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NASA Tracking Plane-Sized Asteroid Approaching the Earth Today
Jul 17, 2025 at 9:28 AM EDT
NASA is monitoring a plane-sized asteroid zooming past the Earth on Thursday at around 13,600 miles per hour.
The space rock known as "2022 YS5" made its closest approach at around 4.15 million miles from the Earth, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The asteroid was measured to be anywhere between around 95 to 204 feet in diameter. according to the JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The national space agency is also tracking a couple of other plane-sized asteroids that are expected to zip past the Earth this weekend.
An asteroid called "2018 BY6" that's around 210 feet in diameter is due to come as close as within 3.27 million miles from our planet on Saturday.
Another space rock, called "2025 ME92," that's around 95 feet in diameter is expected to make its closest approach at 3.19 million miles from the Earth on Sunday, according to the JPL.
Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
The orbits of asteroids bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that range in size from about 10 feet to almost 25 miles across.
Back in February, data from the CNEOS found that the impact probability of the asteroid known as "2024 YR4" in 2032 was at 3.1 percent, which was "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger," the space agency noted at the time.
Further observations since saw NASA conclude that "the object poses no significant impact risk to Earth in 2032 and beyond," the space agency said in a blog post in June.
Experts from the JPL have been able to refine their knowledge of where the asteroid will be on December 22, 2032 by nearly 20 percent.
"As a result, the asteroid's probability of impacting the Moon has slightly increased from 3.8 percent to 4.3 percent," NASA said, noting that "in the small chance that the asteroid were to impact, it would not alter the Moon's orbit."
The space agency says: "Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now too far away to observe with either space or ground-based telescopes.
NASA expects to make further observations when the asteroid's orbit around the Sun brings it back into the vicinity of Earth in 2028."
"The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don't bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact," NASA explains.
However, a small portion of them known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) do merit closer monitoring.
Measuring around 460 feet in size, PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth's orbit around the sun, NASA explains.
"Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs," Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, told Newsweek.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none are likely to hit Earth any time soon.
"The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth.
We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of the CNEOS, told Newsweek.
https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-tracking-plane-sized-asteroid-approaching-earth-2100193
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch/next-five-approaches/
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/nasa-program-builds-bridge-from-military-to-civilian-careers-for-johnson-team-members/
https://www.nasa.gov/careers/skillbridge/
NASA Program Builds Bridge From Military to Civilian Careers for Johnson Team Members
Jul 17, 2025
Of all the possible entry points to NASA, the agency’s SkillBridge Program has been instrumental in helping servicemembers transition from the military and into civilian careers.
Offered in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD), the program enables individuals to spend their final months of military service working with a NASA office or organization.
SkillBridge fellows work anywhere from 90 to 180 days, contributing their unique skillsets to the agency while building their network and knowledge.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston hosted NASA’s first SkillBridge fellow in 2019, paving the way for dozens of others to follow.
SkillBridge participants are not guaranteed a job offer at the end of their fellowship, but many have gone on to accept full-time positions with NASA.
About 25 of those former fellows currently work at Johnson, filling roles as varied as their military experiences.
Miguel Shears retired from the Marine Corps in November 2023. He ended his 30 years of service as the administration, academics, and operations chief for the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, where he was also an adjunct professor.
Shears completed a SkillBridge fellowship with FOD in the summer and fall of 2023, supporting the instructional systems design team.
He was hired as a full-time employee upon his military retirement and currently serves as an instructional systems designer for the Instructor Training Module, Mentorship Module, and Spaceflight Academy.
He conducts training needs analysis for FOD, as well.
Ever Zavala was very familiar with Johnson before becoming a SkillBridge fellow.
He spent the last three of his nearly 24-year Air Force career serving as the deputy director of the DoD Human Spaceflight Payloads Office at Johnson.
His team oversaw the development, integration, launch, and operation of payloads hosting DoD experiments on small satellites and the International Space Station.
He also became a certified capsule communicator, or capcom, in December 2022, and was the lead capcom for SpaceX’s 28th commercial resupply services mission to the orbiting laboratory.
Zavala’s SkillBridge fellowship was in Johnson’s Astronaut Office, where he worked as a capcom, capcom instructor, and an integration engineer supporting the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program.
He was involved in developing a training needs analysis and agency simulators for the human landing system, among other projects.
He officially joined the center team as a full-time contractor in August 2024. He is currently a flight operations safety officer within the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) and continues to serve as a part-time capcom.
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Carl Johnson thanks his wife for helping him find a path to NASA.
While she was a Pathways intern — and his girlfriend at the time — she gave him a tour of the center that inspired him to join the agency when he was ready to leave the Army.
She helped connect him to one of the center’s SkillBridge coordinators and the rest is history. Johnson was selected for a SkillBridge fellowship in the Dynamic System Test Branch.
From February to June 2023, he supported development of the lunar terrain vehicle ground test unit and contributed to the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS), which simulates reduced gravity for astronaut training.
Johnson officially joined the center team as an electrical engineer in the Engineering Directorate’s Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division in September 2023.
He is currently developing a new ARGOS spacewalk simulator and training as an operator and test director for another ARGOS system. Johnson holds an electrical engineering degree from the United States Military Academy.
He was on active duty in the Army for 10 years and concluded his military career as an instructor and small group leader for the Engineer Captains Career Course.
In that role, he was responsible for instructing, mentoring, and preparing the next generation of engineer captains.
Kevin Quinn served in the Navy for 22 years. His last role was maintenance senior chief with Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31, known as “the Dust Devils.”
Quinn managed the operations and maintenance of 33 aircraft, ensuring their readiness for complex missions and contributing to developmental flight tests and search and rescue missions.
He applied that experience to his SkillBridge fellowship in quality assurance at Ellington Field in 2024. Quinn worked to enhance flight safety and astronaut training across various aircraft, including the T-38, WB-57, and the Super Guppy.
He has continued contributing to those projects since being hired as a full-time quality assurance employee in 2025.
Andrew Ulat retired from the Air Force after serving for 21 years as an intercontinental ballistic missile launch control officer and strategic operations advisor.
His last role in the military was as a director of staff at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
There he served as a graduate-level instructor teaching international security concepts to mid-level officers and civilian counterparts from all branches of the military and various federal agencies.
Ulat started his SkillBridge fellowship as an integration engineer in Johnson’s X-Lab, supporting avionics, power, and software integration for the Gateway lunar space station.
Ulat transitioned directly from his fellowship into a similar full-time position at Johnson in May 2024.
Ariel Vargas transitioned to NASA after serving for five years in the Army.
His last role in the military was as a signal officer, which involved leading teams managing secure communications and network operations in dynamic and mission-critical environments in the Middle East and the United States
Vargas completed his SkillBridge fellowship in November 2023, supporting Johnson’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). During his fellowship, he led a center-wide wireless augmentation project that modernized Johnson’s connectivity.
He became a full-time civil servant in May 2024 and currently serves as the business operations and partnerships lead within OCIO, supporting a digital transformation initiative.
In this role, he leads efforts to streamline internal business operations, manage strategic partnerships, and drive cross-functional collaboration.
“My time in the military taught me the value of service, leadership, and adaptability—qualities that I now apply daily in support of NASA’s mission,” Vargas said.
“I’m proud to be part of the Johnson team and hope my story can inspire other service members considering the SkillBridge pathway.”
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NASA’s Chandra Finds Baby Exoplanet is Shrinking
Jul 16, 2025
A baby planet is shrinking from the size of Jupiter with a thick atmosphere to a small, barren world, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This transformation is happening as the host star unleashes a barrage of X-rays that is tearing the young planet’s atmosphere away at an enormous rate.
The planet, named TOI 1227 b, is in an orbit around a red dwarf star about 330 light-years from Earth. TOI 1227 b orbits very close to its star — less than a fifth the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun.
The new study shows this planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, is a “baby” at a mere 8 million years old. By comparison, the Earth is about 5 billion years old, or nearly a thousand times older.
That makes it the second youngest planet ever to be observed passing in front of its host star (also called a transit). Previously the planet had been estimated by others to be about 11 million years old.
A research team found that X-rays from its star are blasting TOI 1227 b and tearing away its atmosphere at such a rate that the planet will entirely lose it in about a billion years.
At that point the planet will have lost a total mass equal to about two Earth masses, down from about 17 times the mass of Earth now.
“It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet,” said Attila Varga, a Ph.D. student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, who led the study.
“The planet’s atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star.” It is probably impossible for life to exist on TOI 1227 b, either now or in the future.
The planet is too close to its star to fit into any definition of a ‘habitable zone,’ a term astronomers use to determine if planets around other stars could sustain liquid water on their surface.
The star that hosts TOI 1227 b, which is called TOI 1227, is only about a tenth the mass of the Sun and is much cooler and fainter in optical light.
In X-rays, however, TOI 1227 is brighter than the Sun and is subjecting this planet, in its very close orbit, to a withering assault.
The mass of TOI 1227 b, while not well understood, is likely similar to that of Neptune, but its diameter is three times larger than Neptune’s (making it similar in size to Jupiter).
“A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they’re receiving,” said co-author Joel Kastner, also of RIT.
“We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star.”
The team used new Chandra data to measure the amount of X-rays from the star that are striking the planet.
Using computer models of the effects of these X-rays, they concluded the X-rays will have a transformative effect, rapidly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.
They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years.
“The future for this baby planet doesn’t look great,” said co-author Alexander Binks of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany.
“From here, TOI 1227 b may shrink to about a tenth of its current size and will lose more than 10 percent of its weight.”
The researchers used different sets of data to estimate the age of TOI 1227 b.
One method exploits measurements of how TOI 1227 b’s host star moves through space compared to nearby populations of stars with known ages.
A second method compared the brightness and surface temperature of the star with theoretical models of evolving stars.
Of all the exoplanets astronomers have found with ages less than 50 million years, TOI 1227 b stands out for having the longest year and the host planet with the lowest mass.
A paper describing these results has been accepted publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available here.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program.
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-chandra-finds-baby-exoplanet-is-shrinking/
https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2025/m31/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250604440V/abstract
Muscle and Exercise Studies to Maintain Crew Health in Space
July 16, 2025
Maintaining muscles and monitoring astronaut health in space were the top research subjects aboard the International Space Station on Wednesday.
The Expedition 73 crew also replaced critical life support hardware and serviced a variety of experimental gear.
The lack of gravity weighing down on a human living in space contributes to muscle loss since it takes much less effort to move around in weightlessness.
Spaceflight crews exercise daily for two hours to counteract space-caused muscle atrophy and bone loss to stay healthy in microgravity and remain in shape for the eventual return to Earth.
Scientists are studying electrical muscle stimulation in combination with exercising in space to improve muscle function, reduce workout times, and design lighter exercise equipment.
NASA Flight Engineers Nichole Ayers and Jonny Kim joined each other in the Columbus laboratory module for the muscle study that may benefit future long-duration space flights as well as patients on Earth with mobility issues.
Ayers wore electrodes that sent electrical signals to her legs as Kim operated the biomedical equipment that also recorded how her muscles responded.
Next, Ayers removed the electrodes then wore a sensor-packed headband and vest collecting her heart and breathing rate as she worked out on the advanced resistive exercise device that mimics free weights on Earth and then pedaled on an exercise cycle.
Researchers will use the health data to continuously adjust crew exercise plans and improve aerobic and cardiovascular conditioning in microgravity.
Ayers and Kim later assisted NASA Flight Engineer Anne McClain as she replaced a catalytic reactor in the Tranquility module.
The catalytic reactor introduces oxygen into the station’s water processor assembly and oxidizes organic material in the wastewater.
Station Commander Takuya Onishi from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) helped the trio conclude the maintenance work as he reinstalled hardware removed in Tranquility so the crew could access the advanced life support components.
Onishi began his day in the Kibo laboratory module troubleshooting and inspecting combustion research hardware in the Multipurpose Small Payload Rack.
Onishi then replaced a device, the Microgravity Measurement Apparatus, that measures the vibrations Kibo experiences due to astronaut activities and spacecraft dockings that may affect sensitive science experiments.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Kirill Peskov also participated in an exercise study as they took turns jogging on the Zvezda service module’s treadmill for a fitness evaluation.
