engine problem... Despite the fact that the spacecraft is now sleeping, the SLIM team hasn't lost hope for a recovery. With solar panels facing west, the lander still has a chance of catching some rays and generating power. If the angle of sunlight changes, SLIM could still be awakened, mission officials said.

That would have to happen soon, though. Night will fall on the moon on Feb. 1, bringing about freezing temperatures. The spacecraft was not built to withstand those conditions.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has now passed over the landing site at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km) — and snapped their own photograph which they say shows "the slight change in reflectance around the lander due to engine exhaust sweeping the surface."

UPI reports: New research published Friday offers hope that the sediment samples picked up by the Mars rover Perseverance could reveal traces of life — if it ever existed on the Red Planet.

The rover already has confirmed an ancient lake on Mars. The new research published in Science Advances shows the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance verified lake sediments, is theorized to have been filled with water that deposited layers of sediments on the crater floor. "The delta deposits in Jezero Crater contain sedimentary records of potentially habitable conditions on Mars," the research article's abstract stated. "NASA's Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero western delta with a suite of instruments that include the RIMFAX ground penetrating radar, which provides continuous subsurface images that probe up to 20 meters below the rover."

The research by UCLA and the University of Oslo shows the lake subsequently shrank and the sediments carried by a river formed a large delta... [R]adar images revealed sediments shaped like lake deposits on Earth. Their existence was confirmed by the new research.

cusco writes: After three years and 72 flights of its 5-flight mission the mission of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is finally over. Images show that Ingenuity suffered damage to one of its rotor blades and will not be able to take off again. NASA's press release, also shared by cusco: Ingenuity landed on Mars Feb. 18, 2021, attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover and first lifted off the Martian surface on April 19, proving that powered, controlled flight on Mars was possible. After notching another four flights, it embarked on a new mission as an operations demonstration, serving as an aerial scout for Perseverance scientists and rover drivers. In 2023, the helicopter executed two successful flight tests that further expanded the team's knowledge of its aerodynamic limits.

[...] Over an extended mission that lasted for almost 1,000 Martian days, more than 33 times longer than originally planned, Ingenuity was upgraded with the ability to autonomously choose landing sites in treacherous terrain, dealt with a dead sensor, cleaned itself after dust storms, operated from 48 different airfields, performed three emergency landings, and survived a frigid Martian winter.

Designed to operate in spring, Ingenuity was unable to power its heaters throughout the night during the coldest parts of winter, resulting in the flight computer periodically freezing and resetting. These power "brownouts" required the team to redesign Ingenuity's winter operations in order to keep flying.

With flight operations now concluded, the Ingenuity team will perform final tests on helicopter systems and download the remaining imagery and data in Ingenuity's onboard memory. The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.

NASA announced Friday that it finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth's atmosphere into the Utah desert. The Guardian reports: The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a "potentially hazardous" because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth by 2300. Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved soon after the canister landed in September, but additional material remaining inside a sampler head that proved difficult to access.

After months of wrestling with the last two of 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston managed to get them dislodged. "It's open! It's open!" Nasa's planetary science division posted on Twitter/X. The division also posted a photograph of dust and small rocks inside the canister. According to the Los Angeles Times, the team designed custom tools made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel to pry it open -- all without the samples being contaminated by Earthly air. Nasa said it will now analyze the nine-ounce sample.

"Good news..." NASA posted Saturday night on X. "We've reestablished contact with the Mars Helicopter..."

After a two-day communications blackout, NASA had instructed its Perseverance Mars rover "to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity's signal" — and apparently they did the trick. "The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout" during the helicopter's record-breaking 72nd flight.

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared this report from NPR: Communications broke down on Thursday, when the little autonomous rotorcraft was sent on a "quick pop-up vertical flight," to test its systems after an unplanned early landing during its previous flight, the agency said in a status update on Friday night. The Perseverance rover, which relays data between the helicopter and Earth during the flights, showed that Ingenuity climbed to its assigned maximum altitude of 40 feet, NASA said.

During its planned descent, the helicopter and rover stopped communicating with each other...
Even before it came back online, RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) pointed out that the Mars copter has done this before. "Batteries dieing, resulting in a communications re-set, If I remember correctly."

Space.com also noted additional alternatives: "Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.

