World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦

WSN SpaceNewscast on YouTube, with wide-ranging innovative space news coverage, and commentary from a fresh perspective. A great way to stay up-to-date!

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

I think Ross made a mistake here. I think he meant to say that the fictional movie matches the fictional stories being told about UFOs. 😂😂

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

Sorry, all the investment money is tied up chasing the AGI mirage.

[Quincy Lee @QuincyEdmundLee]

Power lines connecting different parts of the country would be a major up level for the US grid

During the 2014 polar vortex sharing capacity from Texas to Virginia would have saved tons of costs and misery

The US needs one fully integrated grid across all regional pockets

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

Picture reaching for something on a high shelf and coming up short. You don’t give up; instead, you find a stool, carry it over, and climb up. Buried in that action is something remarkable: You held the goal in your mind, identified what you needed, and executed a plan. No training required.

A study suggests bumble bees can do the same—the first demonstration of this kind of goal-directed problem-solving in an insect.

Learn more: https://t.co/srV4TqUTsp

[NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day @apod]

Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens.

Popularly called Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across.

In fact, the cosmic head-covering is more like an interstellar bubble, blown by a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution.

NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog. This sharp image is a combination of deep images taken in light emitted by hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue).

The star in the center of Thor's Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years.

Image Credit & Copyright: Josep Drudis, Christian Sasse

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

@TheLurioReport We don’t know yet what the concept of operations will be for blue origin.

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

Sentient plasma life 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Jason Colavito @JasonColavito]

“I certainly don’t have the compendium,” Grusch said when asked how many alien species are on Earth. “It’s a continuum from a corporeal bipedal type life to, you know, what I would consider is like sentient plasma life, but there are several that the US government is aware of.”

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

Millions of satellites will make orbits dangerously crowded- this is pure bullshit

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

.@elonmusk says SpaceX isn’t worried about space junk:

“Space is really big.”

“It’s not like space is going to get crowded. Space is enormous.”

“If you zoom in close, the satellite looks big, but relative to Earth, these satellites are so tiny you can’t even see them.”

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

seems like warrantless surveillance that should be unconstitutional

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Leonardo is a $17 billion defense contractor. It built a system called SignalTrace that clips sensors onto the license plate readers already mounted on street poles, overpasses, and police cars across the US. Every time you drive past one, the sensor grabs the Bluetooth and WiFi signals from every device in your car, ties them to your plate, and logs the time and location. Your phone, your AirPods, your kid's tablet. All of it goes into the same file. A friend rides with you once and their devices are linked to your plate.
Leonardo has sold this to police departments since at least 2023. There is no federal law covering it, no opt-out, and no warrant requirement.

My Take
None of the pieces here are new. Your phone has always broadcast a signal. The license plate cameras were already there. Leonardo just connected them and found a buyer. Nobody had to break a law or build anything from scratch. They assembled a surveillance system from parts already in place and sold it before anyone noticed.

Most people found out this week from a 404 Media investigation. Leonardo received the patent in 2024. By the time you hear about something like this, the deals are done and the sensors are on the poles. That's how it works now.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/serZi0IGnT

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

Apollo’s lunar lander was much closer to the final configuration than either of the SpaceX or blue origin vehicles involved in Artemis three

[Lunapolitics @PoliticsLuna]

Remember #Apollo 9? No? Have a Look at #Artemis III, by Kenneth Chang in @nytimes https://t.co/6wJzMItmdI #Lunapolitics 🇮🇹🇺🇸

[Ken Kirtland IV @KenKirtland17]

Artemis 3 thoughts:

Overall in the expected range with some dissapointments.

- Blue Origin is expected to fly a demo Mk1.5 lander with a habitat that the astronauts will enter.

- SpaceX will fly a modified V3 (not HLS) that they will dock with but not enter.

- Pressure Vessel for Starship HLS is already built

This is my main point of confusion. How is it that Blue Origin will have a functional and enterable cabin to their new lander that didn't even ecist as a drawing a few months ago, yet SpaceX's Starship which was contracted first, is currently flying, and has a pressure vessel built, will not? I can only understand this as not willing to, or they believe pulling up an HLS vehicle would risk delaying Artemis IV. This is likely since HLS demo landing is early 2028 and Artemis 3 is likely late 2027. Either way I'm not happy about that. Not the end of the world though.