Doctors will use the data to determine a crew member’s energy requirements to stay fit in space and ensure readiness for strenuous activities such as spacewalks and the return to Earth’s gravity.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Alexey Zubritskiy started his shift cleaning ventilation systems and smoke detectors.
He then trained to perform medical procedures on the orbital outpost including eye checks, needle injections, injury treatments, and more.
The Progress 91 cargo craft docked to the rear port of Zvezda fired its engines for nearly 12 minutes on Wednesday.
The reboost lifts the space station’s orbit to the correct altitude for the approach and docking of the Progress 93 cargo craft planned for September.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/16/muscle-and-exercise-studies-to-maintain-crew-health-in-space/
NASA Curiosity Rover
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4597-4599: Wide Open Spaces
Jul 16, 2025
Earth planning date: Friday, July 11, 2025
Imagine this vista as the view out your office window to start your workday. Your natural tendency would be to grab your camera and photograph as much of the view as possible.
Curiosity was lucky enough to find herself in this situation today after a successful drive of about 61 meters (about 200 feet) on Wednesday, and the science team operating Curiosity wasted no time papering the scene with mosaics.
Between Mastcam and ChemCam, we planned 105 images across the scene.
Those images will capture the structures underpinning the boxwork ridges we are driving toward, smaller-scale fractures in the near field that might be related to the boxwork ridges, and the back side of a ridge we recently studied in detail, “Volcán Peña Blanca.”
Together, the images will help us understand the geologic history of the area that hosts the boxwork ridges, and what conditions existed in this part of Mount Sharp to support their formation.
We did not neglect the rocks directly in front of the rover as we gazed at our surroundings.
Indeed, the bedrock near the rover was nearly uniformly packed with small (less than 1 centimeter, or 0.39 inches) rounded nodules, a characteristic we have not seen for awhile.
MAHLI will image three different instances of the nodules while APXS and ChemCam will each analyze two different targets to understand the chemistry of the nodules and the bedrock hosting them.
REMS, RAD, and DAN will continue to monitor the Martian environment and subsurface throughout the weekend.
Additionally, we planned multiple observations of dust devils, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and clouds including a cloud movie timed to match the overflight of the CASSIS instrument.
Our drive will take us to the foot of the smooth slope seen in the distance of the above image. That slope is the ramp we will take to the top of a big boxwork structure, where surely other delightful vistas await.
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4597-4599-wide-open-spaces/
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4600-4601: Up and Over the Sand Covered Ramp
Jul 16, 2025
Earth planning date: Monday, July 14, 2025
The Curiosity rover continues to navigate through the region of Mount Sharp characterized by the boxwork terrain.
After successfully completing a drive of about 34 meters over the weekend (about 112 feet), the rover parked near the edge of a smooth, sandy stretch at the base of a ridge that leads to the most prominent and complex network of boxwork structures seen so far.
Due to the lack of exposed bedrock in the immediate workspace, the science team opted to give some of the rover’s contact science instruments a break.
With the dust removal tool (DRT) and APXS instruments stowed, the extra energy allowed the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to take high resolution images of “Playa de la Gallina” to survey the uniform, smooth surface consisting of sand and pebble-sized material.
The ChemCam and Mastcam teams scheduled several observations in this two-sol plan that further investigated the rocks and structures in our immediate vicinity and surroundings.
ChemCam LIBS was used to target “El Olivo” to determine the chemistry of the bumpy textured bedrock near the rover, which was also imaged by a Mastcam stereo mosaic.
Additional Mastcam stereo mosaics include fractures at “El Corral” and linear troughs at “Chapare.” Further away, ChemCam’s Remote Micro Imager (RMI) will provide insight into an intriguing section of scoured features within the Mishe Mokwa butte.
The environmental working group continues to keep an eye in the sky and planned a supra-horizon movie and a dust-devil survey as part of their ongoing monitoring campaign of the atmospheric conditions in Gale Crater.
The 21-meter-long drive (about 69 feet) at the end of this plan will maneuver the rover past the sandy ramp to the top of the main boxwork region.
From here, the science team will be able to explore this fascinating area of particularly large boxwork structures. Stay tuned as Curiosity continues to climb higher and delve deeper into the geologic history of Mars!
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/curiosity-blog-sols-4600-4601-up-and-over-the-sand-covered-ramp/
Aurora Australis
Jul 16, 2025
The aurora australis arcs above a partly cloudy Indian Ocean in this photograph from the International Space Station as it orbited 269 miles above in between Australia and Antarctica on June 12, 2025.
Astronauts aboard the space station take photos using handheld digital cameras, usually through windows in the station’s cupola, for Crew Earth Observations.
Crew members have produced hundreds of thousands of images of the Moon and Earth’s land, oceans, and atmosphere.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/aurora-australis-6/
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/nasas-tracers-studies-explosive-process-in-earths-magnetic-shield/
NASA’s TRACERS Studies Explosive Process in Earth’s Magnetic Shield
Jul 16, 2025
High above us, particles from the Sun hurtle toward Earth, colliding with the upper atmosphere and creating powerful explosions in a murky process called magnetic reconnection.
A single magnetic reconnection event can release as much energy as the entire United States uses in a day.
NASA’s new TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission will study magnetic reconnection, answering key questions about how it shapes the impacts of the Sun and space weather on our daily lives.
The TRACERS spacecraft are slated to launch no earlier than late July 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The two TRACERS spacecraft will orbit Earth to study how the solar wind — a continuous outpouring of electrically charged particles from the Sun — interacts with Earth’s magnetic shield, the magnetosphere.
What Is Magnetic Reconnection?
As solar wind flows out from the Sun, it carries the Sun’s embedded magnetic field out across the solar system. Reaching speeds over one million miles per hour, this soup of charged particles and magnetic field plows into planets in its path.
“Earth’s magnetosphere acts as a protective bubble that deflects the brunt of the solar wind’s force. You can think of it as a bar magnet that's rotating and floating around in space,” said John Dorelli, TRACERS mission science lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“As the solar wind collides with Earth’s magnetic field, this interaction builds up energy that can cause the magnetic field lines to snap and explosively fling away nearby particles at high speeds — this is magnetic reconnection.”
Openings in Earth’s magnetic field at the North and South Poles, called polar cusps, act as funnels allowing charged particles to stream down towards Earth and collide with atmospheric gases.
These phenomena are pieces of the space weather system that is in constant motion around our planet — whose impacts range from breathtaking auroras to disruption of communications systems and power grids.
In May 2024, Earth experienced the strongest geomagnetic storm in more than 20 years, which affected high-voltage power lines and transformers, forced trans-Atlantic flights to change course, and caused GPS-guided tractors to veer off-course.
How Will TRACERS Study Magnetic Reconnection?
The TRACERS mission’s twin satellites, each a bit larger than a washing machine, will fly in tandem, one behind the other, in a relatively low orbit about 360 miles above Earth.
Traveling over 16,000 mph, each satellite hosts a suite of instruments to measure different aspects of extremely hot, ionized gas called plasma and how it interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere.
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The satellites will focus where Earth’s magnetic field dips down to the ground at the North polar cusp.
By placing the twin TRACERS satellites in a Sun-synchronous orbit, they always pass through Earth’s dayside polar cusp, studying thousands of reconnection events at these concentrated areas.
This will build a step-by-step picture of how magnetic reconnection changes over time and from Earth’s dayside to its nightside.
NASA’s TRICE-2 mission also studied magnetic reconnection near Earth, but with a pair of sounding rockets launched into the northern polar cusp over the Norwegian Sea in 2018. “The TRICE mission took great data.
It took a snapshot of the Earth system in one state. It proved that these instruments could make this kind of measurement and achieve this kind of science,” said David Miles, TRACERS principal investigator at the University of Iowa.
“But the system's more complicated than that. The TRACERS mission demonstrates how you can use multi-spacecraft technology to get a picture of how things are moving and evolving.”
Because previous missions could only take one measurement of an event per launch, too many changes in the region prevented forming a full picture.
Following each other closely in orbit, the twin TRACERS satellites will provide multiple snapshots of the same area in rapid succession, spaced as closely as 10 seconds apart from each other, reaching a record-breaking 3,000 measurements in one year.
These snapshots will build a picture of how the whole Earth system behaves in reaction to space weather, allowing scientists to better understand how to predict space weather in the magnetosphere.
Working Across Missions in Solar Harmony
The TRACERS mission will collaborate with other NASA heliophysics missions, which are strategically placed near Earth and across the solar system.
At the Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe closely observes our closest star, including magnetic reconnection there and its role in heating and accelerating the solar wind that drives the reconnection events investigated by TRACERS.
Data from recently launched NASA missions, EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer), studying electrical currents at Earth’s nightside, and PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) studying the solar wind and interactions in Earth’s atmosphere, can be combined with observations from TRACERS.
With research from these missions, scientists will be able to get a more complete understanding of how and when Earth’s protective magnetic shield can suddenly connect with solar wind, allowing the Sun’s material into Earth’s system.
“The TRACERS mission will be an important addition to NASA’s heliophysics fleet.” said Reinhard Friedel, TRACERS program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“The missions in the fleet working together increase understanding of our closest star to improve our ability to understand, predict, and prepare for space weather impacts on humans and technology in space.”
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Ejection Mechanism Design for the SPEED Test Architecture Challenge
Jul 16, 2025
The The Stratospheric Projectile Entry Experiment on Dynamics (SPEED), a two-stage stratospheric drop test architecture, is currently under development to bridge the state-of-the-art gap that many NASA flagship missions require to reduce system risk and enable more optimized designs via margin reduction.
To do this, a two-stage vehicle will drop from a high-altitude balloon and use the first stage (an LV-Haack cone aeroshell) to accelerate the sub-scale test model to supersonic conditions.
The onboard avionics will then release the test model into freestream flow at the proper altitude in Earth’s atmosphere for dynamic Mach scaling to the full-scale flight trajectory.
SPEED leverages low-cost methods of manufacturing such as 3D printing and laser/water-jet cutting to enable 8 or more two-stage vehicles to be dropped in a single test, making the science-to-dollar density much higher than any current ground-test facility NASA has at its disposal.
The goal is to develop a robust ejection system that can reliably introduce the test models into supersonic flow with a tight variance on initial condition perturbation.
The separation system must be capable of handling a range of initial angle-of-attacks, keep the test model secure in the first stage during take-off and descent, and eject the test model in such a way that it does not linger behind the first stage and be affected by the resulting wake.
As current ejection system designs are conceptual, complex, and untested, NASA is looking for alternative ideas that can be incorporated into the design of their next iteration of SPEED flight vehicles to increase system reliability.
We are challenging the public to design innovative concepts for a separation mechanism that can be used to assess NASA and commercial reentry vehicle stability.
Award: $7,000 in total prizes
Open Date: July 14, 2025
Close Date: September 8, 2025
For more information, visit: https://grabcad.com/challenges/ejection-mechanism-design-for-the-speed-test-architecture
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/prizes-challenges-crowdsourcing-program/center-of-excellence-for-collaborative-innovation-coeci/ejection-mechanism-design-for-the-speed-test-architecture/
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/50-years-since-the-handshake-in-space-the-legacy-of-apollo-soyuz/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es7Br9kJBbo
50 years since the ‘Handshake in Space’: The legacy of Apollo-Soyuz
July 17, 2025
The Apollo-Soyuz mission, which occurred 50 years ago this month, was the culmination of a series of fitful attempts at possible international cooperation on human spaceflight.
But before one astronaut and one cosmonaut met in an airlock in orbit over the Earth, there were wiretaps and hot dogs, language lessons and vodka toasts.
And though the iconic image of that airlock handshake still resonates in the space community, the future of U.S. cooperation with what is now the Russian Federation is decidedly murky.
Nyet then Da
As early as 1962, the two space-faring superpowers — America and the U.S.S.R. — discussed possible cooperation. President John F. Kennedy had even suggested in a 1963 speech to the United Nations a joint lunar mission.
