Boeing has revealed that it has taken another $125 million in losses as a result of its Starliner spacecraft's delayed return from the ISS. As SpaceNews reports, the company has revealed the losses in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, along with more details about its earnings for the second quarter of the year. The company already posted $288 million in losses "primarily as a result of delaying" the Crew Flight Test mission in 2023. 

The first crewed Starliner flight took off in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams on board. Boeing's spacecraft was only supposed to stay docked to the ISS for eight days before ferrying the astronauts back to Earth, but issues with its hardware prevented the mission from sticking to its original timeline. 

The company had to examine and find what caused the Starliner's degraded maneuvering thrusters while it was approaching the ISS. In addition, the helium leak that caused several delays to the spacecraft's launch seemed to have worsened, as well. Since June, the company has been putting the spacecraft through a series of tests. Just a few days ago, on July 27, it completed a hot fire test of the Starliner's reaction control system jets and made sure that the vehicle's helium leak rates remain within the acceptable margin. The tests were conducted with Williams and Wilmore onboard, because they're part of the preparations for the spacecraft's flight back home. 

NASA said the tests' results are still being reviewed. But once Boeing and the agency ensure that the Starliner is ready, they will set a date for the Starliner and the astronauts' return flight. 

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew on the much-delayed first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner craft, won’t be coming home from the International Space Station until sometime next month, well past their originally planned return date of June 14. NASA announced last night that it's pushing the date of their return trip back even further in order to allow for more reviews into problems that arose with Starliner during its flight, and to avoid conflicts with upcoming spacewalks. As of now, there’s no date set for the flight back to Earth.

Starliner launched on June 5 and delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS about a day later. Their stay was only supposed to last a week or so. During the flight, however, four small helium leaks sprung in the propulsion system, on top of the one that had already been identified prior to launch. And, when Starliner first attempted to approach the ISS on June 6 and begin docking, five of its 28 thrusters went offline. Boeing was able to get four of them back up and running. NASA also revealed a few days after launch that the teams were looking into an issue with a valve in the service module that was “not properly closed.”

The space agency had already pushed the date of the return trip back a few times over the last week and most recently landed on June 26, but now says the flight won’t take place until after the spacewalks planned for June 24 and July 2 have been completed. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, on Friday.

“Starliner is performing well in orbit while docked to the space station,” Stich also said. “We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”

The image of the Serpens Nebula you see above, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), not only looks mesmerizing but also captures a never-before-seen phenomenon. The aligned, elongated “protostellar outflows” visible in the top left support a longstanding theory. As suspected, the jets shoot out in alignment from the swirling disks of surrounding material, showing evidence that clusters of forming stars spin in the same direction.

NASA says the bright and clumpy streaks in the image’s upper-left area, which somewhat resemble JJ Abrams-style lens flare, represent shockwaves caused by outward-shooting jets that emerge when the interstellar gas cloud collapses inwards. As forming stars condense and twirl more rapidly, some material shoots out perpendicular to the disk.

“Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” Klaus Pontoppidan of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a blog post. “However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”

The Serpens Nebula is only one or two million years old and sits around 1,300 light years from Earth. NASA says the dense cluster of protostars at the image’s center includes stars less than 100,000 years old. Serpens is a reflection nebula, meaning the gas and dust cloud shines by reflecting light from stars inside or nearby.

The JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the image, which covers about 16 trillion miles by 11 trillion miles. The black rectangles you see at the full image’s lower left and upper left represent missing data. NASA says its next step is to use the telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to study the Serpens Nebula’s chemical breakdown.

You can check out NASA’s instructional video below for a closer look at specific details from the glorious image.

The hits keep on coming with NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope. According to the space agency, the JWST just found the most distant known galaxy ever. The catchily-named JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy is said to have formed just 290 million years after the big bang, but it features some unique properties that are at odds with that notion.

The galaxy is incredibly large, at 1,600 light years across. It’s also very bright and features an unusual amount of starlight, given how soon it formed after the big bang. This has led researchers Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline to ask “how can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?” In cosmic time, that’s barely a blip.

The wavelengths of light emitted from JADES-GS-z14-0, as spotted by the JWST’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), indicate the presence of strong ionized gas emissions, likely from an abundance of hydrogen and oxygen. This is also weird, as oxygen is not typically present early in the life of a galaxy. This suggests that “multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.”