What makes this worse is we are far past the point of the public needing to see some damn thing about the Starship HLS lander. The bar is on the floor here just show a picture of the pressure vessel that is built for crying out loud, not even a new render? They've had an interior built out for years the public hasn't been show. That is inexcusable, mainly from a public funding standpoint but hell even from a company that is about to IPO like show your moon lander?? Most prestigious contract win in ~50 years, 6 years in and you can't give a damn enough to have a picture at a media event? What is going on? Inexcusable.

Blue Origin rendered there new lander tho so thank you!

This was the time that the public needed some kind of confidence boost from Starship HLS and that opportunity was more than missed, it was avoided like the plague.

[Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut]

Artemis III… pretty shocked honestly. Maybe Artemis IV will be all women 🤷‍♂️

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

Ah shucks I can’t afford it 😰

[The Qubits Guy @Toy_Maestro]

Perfect, just for you @AJamesMcCarthy

- FOR SALE ---- A historic Cold War-era NASA satellite tracking facility turned astronomical research institute is listed for $30 million.
The 192-acre Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) in Rosman, NC was built in 1963. It supported the Gemini Program, helped capture the first images of Earth from space, and later served as a surveillance hub.
Hidden in Pisgah National Forest, this epic property includes massive radio dishes, underground tunnels, labs, a planetarium, 25+ telescopes, and more than 30 buildings.

[Toby Li @tobyliiiiiiiiii]

INTRODUCING THE CREW OF NASA ARTEMIS III

A collaboration between NASA and Italy, Artemis III will dock with SpaceX and Blue Origin lunar landers in low Earth orbit in 2027.

[Ryan Caton @dpoddolphinpro]

INTRODUCING: ARTEMIS III

Commander, Randy Bresnik 🇺🇸
Pilot, Luca Parmitano 🇮🇹
Mission Specialist 1, Frank Rubio 🇺🇸
Mission Specialist 2, Andre Douglas 🇺🇸

@NASASpaceflight

[Phys.org @physorg_com]

Earth’s earliest animals may have stayed almost unchanged for millions of years because they spread as clones, not competitors. @Cambridge_Uni @NatureEcoEvo https://t.co/RsqQ2WAmKY

[Jeff Berardelli @WeatherProf]

Wait. For. It. NASA animation shows Global temperatures warm slowly at first, then rapidly. Warming is accelerating! Here’s the truth. It’s real. It’s us. And we have to come to terms with it, and deal with reality, rather than deceiving ourselves, and hoping it goes away. It won’t… without intervention. #climate #globalwarming #science #climatechange

[World Spaceflight News 🇺🇦 @WSN_WorldSpace]

@SpacecoastPix @Acyn 💯

[Jessica Meir @Astro_Jessica]

Even the simple act of drinking water is more fun in microgravity. Surface tension in action, science in every sip!

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Oh my God! @METR_Evals’s coding benchmarks are saturated! 🤯
Mythos broke the METR graph 🤯

4 weeks later, out comes a new coding task, this time from @cognition: “FrontierCode Diamond remains unsaturated: the best performing model, Claude Opus 4.8, achieves a score of only 13.4%.

There is still a lots of headroom.

*Note that METR itself never panicked. It’s the Twitterverse that has egg on its face.

[Scott Manley @DJSnM]

I had some good success with guessing the Artemis II crew, knowing that Reid Wiseman had just stepped down as head of astronaut office, Canada was sending an astronaut and the wish to not have the crew going around the moon be all white dudes, that left a small number of highly qualified options.
Artemis III is to LEO, it's a different vibe. I see ESA is streaming the event, so that's a clue an ESA astronaut might be involved.
ESA previous said that a german astronaut would be the first to fly to the moon but with this being LEO, and a mission involving testing hardware the ESA jet pilots have an edge so I'd guess Luca Parmitano or Samantha Christoforetti.
From NASA, Andre Douglas was a backup for Artemis II and seems like an obvious choice.
Raja Chari has been working on astronaut development for HLS since his flight in 2022, he seems like someone already well positioned for this flight.
Jasmin Moghbeli has also been involved in HLS, not as much as Raja though.
Nicole Mann also has a lot of relevant experience, working with exploration systems development.
There's definintly some other great choices, Woody Hoburg was on the Orion heat shield review team and Artemis III has another new heat shield.
And I won't be surprised if there's choices not on this list.