Finally, by 1970, the Soviet Academy of Sciences agreed to a meeting after NASA proposed a joint mission.
President Richard Nixon pinned hopes on the mission to help thaw the Cold War.
According to NASA’s official program history, The Partnership: A History of the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, Nixon’s foreign policy guru, Henry Kissinger, told NASA officials in 1971 of the ongoing effort to establish a joint mission:
“As long as you stick to space, do anything you want to do. You are free to commit — in fact, I want you to tell your counterparts in Moscow that the president has sent you on this mission.”
By 1972, the two countries had established the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) and agreed to launch the joint mission three years later.
The countries hoped to not only reap benefits from scientific and technical cooperation, but also from political cooperation.
The mission would be a precedent for future joint efforts and even possible future space rescues.
Planners, engineers, and ground-support personnel — and the spacefarers — had to cope with radically different approaches to spacecraft, according to multiple accounts of the mission.
NASA turned to audio visual division deputy chief and senior photographer Will Taub, who had made a hobby of pursuing technical details of Soviet craft. His drawings helped initial planning considerably, according to historians.
Sometimes with ease, sometimes with difficulty, the two space agencies came together and formed working groups on communications and tracking, life support and crew transfer, mission planning, control and guidance, and mechanical design.
The Americans were led by Glynn Lunney, while the Soviets were led by Konstantin Bushuyev.
America would use the complex, astronaut-centered Apollo capsule once destined to go the Moon, left over when Nixon canceled lunar missions after Apollo 17.
The Soviets had the simple, robust Soyuz that was less reliant on the astronauts flying the vehicle, but lacked back-ups and failsafes. One failure on a Soyuz usually ended a mission. Both sides found fault in the other’s design.
Much of the focus of mission planning centered around how to rendezvous, dock, and find a way to alter the cabin environments in a timely fashion.
For example, the two craft utilized wildly different cabin atmospheres: NASA had a pure oxygen composition at one-third atmospheric pressure, while the Soviets replicated the air and pressure we have here on Earth.
A description of the mission at the California Science Center, which has the ASTP command module on display, explains the complexity of the solution eventually reached:
“Prior to docking with the Apollo command module (that was linked to the docking module), the Russian crew lowered their cabin atmospheric pressure from a full atmosphere to two-thirds atmosphere.
After docking with the Soyuz, the American crew transferred from the Apollo spacecraft into the docking module and closed the hatch behind them.
They added nitrogen to the pure oxygen environment which raised the pressure inside the docking module from one-third atmosphere to two-thirds atmosphere and resulted in a gaseous composition that matched the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The astronauts could then safely open the hatch between the docking module and the Soyuz.”
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Fellow spacefarers
The Americans selected for the mission were commander Tom Stafford and two rookie astronauts, Vance Brand and Donald “Deke” Slayton. Slayton was to have flown years earlier in the Mercury program but was grounded for a heart problem.
But now his health checked out and he was finally going to space. The cosmonauts were Valeriy N. Kubasov and the first space-walker, Alexi Leonov.
According to crew accounts and the 1976 summary of the mission written by Walter Froelich, the language barrier was significant.
Finally, the crews hit on the approach: In joint settings, the Americans would speak Russian while the Russians spoke English. Leonov often joked that Stafford’s accent meant he was speaking “Oklahomski.”
Meanwhile, support personnel, including valued translators, worked hard on giant bilingual technical documents that set out how two mission controls would communicate and what technical procedures each craft needed to follow.
Joint training was held both at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and at Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (or Star City) near Moscow. For the first time, astronauts visited Soviet space facilities, and they insisted on seeing the actual Soyuz vehicle that would fly.
(Soviet openness would extend to the public as it broadcast mission events live for the first time.) The Americans coped with lengthy vodka-drinking and joked about the lack of hotel amenities, knowing that wire taps would capture their complaints.
According to Bob Crippen, who was part of ASTP support before he flew the space shuttle, the wife of one NASA official said loudly in her room, “I sure wish I had water in the room.”
The next day, she did. The hours of training were occasionally punctuated by snowball fights at Star City cosmonaut center.
Leonov recalls how annoyed the Soviets would become when Americans failed to show up for meals. He was surprised at the how little supervision the Apollo crew had for diet and exercise.
When the cosmonauts trained in Houston, they had the opportunity to become familiar with a food called the hot dog and enjoy muggy Texas BBQs. They drank American beer and donned cowboy hats.
The handshake in space
After months of training, it was go-time. Finally, the rockets and the crews and hundreds of support personnel were ready. Both craft launched on July 15, 1975. But to account for orbital mechanics, the Apollo and Soyuz crews lifted off at different times.
The launches were flawless, although historians Asif Siddiqi and Dwane Day wrote in a 2020 article for The Space Review that declassified documents “clearly show a great deal of anxiety among Soviet management that the engineers would essentially screw up and delay the Soviet side of the flight, thus embarrassing the Soviet Union on the international stage.”
Finally, the two ships docked on July 17. About three hours later, the hatches were opened. “Come in here and shake hands,” Stafford said, and he and Leonov shook hands on television, both men sharing big smiles.
Not surprisingly, there were also bear hugs. The handshake took place over the city of Metz, France, according to The Partnership. The televised handshake was in part thanks to an all-nighter aboard the Soyuz spacecraft.
Discovering prior to docking that the Soyuz TV camera did not work, Kubasov and Leonov had to take apart “a major part of our orbital section in order to gain access” to the TV wiring, Leonov recalls.
They did that instead of sleep. Afterwards, Soviet citizens wrote to the space agency that they needed the two cosmonauts “to come and fix their television sets.”
The rest of the mission involved crews exchanging places between the craft and sharing meals (including tubes of borscht jokingly labeled as vodka).
The men also admired drawings of the crews done by Leonov, a talented artist.
They also conducted scientific experiments, a fact that’s often lost in the sheer symbolism of the moment.
Highlights include the first detection of an extragalactic pulsar and the first detection of extreme ultraviolet stars — four in total, one of which was a very hot white dwarf.
Froelich also points to the mission’s “first separation of live biologic materials in space by electrophoresis,” which uses electrical currents to move molecules around.
Leonov also recounted an exercise involving welding in space. The ships even created an artificial eclipse in order to study the Sun.
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On July 18, the crews separated and the hatches were closed, though they continued to experiment with docking maneuvers the next day.
According to Leonov, the Soyuz capsule was almost seriously damaged when Slayton accidentally fired a thruster, which jarred both vehicles toward the docking mechanism.
Fortunately, the issue was quickly resolved and the Soviets’ mission ended without incident, with Soyuz landing on July 21 while Apollo stayed in orbit for three more days.
It was mostly smooth sailing until the end for Apollo — according to Stafford and other accounts, a vent was accidentally left open during reentry, allowing toxic gases from the capsule’s thrusters to enter the cabin.
All three men felt their eyes and throats burn, and Brand even lapsed into unconsciousness twice. The close call could have been far worse, but the men did end up staying in a hospital for two weeks after the flight.
Overall the mission garnered mostly positive attention, according to accounts, though skeptics worried that the Soviets would steal American know-how and others thought it a waste of money.
One paper in Bogata said it was “the end of the Space Race.”A West German paper called it “a glittering soap bubble,” but there were literal signs of change: In Houston, at the media center, signs were displayed in English and Russian.
Afterglow and aftermath
It’s not clear how much the Soviets spent on ASTP, but according to research in The Space Review and from NASA, the U.S. doled out nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
Was it money well spent? Hopes for détente symbolized by the handshake in space and the post-mission tours were torched as quickly as a heat shield, as historians such as Thomas Ellis have described.
Geopolitics got in the way of future space cooperation, as well as the failure of the Nixon Administration to continue human spaceflights. William Burrows writes that the mission “did little or nothing to stop the deterioration in relations.”
Historian Micheal Neufeld tells Astronomy it was “a Cold War one-off détente circus.”
But, on a personal level, the mission’s goals worked: Stafford and Leonov became friends for life. Briefly, the Soviets considered a second ASTP mission and cooperation on solar system exploration, according to Siddiqi and Day, though it did not happen.
Americans did not fly to space again until the space shuttle in 1981, but that program would be pivotal in reestablishing U.S. and Soviet (later, Russian) joint missions. And when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, American and Russian interests once again aligned.
The old Soviet program was in tatters — with former government bureaus becoming private companies — and the U.S. worried that rocket technology might fall into the wrong hands.
Meanwhile, NASA had noticed the Soviet experience with space stations, including, for example, Salyut, and looked to future collaboration on that front.
Stafford played a pivotal role in delegations discussing flying Americans on the shuttle to the Mir space station. Crippen says that Stafford really “spearheaded” Russian involvement, alongside NASA administrator George Abbey, according to space expert John Logsdon.
ASTP’s legacy also includes the docking mechanism, which was used to connect Mir with the space shuttle. A derivation of the design is still part of the International Space Station, which has been the long-standing site of global cooperation despite earthly conflicts.
As spacefaring nations face an uncertain future for the ISS as well as fitful hopes for a lunar return and even a Martian sojourn, it might be worth remembering that a willingness to work together can yield results — and perhaps some of those cannot be valued in dollars or rubles alone.
Only time will tell if Leonov was right when he said during an in-flight press conference, “Together we have begun an irreversible thing. The machine of Apollo-Soyuz is operating now and no one can stop it.”
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https://phys.org/news/2025-07-programmable-dna-moir-superlattices-material.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-025-01976-3
Programmable DNA moiré superlattices: Expanding the material design space at the nanoscale
July 17, 2025
Researchers are creating new moiré materials at the nanometer scale using advanced DNA nanotechnology.
DNA moiré superlattices form when two periodic DNA lattices are overlaid with a slight rotational twist or positional offset.
This creates a new, larger interference pattern with completely different physical properties.
A new approach developed by researchers at the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research not only facilitates the complex construction of these superlattices; it also unlocks entirely new design possibilities at the nanoscale.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Moiré superlattices have become central to modern condensed matter and photonic research.
However, realizing such structures typically involves delicate and laborious fabrication steps, including precise alignment and transfer of pre-fabricated layers under highly controlled conditions.
"Our approach bypasses traditional constraints of creating moiré superlattices," says Prof. Laura Na Liu, director of the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart.
New paradigm for the construction of moiré superlattices
"Unlike conventional methods that rely on mechanical stacking and twisting of two-dimensional materials, our platform leverages a bottom-up assembly process," explains Prof. Liu.
The assembly process refers to the linking of individual DNA strands to form larger, ordered structures.
It is based on self-organization: The DNA strands join together without external intervention, solely through molecular interactions. The Stuttgart research team is taking advantage of this special feature.
"We encode the geometric parameters of the superlattice—such as rotation angle, sublattice spacing, and lattice symmetry—directly into the molecular design of the initial structure, known as the nucleation seed.
We then allow the entire architecture to self-assemble with nanometer precision." The seed acts as a structural blueprint, directing the hierarchical growth of 2D DNA lattices into precisely twisted bilayers or trilayers, all achieved within a single solution-phase assembly step.
Exploring uncharted territory: Moiré structures on the intermediate nanometer scale
While moiré superlattices have been widely explored at the atomic (angstrom) and photonic (submicron) scales, the intermediate nanometer regime, where both molecular programmability and material functionality converge, has remained largely inaccessible.
The Stuttgart researchers have closed this gap with their current study. The team combines two powerful DNA nanotechniques: DNA origami and single-stranded tile (SST) assembly.
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Using this hybrid strategy, the researchers constructed micrometer-scale superlattices with unit cell dimensions as small as 2.2 nanometers, featuring tunable twist angles and various lattice symmetries, including square, kagome, and honeycomb.
They also demonstrated gradient moiré superlattices, in which the twist angle and hence moiré periodicity varies continuously across the structure.
"These superlattices reveal well-defined moiré patterns under transmission electron microscopy, with observed twist angles closely matching those encoded in the DNA origami seed," notes co-author Prof. Peter A. van Aken from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
The study also introduces a new growth process for moiré superlattices.
The process is initiated by spatially defined capture strands on the DNA seed that act as molecular 'hooks' to precisely bind SSTs and direct their interlayer alignment.
