CassSpaceChick

Aspiring to innovate spaceflight tech 🚀 Stargazer 🌌 Sci-fi Enthusiast @CassAstral

[Mario Livio @Mario_Livio]

The James Webb Space Telescope (@NASAWebb) has unveiled numerous stars formerly hidden by clouds of dust in a stellar nursery known as NGC 7129, which resides about 3,300 light-years from Earth.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Jensen Huang: agents will use software better than people do

"These agents are going to be better users of tools than us. And the reason for that is we know 10, 15% of the features of any application. The agent knows every single feature."

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Full video on "Windows" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

[Spaceflight Now @SpaceflightNow]

The deorbit burn is now underway to slow Dragon Freedom and begin Crew 12's descent to a splashdown off the coast of California.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

@Nplet8 @pmtiegs @Combat_learjet @NASAAdmin @boston25 That’s hydrazine, it burns clear

[Avid Space @LabPadre]

After a day in space and a month at sea Ship 40 is back in Texas!

[𝐇𝐓𝐀𝐑𝚰𝐇𝐂 🌈☀️ @Raptor_54321]

The Starshit Odyssey is almost over,
Entering the channel, just miles away from the port of Ithac...Brownsville!
What a view! Welcome back S40!

[Mookafish @Mookafish]

Ship 40 flew to the other side of the world through space and sailed back. What a journey.

[International Space Station @Space_Station]

.@NASA is streaming the undocking of @SpaceX Crew-12 aboard Dragon from the space station at 8:05 a.m. EDT today for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. https://t.co/JiWCV6tzOW

[Gene @SpaceBasedFox]

@Mookafish They need to put it in a museum after all the inspections

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

Erik's work on Atlantis, the human outpost on Neptune's moon Triton, makes me want to go forth and build wonders.

[eVTOL Daily @archer__daily]

Prospects for Joby's first passenger demonstration flights in 2026 👀
$ACHR eVtol $JOBY Aviation Archer
https://t.co/KvMVrPRtcD

[Ian Sweigart🌊🐉 @Sweigart_Ian27]

being stupid on Twitter is insane cuz wdym these are both suborbital

[Mission Status🚀🛰️🪐💫⭐ @ARealRocketMan]

The comparison between NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) and SpaceX's Starship highlights two entirely different eras, design philosophies, and funding models for human space exploration. While SLS is an operational, government-driven, expendable rocket built for near-term reliability, Starship represents a privately developed, fully reusable architecture aiming to radically lower the cost of spaceflight.

The way both rockets approach deep space exploration defines their respective architectures:

SLS (Simulation-Rich)
NASA cannot afford highly visible, publicly funded failures. Therefore, SLS relies heavily on extensive virtual simulations, component stress-testing, and years of strict qualification before ever rolling to the pad. This led to a near-perfect maiden flight (Artemis I) and a successful crewed lunar flyby on Artemis II.

Starship (Hardware-Rich)
SpaceX embraces "explosive iteration". They build prototypes rapidly, flying them to failure to uncover "unknown unknowns" in real flight conditions. While early prototypes famously exploded, this method allowed SpaceX to advance swiftly—culminating in a milestone flight where Starship officially became operational, delivering 26 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The SLS Advantage
SLS can launch NASA's heavily protected Orion crew capsule and push it directly onto a Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) trajectory toward the Moon without needing to refuel in orbit.

The Starship Advantage
Due to its massive 120-ton dry mass, Starship cannot reach the Moon on its own; it requires multiple orbital refuelings via tanker variants in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). However, once refueled, Starship can deliver a massive volume of cargo or humans, acting more like a "flying mansion" compared to Orion's small capsule.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Mars is ripping its own moon apart right now, and you can see the damage. Those long parallel grooves across Phobos used to be blamed on an ancient asteroid impact. NASA modeling now says they're stretch marks, stress fractures from Mars' gravity slowly tearing the moon open in real time.

The physics is a mirror image of our own Moon. Phobos circles Mars in 7 hours 39 minutes, but Mars takes 24 hours 37 minutes to spin once, so the moon outruns its own planet. That means the tidal bulge Phobos raises on Mars always trails behind it, tugging backward like a brake. Phobos loses altitude, about 6 feet per century.

Earth's Moon runs the same equation with the clocks reversed. It orbits slower than Earth spins, so our bulge sits ahead of it and slingshots it outward at 3.8 cm a year. Identical physics, and one moon gets exiled while the other gets eaten.

Phobos probably never hits Mars intact, though. Spacecraft data suggests it's a rubble pile, loose debris wrapped in roughly 330 feet of powdery regolith, barely holding itself together. Long before it reaches the surface it crosses the Roche limit, the altitude where Mars' tides overpower the moon's own gravity, and it shreds into a ring.

Models say that ring could last up to 100 million years before raining down on the Martian equator. Mars would become the only rocky planet in the solar system with rings, and anyone around at the time gets to watch them form.

Phobos is already the closest moon to its planet anywhere in the solar system, just 3,700 miles up. Every groove on that surface is the countdown, running at 6 feet per hundred years.

[Chris Ray @itschrisray]

Great thread that shows just how entrenched $RKLB is in the space industry.

These are just developments from the past WEEK…

[Latest in space @latestinspace]

69 years ago today, humanity launched the world's first artificial satellite 🛰️ Sputnik 1

[Oliver Walker-Jones @oliwalkerjones]

This looks almost unreal, but it’s there, it’s real and it’s ready to roll $JOBY

[ArianeGroup @ArianeGroup]

Today, that heritage protects Rosalind Franklin's 3.80-metre shield, the largest ever built in Europe. 🛡️

#RocketMakers #Civil #ExoMars

[ArianeGroup @ArianeGroup]

ExoMars, born from three missions: Beagle2 (2003), Huygens (2005), Schiaparelli (2016). Each one built ArianeGroup's expertise in atmospheric entry.

[Let's Talk Joby @tb_travis]

$JOBY Manufacturing...yet another MOAT! 💪

Joby's Strategic Manufacturing Alliance with @Toyota is wildly underestimated, the breadth of their expertise in building eVTOL is unrivaled.

Here's my take on recent clues that Joby may be scaling eVTOLs soon!
https://t.co/0X2ICG66Cn