Ingenuity has stayed aloft for more than 128 minutes and covered a total of 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) during its 72 Mars flights, according to the mission's flight log.

The Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of GN-z11 in 2016 marked it as the most distant galaxy known at that time, notable for its unexpected luminosity despite its ancient formation just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Now, in a paper published in Nature, astrophysicist Roberto Maiolino proposes that this brightness could be due to a supermassive black hole, challenging current understanding of early black hole formation and growth. NPR reports: This wasn't just any black hole. First -- assuming that the black hole started out small -- it could be devouring matter at a ferocious rate. And it would have needed to do so to reach its massive size. "This black hole is essentially eating the [equivalent of] an entire Sun every five years," says Maiolino. "It's actually much higher than we thought could be feasible for these black holes." Hence the word "vigorous" in the paper's title. Second, the black hole is 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun, and it was in place just 400 million years after the dawn of the universe. "It is essentially not possible to grow such a massive black hole so fast so early in the universe," Maiolino says. "Essentially, there is not enough time according to classical theories. So one has to invoke alternative scenarios."

Here's scenario one -- rather than starting out small, perhaps supermassive black holes in the early universe were simply born big due to the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas. Scenario two is that maybe early stars collapsed to form a sea of smaller black holes, which could have then merged or swallowed matter way faster than we thought, causing the resulting black hole to grow quickly. Or perhaps it's some combination of both. In addition, it's possible that this black hole is harming the growth of the galaxy GN-z11. That's because black holes radiate energy as they feed. At such a high rate of feasting, this energy could sweep away the gas of the host galaxy. And since stars are made from gas, it could quench star formation, slowly strangling the galaxy. Not to mention that without gas, the black hole wouldn't have anything to feed on and it too would die.

"It's the third all-private astronaut mission to the International Space Station," writes NASA — and they're expected to start boarding within the next hour!

Watch it all on the official stream of NASA TV.

More details from Ars Technica: The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning. This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.
NASA reports that the crew "will spend about two weeks conducting microgravity research, educational outreach, and commercial activities aboard the space station." NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said "During their time aboard the International Space Station, the Ax-3 astronauts will carry out more than 30 scientific experiments that will help advance research in low-Earth orbit. As the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the space station, the Ax-3 crew is proof that the possibility of space unites us all...."

The Dragon spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station's Harmony module as early as 4:19 a.m. [EST] Saturday. Hatches between Dragon and the station are expected to open after 6 a.m. [EST], allowing the Axiom crew to enter the complex for a welcoming ceremony and start their stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.... The Ax-3 astronauts are expected to depart the space station Saturday, February 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.

With NASA's Artemis moon program now targeting September 2025 for its Artemis 2 mission and September 2026 for Artemis 3, some members of Congress are concerned about the potential repercussions, particularly with China's growing ambitions in lunar exploration. "For the United States and its partners not to be on the moon when others are on the moon is unacceptable," said Mike Griffin, former NASA administrator. "We need a program that is consistent with that theme. Artemis is not that program. We need to restart it, not keep it on track." Space.com reports: The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing about the new Artemis plan today (Jan. 17), and multiple members voiced concern about the slippage. "I remind my colleagues that we are not the only country interested in sending humans to the moon," Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) said in his opening remarks. "The Chinese Communist Party is actively soliciting international partners for a lunar mission -- a lunar research station -- and has stated its ambition to have human astronauts on the surface by 2030," he added. "The country that lands first will have the ability to set a precedent for whether future lunar activities are conducted with openness and transparency, or in a more restricted manner."

The committee's ranking member, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), voiced similar sentiments. "Let me be clear: I support Artemis," she said in her opening remarks. "But I want it to be successful, especially with China at our heels. And we want to be helpful here in the committee in ensuring that Artemis is strong and staying on track as we look to lead the world, hand-in-hand with our partners, in the human exploration of the moon and beyond." Several other committee members stressed that the new moon race is part of a broader competition with China, and that coming in second could imperil U.S. national security.

"It's no secret that China has a goal to surpass the United States by 2045 as global leaders in space. We can't allow this to happen," Rich McCormick (R-GA) said during the hearing. "I think the leading edge that we have in space technology will protect the United States -- not just the economy, but technologies that can benefit humankind." And Bill Posey (R-FL) referred to space as the "ultimate military high ground," saying that whoever leads in the final frontier "will control the destiny of this Earth."