This enables the controlled formation of twisted bilayers or trilayers with accurately aligned SST sublattices.
Broad implications across molecular engineering, nanophotonics, spintronics, and materials science
Their high spatial resolution, precise addressability, and programmable symmetry endow the new moiré superlattices with significant potential for diverse applications in research and technology.
For example, they are ideal scaffolds for nanoscale components—such as fluorescent molecules, metallic nanoparticles or semiconductors in customized 2D and 3D architectures.
When chemically transformed into rigid frameworks, these lattices could be repurposed as phononic crystals or mechanical metamaterials with tunable vibrational responses.
Their spatial gradient design also opens avenues for transformation optics and gradient-index photonic devices, where moiré periodicity could steer light or sound along controlled trajectories.
One particularly promising application lies in spin-selective electron transport.
DNA has been shown to act as a spin filter, and these well-ordered superlattices with defined moiré symmetries could serve as a platform to explore topological spin transport phenomena in a highly programmable setting.
"This is not about mimicking quantum materials," says Prof. Liu. "It's about expanding the design space and making it possible to build new types of structured matter from the bottom up, with geometric control embedded directly into the molecules."
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https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-the-air-staff-speech-at-global-air-space-chiefs-conference-2025
Chief of the Air Staff speech at Global Air & Space Chiefs' Conference 2025
17 July 2025
Susannah thank you very much and Dave thank you A - for being here and B - for giving such a great presentation, I am now starting to doubt the fact that I took out the animal videos from last year out of my presentation.
As you heard yesterday this is the last appearance for me as the CAS at the Global Air Space Chiefs Conference and I am going to miss it. This conference provides a fantastic opportunity for us to get to know each other, build relationships, and most importantly to share ideas.
Combined with RIAT and the invitation to our crews, to our industries, and to our spouses, this always feels like a very special event.
You might remember that two years ago I showed this picture of Caitlin and me on holiday in Greece as a mechanism to try and build a rapport or relationship. I got in trouble because I hadn’t cleared it with her before I showed it but I’m doing it again, it’ll be fine.
I wanted to start today by saying a huge thank you to the global air and space chief community for your friendship and support over the two years while I’ve been chief and particularly over the last year.
Some of you know that Caitlin was not at RIAT last year as she underwent a pretty aggressive form of chemotherapy, and that camaraderie and support that I felt from this international community was incredible.
It’s those bonds of friendship and understanding that will sustain us both in peacetime and in war. I am pleased to say that Caitlin is doing well and she’ll be back at RIAT.
And for those of you who are wondering she is still a divorce lawyer. So, if she hands you her business card you should be afraid, if she hands your spouse her business card – be very very afraid!
Two years ago in 2023 when I stood on this stage, the war in Ukraine was just over a year old and my key conclusion was that after 3 decades of peace dividend and fighting impressive counter-terrorism campaigns globally, we – the Royal Air Force and other air forces needed to change if we were going to avoid the kind of war that we saw playing out in Ukraine.
Our response to this demand for change intellectually was to update our air operating concept. At the heart of it is this idea of decision superiority supported by agility, integration, and resilience.
Roll forward a year, last year we focused on deterrence. In whatever way you describe it, warfare is costly, and I argued that our job as military leaders was to stop these wars from starting.
I also explained last year where our priorities lay in terms of developing the capabilities to ensure we could deter the kind of fight we’ve seen in Ukraine.
It started with command and control. Capabilities to counter the A2 AD threat. Integrated area missile and defence and agile combat employment.
And taking a leaf out of Dave’s book I also showed you this picture of my good friend Patrick Sanders, shortly after he finished being the head of the British Army at Glastonbury.
I’m pleased to say that Patrick has gone past his Glasto phase and is now a successful podcaster and it’s really good, I can really recommend it. But Patrick was in the news again last weekend with a warning that we should head as we think about the pace of change.
As you heard from the Minister, last month the UK published its Strategic Defence Review, a vision about making Britain safer, secure at home, and strong abroad. It played back to us much of the logic and analysis we’ve talked about in conferences like this for several years.
As you’ve heard today, it focuses on warfighting readiness, it’s clear about putting NATO first, and using defence as and engine for growth, with UK innovation driven by lessons from Ukraine, and a whole of society response.
This is a radical shift for the UK. And all of that is before The Hague Summit where many of our allies signed up to spend significantly more on Defence. This is a watershed moment for the UK and the West.
Throughout my whole career Defence budgets have shrunk, armed forces have got smaller. I was at RAF Cranwell recently talking to our officer cadets about to graduate and coming out into their next phase of training and into the Air Force.
I told them that they are entering an air force that none of us have known. An Air Force where budgets are growing, and numbers are increasing.
Last year, I also talked about the high low mix and its importance and autonomous collaborative platforms, and you’ve heard about that from the minister this morning.
I got Jim Beck our Director of Capability, who we saw yesterday, to promise in front of all of you he would deliver this year the first of a family of ACPs that would improve the lethality and survivability of our crewed platforms.
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I want to pay tribute to Jim today and the wider team for delivering in April this year StormShroud.
It is an impressive capability that was delivered with a different attitude towards risk both in terms of its acquisition and in the terms of the way it’s operated.
It also delivered through collaboration with warfighters, traditional defence industry, and new entrants to it.
I am enormously proud of what Jim, the team and the wider team have done to deliver it, and I am enormously pleased that what SDR sets out is a direction of travel that we have been on as air forces for several years.
But the SDR is clear, and I’m clear that we have to do this quickly, and we can’t do it on our own. To borrow a phrase from my great friend Jabba Steur the Dutch chief, we need to be ready to fight tonight, tomorrow, and together.
These alliances, that these conferences help build are incredibly important to us, and frankly the alliance with the United States of America is the most important of all.
Arthur Tedder and Tooey Spatz, the first Chief of Staff for the US Air Force, forged a relationship during the second world war that sustained them through peace. Today the relationships we form in peacetime need to sustain us through war.
This year has seen many of us in this room flying alongside our US friends and fighting alongside them globally.
But is not just about working together as allies, this evolving battlespace demands that we work together across all 5 domains, and that’s why that is the theme of this conference how do we integrate air and space power into this evolving battlespace.
I want to use 3 stories from the past, present and future to illustrate why this is important and what lessons we might draw about how we do it.
Now looking round the room, I think quite a lot of us in the room remember the early days in our career the end of the Cold War.
Every self-respecting junior officer would have read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. In it, NATO face the task of repelling Russian aggression from Eastern Europe through or by, as Tom said, ‘…penetrating the most concentrated SAM belt the world had ever known.’
In Tom Clancy’s day that was a job for Air Forces it required large packages of aircraft, it was what our flag exercises, Red Flag, Green Flag, Maple Flag, were all about. Honing our Large Force Employment skills – we relished the opportunity; we loved flying and fighting alongside the very best from other nations.
I’m sure just the mention of it evokes warm memories at the time when it was the air force that we knew and loved, when we had more hair, slimmer waists, and we didn’t groan when we got out of chairs.
This was air power’s World Cup. I was also going to say this was, for our American audience, it’s like the World Series, but I found out that Donald Trump seems to recognise Soccer is the more important game, and if you’re going to have a world event you do have to invite people from other countries to it, just saying. Sorry Dave!
This was a complex mission and attrition was expected. In Tom Clancy’s novel, more than a dozen of the most technologically advanced aircraft the West had were lost on that first mission.
In the 1980s we had the mass to cope with that kind of level of attrition. Today, we know that this is going to require more than just brilliant air forces. Even the most ardent advocate of air power, Dave Deptula agrees.
In Tom Clancy’s time, other terrestrial domains lacked the tools to be able to really influence this fight. Space and cyber weren’t even nascent capabilities.
Today, not only is it feasible to integrate effects across multi domains, it is essential.
And this is hard, it’s hard to do it on a national level, trying to do it multi-nationally, across a continent is exponentially more difficult but it is the challenge of our generation, and our adversaries know that and they’re trying to emulate us.
Fortunately, however they are showing us how not to do it.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it looked like integrated multi-domain operations.
With two combined armies, supported by strategic fires, tactical and strategic air power provided by VKS, land launched, sea launched, air launched cruise missile, electronic warfare, and critical space and cyber effects, surely that was integrated?
But the reality is Russia’s sees air power differently to the west, in the western way of warfare, air power is at the heart of the way we fight.
In Russia it’s about supporting the land campaign, and we know as Justin Bronkin and Dag Henrikson have pointed out that Russia has always struggled to integrate air power emissions to deliver strategic effect.
So in those first few hours and days after the war started, what we saw was Russia’s actions were stove pipped, they were deconflicted in time and space and fratricide both electronically and kinetically was commonplace.
But three years and a million causalities later, Russia is learning. And we have to learn too, as General Patton said,
Our job as air chiefs is to educate our aviators and our commander so that we are ready for the next Storm Rising. There’s no way I could write it.
I’ve stood on this stage and said, that we should not image that Ukraine is the way in which we would fight in the future. Ukraine is a 19th Century war, fought with 20th Century tactics and 21st Century weapons.
What we need to do is fight 21st Century war, with 21st Century capabilities, and 21st Century thinking.
2025 has given for us some examples of how this air led innovation and integration can make a difference.
We’ve heard about Ukraine’s audacious attack against Russia’s strategic assets and operations in Iran have really shown us what exquisite air power integrated with other multi-domain effects can do at both the strategic and campaign level.
But when the war starts, we know that it’s going to be a dynamic environment, and so whilst the tactics and the targets might be the same as they were in Tom Clancy’s day, the threat has changed, and the tactics need to change too.
There’s breadth, scale, depth coupled with three years of operational experience mean the threat is much greater than it was in Tom Clancy’s time.
And so the tactics need to change, and we need an integrated approach. We need space, cyber, land, sea, and air to work together.
We know space will deliver PNT, we know it will deliver ISR, we know it will deliver battle damage assessment, but it can also be used to disrupt our adversaries’ communications. We can shield our own forces from their satellites.
Cyber can disrupt and degrade C2 systems. The maritime environment might deliver fires or air defence.
The land domain might launch Stromshroud, project special forces or launch attacks against key targets.
We get this right; we create control of the air. We might be limited in time and geography, but it opens up the opportunity for our forces to target and exploit other opportunities.
But no plan survives contact with the enemy and we need a mechanism to adapt and react, to ensure that we’re able to exploit opportunities and make the right decisions at the right time in this complex environment.
In the UK we’ve developed NEXUS, it’s our combat cloud and it will form part of the digital targeting web the minister talked about this morning and it’s through that that we’ll deliver the tempo and deliver that all domain C2.
But C2 is about more than the network, it’s about our commanders, our decision making and our training.
We’ve got challenge in NATO in particular, how do we command and control in a dynamic environment, multi-domain operations when we’re structured by component and organised by components or geography.
NATO’s land component commander argues that it’s the Army’s task, the Army should, alone deal with the counter A2 AD threat in Kaliningrad. He might be right in that specific environment, but it’s not proven or tested.
It would be like me saying that actually it’s air power that should be the soul force that blunts Russian attacks into NATO territory. We need to lift ourselves out of these historic rivalries and reductive arguments and think about how we deliver truly integrated multi-domain effects.
How do we set the board at risk in the way Dave said yesterday to make sure we are ready for the next Storm Rising.
We can learn lessons from other campaigns and operations and the next panel will talk about some of those. But I think we need to test, to train, and to educate our people.
In the real world, exercises like Bamboo Eagle provide high-end, multi-domain, multinational and long-range exercises where we can test ourselves against these kinds of scenarios.
Red Flag has always been the pinnacle air exercise, in this case Red Flag was just the starter to the main course which was exercise Bamboo Eagle.
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175 aircraft from Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US. In an operation that ranged right across the indo-pacific. But we don’t just need to rely on the real world anymore, the synthetic environment provides us with opportunities to test and train in ways we’ve not been able to before.
In the UK, we’ve developed Gladiator, a synthetic, multi-domain environment that connects national and international components so they can mission rehearse the most complex of multi-domain operations that we are unable to imagine.
Earlier last year, in Exercise Cobra Warrior, the weather meant that we were unable to conduct some of the flying that we intended, quite a common thing in the UK.
What we did was, we flew the mission in Gladiator. The full COMAO flew real-time, and then the combined synthetic and real picture that came from that was fed into the was fed into the ops centre which allowed our C2 and ISR teams to test themselves as though it had been for real.
We can no longer wait to find out what we know and adapt when the war starts.
For those, like Dave and Shawn Harris who have walked the corridors of the USAF’s School of Advanced Air and Space Power Studies, they’ll see this quote.
We need to provide those opportunities for our people, so that they are ready for the next Storm Rising.
The Americans have shown the way with Bamboo Eagle and the phenomenal capability off the coast of California, but I think we need something like this in Europe too.
Somewhere where we can bring our Armies, Navies, and Air Forces together. Where we can test the land component commander’s assertion that he can alone address the counter A2 AD task in Kaliningrad.
Where we can find out how do we command and control multi-domain effects in NATO when we’re organised by components.
We have talked and sat around the NATO Air Chiefs table about creating some airspace we can turn on and off over the North Sea. But for our agencies and our airlines it’s all a bit too difficult.
Now to be fair, North Sea might not be the right place. Our friends in Sweden and Finland have got a lot of space and are keen to help. What I would like to do is to see our European and NATO forces pool our resources and create that capacity and capability here in Europe.
So let me sum up. We have to be ready for this next Storm Rising. We know it is going to be harder than it was in Tom Clancy’s day.
Fighting a bespoke, exquisite air campaign that’s not integrated into this evolving battlespace will lead to campaign failure.
What we need is genuinely integrated multi-domain effects, at this operational and strategic level not just at the tactical level where we know that we excel. How we do that is through thinking and practice.
We can do some of that in synthetic environment and that also allows us an opportunity to exploit some of those tools that Keith and others talked about yesterday. But we need to do it in the real world too, so we can identify the frictions and fix them.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know the answer to this NATO conundrum about command and control and how we do that command and control integrated action and deliver multi-domain effects when we’re organised by component.
But the answer to it starts with thinking and practice, and it’s through that we will be able to deter, to fight and to win – tonight, tomorrow and together.
Thank you very much.
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In 1973, NASA Sent Two Spiders Into Space To See If They Can Spin Webs – And They Learnt A Lot
July 17, 2025
Can spiders still spin webs in microgravity? Fortunately, we know the answer thanks to two arachnids, Arabella and Anita, who were blasted off to space in 1973.
The idea for the “arachnaut” experiment originally came from a 17-year-old high school student in Massachusetts called Judith Miles.
Presumably by coincidence, she suggested the idea in 1972, the same year David Bowie released the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Her proposal was put forward as part of a NASA project that allowed students to suggest experiments onboard Skylab, the first US space station, which briefly operated a few missions between May 1973 and February 1974.
NASA loved the idea, so it was selected to be part of Skylab 3, the second crewed mission of the mini space station.
Two female European garden spiders, also known as cross spiders, were put into two small plastic bottles and launched into low-Earth orbit on July 28, 1973.
Once everything was in place, Arabella was coaxed into a specially designed tank and left to do her thing.
According to the results, Arabella initially struggled to adapt to the new conditions, creating a web that was “rudimentary” at best.
However, by day two, she started to form complete webs. The team was keen to see how things developed, so they extended the experiment and introduced Anita mid-mission.
In sum, the pair took some time to get used to the strange surroundings, but they quickly learnt to spin webs just as well as they did back home on planet Earth, albeit with finer silk.
Although spiders were the subject of the study, the findings were intended to solve broader questions about how near-microgravity impacts the central nervous system of animals, including humans.
NASA explains: “The geometrical structure of the web of an orb-weaving spider provides a good measure of the condition of its central nervous system.”
“Since the spider senses its own weight to determine the required thickness of web material and uses both the wind and gravity to initiate construction of its web, the lack of gravitational force in Skylab would provide a new and different stimulus to the spider’s behavioral response,” it added.
In other words, the ability to spin webs could provide insights into how our motor and central nervous systems might react to alien conditions.
Sadly, neither spider lived to tell the tale. Arabella and Anita both died on the space station, most likely as a result of dehydration. RIP. Gone, but not forgotten.
Since the 1970s, several experiments have sent spiders into low-Earth orbit in an effort to unravel how life adapts to space.
In recent years, scientists at the University of Basel studied the behavior of Trichonephila clavipes spiders aboard the International Space Station (ISS), focusing on the symmetry of the webs they spun.
On Earth, spiders typically build asymmetrical webs, with the center positioned closer to the top. This puts them in a better spot to scuttle downwards quickly, using gravity, to snare prey that hits the lower part of the web.
Fascinatingly, the webs built in near-zero gravity on the ISS were more symmetrical than those spun on Earth, with the center closer to the middle.
Despite having no evolutionary experience with space, the spiders adapted their web-building behavior remarkably quickly.
https://www.iflscience.com/in-1973-nasa-sent-two-spiders-into-space-to-see-if-they-can-spin-webs-and-they-learnt-a-lot-80054
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/judiths-web-student-experiment-aboard-skylab-3/
S. Korea Aims To Establish Lunar Base By 2045 Under New Space Exploration Roadmap
July 17, 2025
South Korea aims to build a lunar base by 2045 under its new long-term national space exploration roadmap, the country’s space agency said Thursday.
The Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) revealed the country’s latest space exploration vision during a public hearing at the National Research Foundation of Korea in the central city of Daejeon.
The roadmap categorizes exploration areas into Earth orbit, moon, heliosphere and deep space, and outlines five core missions, including low-Earth orbit and microgravity exploration, lunar exploration, and solar and space science missions.
In the lunar sector, KASA said it aims to develop independent landing and mobility technologies, utilize lunar resources and construct infrastructure for economic activities.
By 2040, it plans to develop a next-generation lunar lander for logistics, with the goal of building a lunar economic base by 2045.
For solar and heliosphere exploration, the roadmap calls for the development of probes to monitor solar activity and enhance space safety.
KASA also envisions a mission to deploy a solar observation satellite to the so-called Lagrange point L4, where the gravitational forces of the sun and Earth are balanced, by 2035.
http://koreabizwire.com/s-korea-aims-to-establish-lunar-base-by-2045-under-new-space-exploration-roadmap/326296
New copper alloy shows shape memory effect at -200°C for space use
July 17, 2025
Researchers have developed a novel copper-based alloy that exhibits a special shape memory effect at temperatures as low as -200°C. The work has been published in the journal Communications Engineering.
Shape memory alloys can be deformed into different shapes when cold, but will revert back to their original shape when heated (as if "remembering" their default state, like memory foam).
This exciting new alloy has the potential to be used for space equipment and hydrogen-related technologies, where challenging, cold environments below -100°C are the norm.
Previously studied shape memory alloys using Ni-Ti could not maintain their shape memory ability below -20°C, despite their otherwise practical characteristics.
In contrast, the known existing shape memory alloys that can actually operate below -100°C aren't suitable for practical implementation.
This study met the challenge of finding the first functional actuator material capable of large work output at temperatures below -100°C.
Actuators are components that turn some sort of input into mechanical energy (movement). They can be found not only in machines bound for outer space, but in everyday devices all around us.
The researchers, from Tohoku University, Iwate University, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), National Astronomical Observation of Japan, Tokyo City University, and Kyoto University, prototyped a mechanical heat switch using a new alloy (Cu-Al-Mn) as an actuator.
This switch was shown to operate effectively at -170°C, controlling heat transfer by switching between contact and non-contact states based on temperature changes.
The operating temperature of the alloy can be adjusted by modifying its composition. "We were very happy when we saw that it worked at -170°C," said Toshihiro Omori (Tohoku University).
"Other shape memory alloys simply can't do this."
The Cu-Al-Mn alloy is the first actuator material capable of large output at temperatures below -100°C.
This development paves the way for the realization of high-performance actuators that can operate even under cryogenic conditions, which could not be realized before.
Potential applications include a reliable mechanical heat switch for cooling systems in space telescopes.
The simplicity and compactness of such mechanical heat switches make them a crucial technology for future space missions and for advancing carbon-neutral initiatives like hydrogen transportation and storage.
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-copper-alloy-memory-effect-200c.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-025-00464-9
Astronomers discover a cosmic 'fossil' at the edge of our solar system. Is this bad news for 'Planet 9'?
July 16, 2025
Astronomers have discovered a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto.
The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether.
The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid."
Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion."
The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
The sednoid is estimated to be between 136 and 236 miles (220 and 380 kilometers) wide. That makes it 45 times wider than the height of Mount Everest.
This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years.
However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago.
That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth.
Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system.
"The fact that 2023 KQ14's current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis," team leader Yukun Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan said in a statement.
"It is possible that a planet once existed in the solar system but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today."
Hello 2023 KQ14. Goodbye Planet Nine?
2023 KQ14 was first spotted in the wide field of view of the Subaru Telescope, located on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, in observations collected during March, May, and August 2023.
The sednoid was confirmed using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope during follow-up observations performed in July 2024.
This data was combined with archival data from other observatories, allowing astronomers to reconstruct the orbit of 2023 KQ14 over the past 19 years.
But this is a celestial body that likely formed as the planets of the solar system were taking shape around the infant sun around 4.6 billion years ago. Thus, astronomers were keen to retell the story of its orbit for much longer than two decades.
To do this, Huang and their FOSSIL team colleagues turned to the computer cluster operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan to perform complex numerical simulations.
This revealed the orbital stability of 2023 KQ14 for 4.5 billion years and the implications of that steady orbit.
"2023 KQ14 was found in a region far away where Neptune's gravity has little influence," team member and planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida said.
"The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when 2023 KQ14 formed.
"Understanding the orbital evolution and physical properties of these unique, distant objects is crucial for comprehending the full history of the solar system."
Yoshida added that, at present, the Subaru Telescope is one of the only telescopes on Earth capable of making a discovery like that of 2023 KQ14.
"I would be happy if the FOSSIL team could make many more discoveries like this one and help draw a complete picture of the history of the solar system," Yoshida concluded.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/solar-system/astronomers-discover-a-cosmic-fossil-at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system-is-this-bad-news-for-planet-9
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02595-7
Satellite images track Grand Canyon wildfires burning across thousands of acres
July 16, 2025
Two wildfires in Northern Arizona, sparked from lightning, have burned at least 60,000 acres in a little over a week — and, while firefighters work around the clock trying to contain the fires, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s satellites are aiding the fight from space.
The fires have also spread to the Grand Canyon.
The first wildfire to directly impact Grand Canyon National Park was the Dragon Bravo Fire, which began on July 4.
Dragon Bravo has already scorched thousands of acres and continues to destroy a number of structures, including the monumental Grand Canyon Lodge, along its path within the park’s North Rim.
Five days after the Dragon Bravo Fire began, another thunderstorm resulted in the creation of the White Sage Fire, which rapidly grew and expanded during a period of dry and hot weather accompanied by powerful wind gusts.
In order to fight the fires from all angles, firefighters, weather forecasters and community leaders depend on information gathered in space from satellites.
Some satellites are equipped with instruments that can monitor a wildfire's progression and growth, as well as provide high-resolution photos of both the fire itself and the associated smoke plume.
There are two satellite constellations from NOAA that particularly tag-team with wildfire updates: the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).
Together, the satellites can paint a picture using tools they're equipped with, with JPSS tracking the United States in a non-geosynchronous orbit while 512 miles (824 kilometers) above us and GOES orbiting around the Earth at the same speed in a geosynchronous orbit while 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above.
So, how do satellites gather information that's crucial in the fight to contain a wildfire?
There are different filters and spectral bands that can be used to get that information., and tools on the satellites are able to analyze just those two things.
These tools capture high-resolution images of the growth and expansion of a wildfire in almost real-time. They can also show, via time-lapse, the direction that fire and smoke are moving.
If we look at the time-lapse of images taken by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard NOAA's GOES-18 satellite, you can see where the fire originated, its rapid growth and expansion, and how the direction of the wind steered the flames over time (in this view, the winds were blowing from the north/northwest).
Another instrument that regularly provides important information about wildfires lives on NOAA's JPSS satellites, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21.
Even after the sun goes to sleep, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) can continue to snap photos of the wildfire.
These details keep first responders and community leaders aware of the fire's behavior — and alert them if any growth, new hot spots, or updates critical with fighting the wildfire can be seen.
These monitoring tools thus remain of extreme importance, continuously providing information to help us understand a wildfire with a level of accuracy and precision that ground reports alone cannot offer.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/earth/satellite-images-track-grand-canyon-wildfires-burning-across-thousands-of-acres
https://inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-information/azasd-white-sage-fire
https://inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-information/azgcp-dragon-bravo-fire
The largest Mars meteorite on Earth has sold for $5.3 million
July 16, 2025
On Wednesday (July 16), the largest Mars meteorite on Earth was auctioned off at Sotheby's in New York City for $4.3 million. (Extra fees bring the lot price to about $5.3 million).
The jagged, 54-pound (25-kilogram) chunk of the Red Planet is formally called NWA 16788. It was found in Northwest Africa, which is where the "NWA" title comes from — but, surprisingly, the bidding war to attain this cosmic relic wasn't as enthusiastic as many expected.
Before live bidding began, advance bids set the starting price of NWA 16799 at $2 million — during live bidding, however, things were slow.
Still, the object sold for higher than the original estimate that maxed out at $4 million.
As Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman of science and natural history at Sotheby's, told Space.com, NWA 16788 doesn't only set itself apart from other Mars meteorites we've found on the planet in size, but also in aesthetics.
"It also looks just like the surface of the Red Planet," she said. "Most other Martian meteorites that we find are really small, thin slices, and when you first look at them, you would never guess that they're Martian."
For context, this particular Mars meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest Mars meteorite that's been located on planet Earth; and Hatton says many of those smaller Red Planet samples sold for between $20,000 and $80,000.
As for the identity of the proud new owner of the largest piece of the Red Planet we have on Earth? Well, we may never know. It's fully up to the buyer to reveal themselves, and Hatton says many choose to remain anonymous.
"There's all sorts of reasons — maybe safety," she said. "Maybe they're worried somebody will try to steal it from them; maybe they want to be an anonymous donor to a museum.
People have all sorts of motivations for keeping it quiet, and then some people like to announce it immediately."
This Mars rock wasn't the only rare object to be sold for a hefty sum during Wednesday's auction.
The other star of the show was a mounted juvenile Ceratosaurus skeleton from approximately 154-149 million years ago, which sold for $26 million, and a plethora of incredible items were distributed during the event.
For instance, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex foot sold for $1.4 million; a Megalodon Shark tooth from Virginia sold for $18,000; a Neanderthal tool set sold for $45,000; and a stunning, clear blue Aquamarine specimen sold for $75,000.
(All prices mentioned do not include the extra fees).
"At the end of the day, it's the bidders who tell us what things are worth, not me, not anyone else. The estimates are just there to give people an indication," Hatton told Space.com.
"Last summer, I sold the Stegosaurus 'Apex.' For the Stegosaurus, the estimate was [$4 million to $6 million], and it sold for $44.6 million."
"I've had single objects sell for $6 million," Hatton said. "I did the whole Buzz Aldrin collection, and I think that did $8 million. I did the whole Richard Feynman collection of his Nobel Prize in papers that did $4 million."
The entire concept of auctions, particularly for scientific objects that could benefit the public as well as scientific community, can be quite fraught. Why not freely donate to scientific laboratories, children's museums or other public spaces?
Hatton, however, believes that attaching monetary value to such items can incentivize collectors to take care of those items — perhaps better than museums that struggle with funding can.
She also says many collectors tend to donate their purchases to museums, or at least allow them to be displayed, while also providing a sum of money to the selected institution to help staff take care of the objects.
Some of that money, she says, may even be set aside to create funding for postdoctoral researchers who can study the objects. In order to confirm that NWA 16788 is indeed a Mars meteorite, a small piece of it was also broken off to send to a lab.
This piece may be helpful for scientists looking to analyze the object. "A sample has been taken and analyzed and published in the meteoritical bulletin, so they could go and get that," Hatton said.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/the-largest-mars-meteorite-on-earth-has-sold-for-usd4-3-million
NASA won't publish key climate change report online, citing 'no legal obligation' to do so
July 16, 2025
A major climate report, the U.S. government's primary, peer-reviewed climate assessment that is completed every four to five years, will not be published on NASA's website, reversing course after the White House indicated the space agency would make the document publicly available online.
The decision complicates public access to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which contains key scientific findings used to track risks and impacts of climate change across the United States.
NASA says it will not post the climate report to its website, citing lack of legal obligation. The move contradicts a July 3 statement from the White House naming NASA as the new host for the documents after their original site, globalchange.gov, was shut down, according to an Associated Press report.
"NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov's data," NASA's press secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email to Space.com.
She added that the USGCRP — the U.S. Global Change Research Program, responsible for overseeing the study and previously published the findings on its own website — "met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress," Stevens said.
The NCA is a legally-mandated report that is issued about twice a decade, and provides peer-reviewed analysis of climate change impacts across the U.S.
It outlines localized risks climate change pose to public health, agriculture, infrastructure and more, and is used to guide municipalities' mitigatory steps in the face of natural disasters like floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts on an ever-warming Earth.
While past reports can still be accessed in some form in the online annals of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the official USGCRP website remains down.
As of yet, no other agency has been publicly assigned to host the reports.
The breakdown in public access has drawn concerns about government transparency and long-term support for climate research.
The White House's FY2026 budget proposal for NASA already suggests stripping the agency of 47% of its science funding, though that may now be getting some pushback from lawmakers in Congress.
The next NCA is scheduled to be published in 2028, but its future is uncertain. According to the New York Times, hundreds of scientists already working on the upcoming report were dismissed by the Trump Administration in April.
https://www.space.com/science/climate-change/nasa-wont-publish-key-climate-change-report-online-citing-no-legal-obligation-to-do-so
https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-nasa-reports-trump-hidden-doc-1ade1eb89bb4785f7cdd6e1d6ba31a21
https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/
A vast shadow will sweep over Saturn's cloud tops early on July 18: Here's how to see it
July 17, 2025
Early risers will get a rare opportunity to see something extraordinary in the early hours of July 18 — the dark shadow of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, sweeping across the planet's cloud tops.
Once every 15 years, Saturn's tilted orbit brings its iconic rings — and Titan's orbital path — into an edge-on alignment with Earth.
This event, known as a ring-plane crossing, heralds the onset of a season of dramatic 'shadow transits', as Titan's vast umbral silhouette periodically sweeps across the gas giant's surface.
"Sighting a shadow transit of Titan for an amateur astronomer is somewhat the equivalent of a fisherman hooking and reeling in a particularly large or elusive fish," Hayden Planetarium instructor and lecturer Joe Rao told Space.com in an email.
"It is so unusual a sight that doesn't happen very often, which is why even veteran skywatchers are excited at the possibility of making such a sighting."
When is Titan's shadow transit?
Titan's next shadow transit will get underway at 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) on July 18, at which time the moon's dark outline will be visible slowly progressing across Saturn's cloudy disk, according to Sky and Telescope.
Look for Saturn in the southeastern sky, just below the stars of the constellation Pisces shining like a bright star to the naked eye, with the moon in the east.
Observers in the U.S. will have a good view of the first two hours of the shadow transit, but by the time Titan's shadow leaves Saturn's disk at 8:05 a.m. EDT (12:05 GMT), the brightening dawn will overpower the view.
How powerful does a telescope need to be to spot Titan's shadow?
At the time of the shadow transit, Titan and Saturn will be separated by approximately 846 million miles (1.36 billion kilometers) from Earth — far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye or binoculars, but well within reach of many amateur telescopes.
We asked Rao for guidance on the kind of scope needed to view Titan's shadow transit.
"An 8-inch telescope at 200-power or a 10-inch telescope at 250-power should provide a good view of Titan's shadow, especially on a night of good seeing," Rao explained.
To calculate the magnifcation of your telescope, you need only divide its focal length by the focal length of your chosen eyepiece.
For example, a 1000 mm telescope with a 10 mm eyepiece yields 100-power magnification.
Rao also emphasised that stable atmospheric conditions are crucial to obtaining a clear view. This becomes more important when using higher power with a smaller aperture scope.
It's best to use one-half magnification/power when viewing distant objects to avoid them appearing to "boil", or "scintilate" when viewed through the eyepiece.
"At least 200-power is necessary for getting a reasonably good view of the dark 'shadow dot' projected on Saturn's disk," continued Rao.
"The general rule of thumb is to utilize 50-power for every inch of aperture of the telescope objective, or mirror.
So, for a 4-inch telescope, the maximum magnification to be used is 200-power, which is considered the limit for a telescope of that size."
When are the next Titan shadow transits?
After the July 18 event, five more Titan shadow transits will be visible from Earth.
Each occurs roughly 16 days after the last — a result of Titan's 16-day orbital period — and starting progressively earlier in the night for viewers in the U.S.
Row 5 - Cell 2
The next transit after this week will begin at 2:25 a.m. (0625 GMT) on August 3, while the last chance to catch the moon's shadow fall on Saturn will take place on October 6.
After the October event, stargazers will have to wait another 15 years before the next ring crossing brings Titan — and its shadow — into alignment once more!
Titan's shadow through the eyes of the Cassini spacecraft
Without question, the most spectacular views of a Titan shadow transit came courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which witnessed the moon's dark outline fall over Saturn's cloud surface in November 2009, while it travelled a mere 1.3 million miles (2.1 million km) from the colossal gas giant. C
assini has long since found its resting place beneath the cloud surface of Saturn, but amateur astronomers will have an opportunity to follow in Cassini's steps later this week and witness the next Titan shadow transit for themselves when it takes place on July 18.
"Though we, living in the 21st century, have grown accustomed to seeing the Saturnian system through the eyes of Cassini, there still remains the thrill of witnessing, with one's own eyes, a major celestial event in the life of another planet a billion miles away," Carolyn Porco, planetary scientists and imaging team leader for NASA's Cassini mission told Space.com in an email.
https://www.space.com/stargazing/a-vast-shadow-will-sweep-over-saturns-cloud-tops-early-on-july-18-heres-how-to-see-it
China's Tianwen 2 asteroid-sampling probe snaps gorgeous shots of Earth and the moon
China's Tianwen 2 probe has captured striking pictures of home as it heads out to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples.
Tianwen 2 launched from Xichang on a Long March 3B rocket on May 28 and is en route to the enigmatic asteroid Kamo'oalewa. But shortly after departure, the spacecraft took the opportunity to test out its cameras.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a statement on July 1 including images of Earth and the moon.
The image of Earth was captured by Tianwen 2's narrow field of view navigation sensor while 590,000 kilometers (367,000 miles) away from the planet on May 30.
A couple of hours later, the same instrument took a shot of the moon from a similar distance.
At the time of that update, Tianwen 2 had been in Earth orbit for 33 days, CNSA officials said. The probe was more than 12 million km (7.46 million miles) away from Earth and was in good working condition.
Previously, Tianwen 2 returned an image of one of its two circular solar arrays using an engineering camera, providing our first glimpse of the actual spacecraft.
Tianwen 2 is China's first asteroid mission. It aims to collect samples from Kamo'oalewa, one Earth's seven known "quasi moons," and is expected to arrive at the rocky body around July 2026.
It will then study the small asteroid to determine possible landing sites before collecting samples and heading for home, delivering its precious payload in a reentry capsule in late 2027. Analysis of the samples could shed light on the early days of our solar system.
"[This asteroid] is very likely to hold the original information of the solar system at its birth, which is of great scientific research value for our understanding of the material composition of the early solar system, including its formation process and evolutionary history," Han Siyuan, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center (LESEC) under CNSA, told Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV.
Tianwen 2's mission won't end there. The spacecraft will use its return to Earth to make a gravity slingshot maneuver to send it onto the next step of its journey: a rendezvous with the main belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS, which will occur around 2035.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/chinas-tianwen-2-asteroid-sampling-probe-snaps-gorgeous-shots-of-earth-and-the-moon-video-photos
https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/n6758823/n6758838/c10684432/content.html
Telescope spies rare interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS zooming through our solar system
July 17. 2025
Astronomers unveiled a striking new view of the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS on its journey toward the inner solar system.
The Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i captured the newfound comet passing through our cosmic neighborhood, about 290 million miles (465 million kilometers) from Earth.
3I/ATLAS was initially detected by ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on July 1.
It's just the third known interstellar object — meaning it originated outside of our solar system — according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab, which operates the International Gemini Observatory.
"The sensitivity and scheduling agility of the International Gemini Observatory has provided critical early characterization of this interstellar wanderer," Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory, said in the statement.
"We look forward to a bounty of new data and insights as this object warms itself on sunlight before continuing its cold, dark journey between the stars."
Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are remnants from distant star systems that have been ejected into space.
They offer valuable insights into the building blocks of other planetary systems in the universe — including the chemical elements that were present when and where they formed, according to the statement.
3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object detected visiting our solar system, after 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.
While more objects of this nature are believed to regularly pass through our solar system, they are incredibly difficult to capture.
However, at an estimated 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS is much larger than previous interstellar objects, making it a better target for study.
The new images from the Gemini North telescope show that the comet has a compact coma — the cloud of gas and dust enveloping its icy core.
And other observations have suggested that it may be the oldest comet ever discovered (possibly older than our solar system), hailing from the outer thick disk of the Milky Way.
3I/ATLAS will reach its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 30, passing within 130 million miles (210 million km), or just inside the orbit of Mars.
In December, 3I/ATLAS will pass within about 170 million miles (270 million km) of Earth, though it will pose no danger to our planet.
Given 3I/ATLAS' highly eccentric orbit, this will be its one and only visit to our solar system, as its trajectory does not loop back around the sun.
That's why astronomers around the world are using a wide variety of telescopes to observe the comet during its brief visit, before it returns to interstellar space.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/telescope-spies-rare-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-zooming-through-our-solar-system-photos
https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2522/?lang
Telescope spies rare interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS zooming through our solar system
July 17. 2025
Astronomers unveiled a striking new view of the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS on its journey toward the inner solar system.
The Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i captured the newfound comet passing through our cosmic neighborhood, about 290 million miles (465 million kilometers) from Earth.
3I/ATLAS was initially detected by ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on July 1.
It's just the third known interstellar object — meaning it originated outside of our solar system — according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab, which operates the International Gemini Observatory.
"The sensitivity and scheduling agility of the International Gemini Observatory has provided critical early characterization of this interstellar wanderer," Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory, said in the statement.
"We look forward to a bounty of new data and insights as this object warms itself on sunlight before continuing its cold, dark journey between the stars."
Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are remnants from distant star systems that have been ejected into space.
They offer valuable insights into the building blocks of other planetary systems in the universe — including the chemical elements that were present when and where they formed, according to the statement.
3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object detected visiting our solar system, after 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019.
While more objects of this nature are believed to regularly pass through our solar system, they are incredibly difficult to capture.
However, at an estimated 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS is much larger than previous interstellar objects, making it a better target for study.
The new images from the Gemini North telescope show that the comet has a compact coma — the cloud of gas and dust enveloping its icy core.
And other observations have suggested that it may be the oldest comet ever discovered (possibly older than our solar system), hailing from the outer thick disk of the Milky Way.
3I/ATLAS will reach its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 30, passing within 130 million miles (210 million km), or just inside the orbit of Mars.
In December, 3I/ATLAS will pass within about 170 million miles (270 million km) of Earth, though it will pose no danger to our planet.
Given 3I/ATLAS' highly eccentric orbit, this will be its one and only visit to our solar system, as its trajectory does not loop back around the sun.
That's why astronomers around the world are using a wide variety of telescopes to observe the comet during its brief visit, before it returns to interstellar space.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/telescope-spies-rare-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-zooming-through-our-solar-system-photos
https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2522/?lang
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Vigil/Vigil_s_tools_as_a_space_weather_reporter
Vigil’s tools as a space weather reporter
17/07/2025
Big solar storms, like the one in May 2024 that lit up the skies with stunning auroras across Europe, have the potential to disrupt power grids, communications and satellites.
Space weather, driven by solar activity, needs to be predicted early and accurately to give us the crucial time needed to protect satellites, astronauts and vital infrastructure on Earth.
That’s where ESA’s Vigil mission comes in. Acting as a dedicated ‘space weather reporter’, Vigil will drastically improve our forecasting abilities with its specialised set of instruments, delivering breaking space weather news from its unique deep-space vantage point at Lagrange point 5 (L5).
The power of the L5 perspective
Vigil will be ESA’s – and the world’s – first dedicated operational space weather mission at the fifth Lagrange point in deep space. Sending data continuously across 150 million kilometres back to Earth is both difficult and costly.
It requires sophisticated onboard data processing, a steady, low-latency data downlink with deep space antennas, and the transformation of Vigil’s raw data into actionable insights for space weather services. No small technical challenge.
It is the power of Vigil’s instruments combined with its position, observing from the unique perspective of the fifth Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L5), that will make it worthwhile.
new vantage point will vastly improve forecasts, allowing earlier warnings of up to 4–5 days in advance for certain space weather effects. Vigil’s valuable lead time may mean the difference between a minor inconvenience and a major disruption.
How can location alone be so crucial? There are three main ways Vigil’s instruments benefit from being located at the L5 vantage point.
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Looking around the corner
At the fifth Lagrange point, Vigil can observe the Sun’s surface and atmosphere from the side.
As the Sun rotates on its axis approximately every 28 days, regions of enhanced activity can rotate into Earth’s view and immediately erupt towards us with little warning.
Because Vigil will be positioned at L5, it offers a vital early glimpse ‘around the corner,’ detecting potentially hazardous regions several days before they face Earth, allowing time to prepare and respond.
Vigil’s Photospheric Magnetographic Imager (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany) will image the Sun’s surface magnetic fields to help predict solar activity and sunspots, and its data will feed into models of the heliosphere.
At the same time, extreme ultraviolet imager JEDI (South West Research Institute/NASA, USA) will capture high-resolution images of the Sun’s atmosphere to locate solar flares and eruption sites.
Together, these instruments act like a weather team observing storm clouds forming just beyond the horizon – before the sky even begins to darken – giving forecasters valuable time to issue warnings and prepare.
Over time, their continuous observations will also deepen our understanding of how these active regions form, evolve and erupt.
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Looking from the side
The second advantage of observing from the fifth Lagrange point is also the most important for directly predicting solar storms: looking at them side-on.
Imagine trying to judge the speed and size of a car coming straight at you. It’s difficult. Now imagine watching it from the side: suddenly it’s much easier to see how fast it’s going and how big it is.
It is the same with solar eruptions, but unlike cars, these eruptions come in all shapes and sizes, making side-on observations even more important.
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Currently all permanent operational space weather observers are positioned in an Earth orbit or at Lagrange point 1, which is about 1% of the way to the Sun on the Sun-Earth line.
This means these satellites have a head-on view of eruptions coming towards us. Vigil’s new side-on perspective from L5 will give us an earlier and much clearer understanding of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) moving towards Earth.
Because Vigil can see the space between the Sun and Earth from the side, it can see how solar eruptions move from the moment they leave the Sun to when they approach Earth.
The timing of CME impacts will be predicted with far greater accuracy. Even better, arrival time estimates will be refined and updated in near-real time as events unfold.
Vigil’s Compact Coronagraph (Naval Research Lab/NOAA, USA) blocks the bright disk of the Sun to observe the million-times-fainter outer solar atmosphere called the corona, allowing it to detect CMEs shortly after they erupt.
Then, the Heliospheric Imager (Leonardo SpA/CSL, Italy/Belgium) captures wide-angle images of these eruptions as they travel through space toward Earth.
This continuous view enables improved tracking and modelling of space weather events in real time.
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Measuring sweeping solar winds early
If you stick your hand out the window before leaving the house, you can get a sense of whether it's raining and how hard. But it’s far more useful to have a forecast that tells you that in advance.
In much the same way, the third major benefit of Vigil’s location at Lagrange Point 5 is that it can observe solar wind conditions similar to what will be experienced at Earth a few days later.
Because solar wind streams follow curved paths known as Parker spirals – much like water spraying from a rotating garden sprinkler – L5 is ideally positioned to sample the flow moving along these spirals.
The Plasma Analyser (Mullard Space Science Laboratory, United Kingdom) measures solar wind particles directly at L5, giving us valuable insight into what will soon sweep past Earth.
Vigil’s second in situ instrument is its Magnetometer (Imperial College London/IWF Graz, UK/Austria). It detects magnetic fields from the end of a seven-metre-long boom.
This distance helps eliminate interference from the spacecraft itself, enabling precise tracking of incoming magnetic disturbances associated with space weather events.
Vigil’s forecasts: more than the sum of their parts
Together, Vigil’s powerful suite of instruments will help reduce the risk of disruptions caused by space weather events, continuously monitoring the Sun and the Sun–Earth line for years.
Vigil’s unique and stable L5 location also makes it a fascinating source of scientific data. Vigil’s observations will feed into various space weather services, including ESA’s own Space Weather Service Network.
"When combined with data from other missions near Earth and at Lagrange point 1, Vigil’s unique perspective makes the system greater than the sum of its parts," says Matthew West, Vigil mission scientist at ESA.
"By contributing observations from a previously unmonitored region of space, Vigil will help stitch together a continuous scene: from activity on the Sun, through the heliosphere, all the way to Earth’s space environment.
This added dimension will significantly enhance our ability to forecast and respond to solar storms."
With Vigil’s launch scheduled for 2031, Europe will gain a new and vital sentinel in space that is keeping watch, keeping data flowing and helping keep our modern world resilient to solar activity.
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Air Force Claims $10.4B in DOGE Savings, Most from Consultants and Contractors
July 16, 2025
The Department of the Air Force is claiming more than $10 billion in savings as part of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink.
The department did not provide a full breakdown of the savings, but the bulk appear to be derived from cancelling contracts or planned contract pools for consultants and cutting civilian jobs.
In a video shared on social media, Hegseth said the Air Force has worked for six months with DOGE, Trump’s cost-cutting team, “cutting waste and working with vendors to reduce contract spendings.”
“I want to commend you, Mr. Secretary, and the entire Air Force team in rooting out excess,” Hegseth added.
Meink said the department reviewed more than 500 contracts and 50 business systems as part of its efforts.
“With the modernization going on, which is the largest in the history of the Air Force, every last dollar is going to be necessary to bring that lethality and peace through strength,” he said.
A Department of the Air Force spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the total savings were valued at $10.4 billion, to include “cost savings or avoidance on contracts including descoping, reducing the contract ceiling, terminating, or declining to exercise contract option periods.”
The spokesperson could not provide a detailed breakdown of those savings, but did provide a few examples.
By far the biggest savings—or at least cost avoidance—comes from reductions to the Department of the Air Force Strategic Transformation Support contract, an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract through which offices can access consulting and advisory services on Air Force enterprise changes.
The Air Force spokesperson claimed that by terminating and descoping the program, the department saved $4.8 billion.
On its website, DOGE says it saved $3.75 billion by terminating a second AFSTS contract vehicle before it was awarded, plus another $832 million by canceling a task order for Deloitte under the first AFSTS contract, and $104 million in AFSTS contracts for other consultants.
Most of those savings aren’t funds that have been spent or obligated, though. Under IDIQ contracts, companies can compete for task orders up to the ceiling amount listed.
But the actual amount spent can vary. USASpending.gov, for example, lists $353 million in Pentagon spending on AFSTS. In fiscal 2024, the total was around $12.17 million.
Additionally, “we identified significant savings in terminating IT Service Contracts by eliminating unused software licenses,” the Air Force spokesperson said.
“In one example, we were paying for 16,000 licenses but only 300 licenses were being used. That’s a utilization rate of just 1.9 percent. We renegotiated the contract to match actual deployment needs.
The result: $19.4 million in immediate savings plus long-term cost avoidance by rightsizing the license usage.”
DOGE’s website notes a canceled contract worth $309.9 million for an Air Force Research Laboratory effort called Mayhem, meant to develop “a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface,” plus another
The Air Force also noted DOGE savings in documents for its 2026 budget request released last month, most of it from civilian personnel reductions or consulting and contractor cuts.
A budget briefing notes $1.7 billion in savings from “civilian workforce optimization” and $1 billion from cutting back on “Advisory and Assistance Services.”
It also claimed $368.1 million in savings on reduced travel expenses, and $340.9 million in shelved climate initiatives.
Air Force and Space Force officials told Congress earlier this year they expect to a significant portion of their civilian workforce as part of a the DOGE drive to reduce the Pentagon civilian workforce by 5 to 8 percent. Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services, said she expects to lose about 12,000 Air Force civilians, roughly 6 percent of the department’s 186,000 civilian employees.
Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman estimated a reduction of “almost 14 percent of our civilian workforce.”
Hegseth’s office did not immediately provide a breakdown of the purported savings.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-doge-savings-advisory-services-civilian-workforce/
https://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1945500216523657724
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/defense-policy-nominee-has-advocated-merging-nro-and-space-system-command/
https://spi.elliott.gwu.edu/2025/07/02/book-launch-event-july-15-1030am-100pm-contested-space-ensuring-effective-u-s-national-security-space-capabilities-in-an-increasingly-contested-environment/
Defense Policy Nominee Has Advocated Merging NRO and Space System Command
July 16, 2025
Combining the National Reconnaissance Office with the Space Force’s Space Systems Command could help turbocharge national security space acquisition, argues Mark Berkowitz, the Trump administration’s nominee to be assistant secretary of defense for space policy, in a newly published essay he coauthored.
Berkowitz is awaiting Senate confirmation and was not available for comment.
The essay appears in the book, “Contested Space: Ensuring Effective U.S. National Security Space Capabilities in an Increasingly Contested Environment,” which was recently published by by the nonprofit National Security Space Association.
In the essay, Berkowitz and coauthor Chris Williams, a former Defense Department official, argues that the Trump administration should tighten the relationship between the two organizations, including a potential merger, to improve coordination between the Space Force and the intelligence community with regard to space technology.
A closer relationship would help Space Force acquirers benefit from NRO’s special authorities and vast experience.
Williams spoke July 15 at the Washington D.C. book launch, along with other contributors.
He said merging NRO with Space Systems Command, the Space Force’s main acquisition organization, would create a “single, agile” entity to “enable closer collaboration, utilize best of breed acquisition practices and result in more integrated mission architectures.”
A single organization could “promote a common culture focused on rapidly delivering advanced space capabilities to national and defense customers, enhance technology sharing, improve communications between the various [acquisition] organizations and more,” Williams said.
The Space Force could also benefit from a merger because it would be able to leverage the NRO’s special purchasing rules, Williams added.
“One of the reasons the NRO is so effective is because of those very unique acquisition authorities and the Space Force does not have similar authorities in many respects,” he explained. “It’s worth looking at how those might be blended.”
A less radical alternative: Moving Space Systems Command from its Los Angeles Air Force Base headquarters in California to co-locate with the NRO in Chantilly, Va. That too could be controversial, Williams acknowledged.
Co-location would “enable closer collaboration and integration of acquisition activities … and promote efforts to create synergies, both within DOD and between DOD and the NRO space programs that could potentially result in long term cost savings.”
He and Berkowitz suggest other ways to forge tighter bonds: a common training curriculum and career path for acquisition professionals and “shared adoption of common systems engineering, modeling and simulation architecture,” said Williams.
“It’s very wonky, but important stuff.” Williams insisted their essay, and indeed all the ideas in the book as a whole, are not prescriptive. “It doesn’t say, ‘You must do X, Y, and Z.’”
Instead, the authors lay out policy options the administration should consider, leaving it up to policymakers to weigh the pros and cons.
The book was written last year, before the election, but had to be submitted for classification review by the DOD, noted Williams.
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Merging or even co-locating Space Systems Command with the NRO would be a massive undertaking, Williams acknowledged in a short interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Politics, as well as policy considerations would come into play. Congress would have to approve any reorganization and local politicians would protest, he said: “Don’t take that out of my backyard!”
Others would argue that the costs and the disruption of a cross-country move would kneecap Space Systems Command for the crucial years running up to 2027 — the date by which China’s President Xi Jinping has demanded that the People’s Liberation Army be ready to take Taiwan by force if needed.
“The dislocation, moving people across the country, that’s a big deal,” Williams said, “There’s a cost associated with it, and there’s also the time and energy that’s spent.
The question is, is it the right thing to do? Are those near-term costs worth the long-term benefits? Those are decisions the folks in the government have to make.”
When the Space Force was set up in the first Trump administration, the intelligence agencies and their oversight committees on Capitol Hill successfully fended off proposals to move NRO into the new service.
But Williams said the new administration is open to proposals for disrupting the status quo.
“If Trump is anything, he’s a rock-the-boat kind of guy,” Williams said. “This administration is interested in doing things differently … so maybe we’ll see some of these issues addressed.”
Williams noted that many Defense Department posts remain vacant, even six months after the inauguration. New Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, a former Air Force officer, spent the past decade at NRO, including the past five as its deputy director.
“As the new administration starts filling out some of their key people, as those people start occupying their new jobs and engaging together, my hope is they’ll have more time and energy to devote to this,” he said.
Former NRO Director Jeffrey Harris, a member of NSSA’s advisory board, welcomed the proposal, pointing out that the NRO had originally been founded to ensure the project to build the nation’s first photographic spy satellite, Corona, would be completed rapidly and avoid interservice disputes.
“The Army was trying to get their booster [rocket] to work, while the Air Force was trying to get theirs … And President [Eisenhower] finally said, ‘This is actually sort of important.
Why don’t we organize to get the job done?’” he said. “And so the NRO was formed in 1960.”
As an intelligence agency, the NRO functions under different rules, out of the public eye, and can draw “the best and the brightest” from across the community, including the Air Force, Space Force, CIA, and Navy, Harris said, “civilian and military, fully integrated under a common command structure across research, development, acquisition, procurement and operations, allows us to move with speed and agility.”
Rivalries continue, however. In the mid 1990s, when he was NRO director, a bureaucratic fight over a small military payload on an NRO satellite caused a costly delay.
“The satellite had $6 million worth of defense investment on it, and the money had to be moved from one defense account to another,” Harris recalled. “I was spending $10 million a month waiting for $6 million to move.”
SNAFUs like that could be avoided if NRO and Space Systems Command were more closely linked, he said. “We have the people to figure out how to go do the mission—if we can get the [acquisition] systems to appreciate that.”
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Trump taps new Air Force, Space Force No. 2s
July 16, 2025 at 4:38 PM
President Donald Trump has tapped two military leaders to serve as the No. 2 officers of the Air Force and Space Force, respectively, filling posts left vacant by the unceremonious dismissal of one official and the elevation of another.
For the Air Force, Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, would take over as the service’s vice chief of staff, according to a congressional notice.
The post has been empty since Gen. Jim Slife was fired, largely without explanation, by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Feb. 21.
Bussiere, who as Global Strike Command chief oversees the Air Force’s nuclear deterrent and strategic assets like bombers, has been viewed as a top candidate for months and would bring a depth of personal experience to the role.
Achieving the rating of a command pilot after logging thousands of hours on aircraft like the F-15 Eagle, B-2 Spirit and F-22 Rapter, Bussiere’s service biography shows he has held numerous posts including deputy director for nuclear, homeland defense and current operations on the Joint Staff.
He has served in his current role since December 2022.
A strong advocate for modernization efforts underway across the Air Force, Bussiere has said it would be prudent to reexamine the assumptions underlying years-old targets for the size of the Air Force’s bomber fleet.
While the general currently stewards so-far successful programs like the B-21 Raider, his portfolio also includes flagging efforts like the LGM-35A Sentinel, which he revealed will require new missile silos.
Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, current Space Force deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements, has been tapped to be the service’s next vice chief of space operations, according to a congressional notice.
His elevation has been widely expected by service and industry officials for some weeks. The nomination was
He would replace Gen. Michael Guetlein, who has been nominated by Trump to serve as the program manager for his ambitious Golden Dome effort to build a comprehensive missile shield for the US homeland.
While Guetlein has not yet been officially confirmed, he is widely expected to face few obstacles. In that new role, he would report directly to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
As for Bratton, in his current role he played a key part in development of the Space Force’s overarching “warfighting framework” that seeks to substantiate Space Force plans to conduct warfare “in, from and through” space — as well as establish the centrality of “space superiority” to joint military operations against peer adversaries China and Russia.
He also led the service team charged with creating a blueprint for a new Space Force Futures Command, which would focus on fleshing out capabilities that might be available and relevant to space operations some 15 to 20 years down the line.
Bussiere and Bratton now both require Senate confirmation. Hearing dates for either nominee have not yet been scheduled.
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/07/trump-taps-new-air-force-space-force-no-2s/
https://www.congress.gov/nomination/119th-congress/412?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22%5C%22shawn+Bratton%5C%22%22%7D&s=2&r=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6tGRx-p0O0
Space Force Front Door fosters international partnerships at inaugural event
July 17, 2025
The U.S. Space Force Front Door, a commercial partner engagement office embedded within Space Systems Command, expanded its outreach beyond U.S. based enterprises with its inaugural Joint Briefing on Acquisition Pathways for Allied Commercial Space Vendors.
The event coincided with the 2025 National Space Symposium in anticipation of the recently released USSF International Partnership Strategy to unify like-minded nations’ efforts in the space domain.
Zoe Nelson, Acquisition program manager at Front Door and a key organizer of the event, noted that the robust attendance revealed both an intense global interest in commercial U.S. defense space opportunities as well as the persistent challenges in navigating them.
Held in close proximity to the Space Symposium conference venue, the Front Door event drew more than 100 international vendors and government partners to the Innovation Hub, a collaborative partnership space managed by VT-ARC for SSC and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Presentations and networking opportunities explored pathways for allied commercial space collaboration with the Department of Defense and other governmental agencies.
"I'm really thrilled with the results,” Nelson said. “The fact that we brought together over 100 vendors and U.S. government partners to attend this event that was off campus is a testament to the interest in this challenge."
The genesis of the event started with a simple meeting between Kara Hernandez, an Aerospace Corporation contractor supporting Front Door, and the U.K. Department of Business and Trade.
Once Front Door’s attendance at the symposium was confirmed, "we thought we might as well make this an open event and try to really deliver value versus doing a bunch of individual meetings," Nelson explained.
After gaining the U.K. delegation’s approval to expand participation, 114 vendors from 12 nations joined the list of attendees.
Front Door also invited a group of U.S. government speakers to illuminate various engagement routes apart from Front Door.
This included representatives from U.S. Space Force’s Global Partnerships Directorate, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s Foreign Comparative Testing program, and the Defense Innovation Unit’s space portfolio.
Nelson emphasized the strategic importance of working with international partners.
"In my view, it's beneficial to work with international or foreign vendors in part to try to deliver interoperability between architectures," she said, citing the importance of "resiliency through redundancy" of critical space infrastructure, and accessing advanced technologies where allies might have more experience and production capability.
The success of the event, particularly given the shortened window for planning, has energized the team. During next year’s symposium, Front Door aims to host a similar event.
Plans include inviting key partners like the Air Force Research Laboratory and more directly identifying and addressing specific roadblocks for international vendors.
In addition to refining pathways for international vendors to work with Space Force, Nelson said Front Door has and will continue to provide advisory support to allies, such as the United Kingdom, as they build out their own "Front Door" equivalents modeled after the USSF’s Front Door portal.
"I'm really excited for the day when we get everyone on board in utilizing these capabilities," Nelson said.
https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4248220/space-force-front-door-fosters-international-partnerships-at-inaugural-event