NASA

As always with distant space stuff, we are actually looking at the past, due to the speed of light, so that means that the galaxy spawned those multiple generations of massive stars in under 290 million years. Stars “only” take around ten million years to form, but can take up to 20 billion years to die. However, ultra-massive stars typically have decreased lifespans. So this finding doesn’t exactly rewrite our understanding of the cosmos, but does certainly call into question the nature of star formation in the early life of the universe.

“All of these observations, together, tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not like the types of galaxies that have been predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to exist in the very early universe,” the researchers told NASA. “It is likely that astronomers will find many such luminous galaxies, possibly at even earlier times, over the next decade with Webb.”

The Webb telescope has made a habit out of redefining our understanding of the cosmos. It has shown us stars being born in the Virgo constellation, found water for the first time orbiting a comet and discovered carbon dioxide on a distant exoplanet, which was a first. All of this has been done in under two years of operation, so who knows what the future will bring.

Blue Origin is back in the space tourism game. Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company successfully flew six paying customers to the edge of space and back this morning, breaking its nearly two-year-long hiatus from crewed missions. This was Blue Origin’s seventh trip with humans on board. The mission — a quick jaunt to cross the Kármán line, or the boundary of space, about 62 miles above Earth — lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30AM ET.

The six people inside the New Shepard crew capsule included 90-year-old Ed Dwight, a former Air Force Captain who was the first Black astronaut candidate when he was picked for the training program in 1961. He went through training but ultimately wasn’t selected for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, and never made it to space until now. Also on board were Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller and Gopi Thotakura. They were briefly able to unbuckle their seatbelts and experience zero gravity.

The crew safely landed back on the ground about 10 minutes after launch. One of the capsule's three parachutes didn't properly deploy on the return trip, but this didn't pose any problems for its touchdown thanks to the redundancies in the system that account for exactly that type of situation. 

This was also the 25th mission for a New Shepard rocket. It last flew a crew in August 2022, but suffered a structural failure in its engine nozzle the following month during the launch of a payload mission and didn't fly again at all until December 2023. It returned to flight then with another payload mission, making today's launch its first with human passengers in almost two years. 

The strongest geomagnetic storm in 20 years made the colorful northern lights, or aurora borealis, visible Friday night across the US, even in areas that are normally too far south to see them. And the show may not be over. Tonight may offer another chance to catch the aurora if you have clear skies, according to the NOAA, and Sunday could bring yet more displays reaching as far as Alabama.

The NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said on Saturday that the sun has continued to produce powerful solar flares. That’s on top of previously observed coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or explosions of magnetized plasma, that won’t reach Earth until tomorrow. The agency has been monitoring a particularly active sunspot cluster since Wednesday, and confirmed yesterday that it had observed G5 conditions — the level designated “extreme” — which haven’t been seen since October 2003. In a press release on Friday, Clinton Wallace, Director, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, said the current storm is “an unusual and potentially historic event.”

Geomagnetic storms happen when outbursts from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetosphere. While it all has kind of a scary ring to it, people on the ground don’t really have anything to worry about. As NASA explained on X, “Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere” to physically affect us. These storms can mess with our technology, though, and have been known to disrupt communications, GPS, satellite operations and even the power grid.

The strongest geomagnetic storm in 20 years made the colorful northern lights, or aurora borealis, visible Friday night across the US, even in areas that are normally too far south to see them. And the show may not be over. Tonight may offer another chance to catch the aurora if you have clear skies, according to the NOAA, and Sunday could bring yet more displays reaching as far as Alabama.

The NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said on Saturday that the sun has continued to produce powerful solar flares. That’s on top of previously observed coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or explosions of magnetized plasma, that won’t reach Earth until tomorrow. The agency has been monitoring a particularly active sunspot cluster since Wednesday, and confirmed yesterday that it had observed G5 conditions — the level designated “extreme” — which haven’t been seen since October 2003. In a press release on Friday, Clinton Wallace, Director, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, said the current storm is “an unusual and potentially historic event.”

Geomagnetic storms happen when outbursts from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetosphere. While it all has kind of a scary ring to it, people on the ground don’t really have anything to worry about. As NASA explained on X, “Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere” to physically affect us. These storms can mess with our technology, though, and have been known to disrupt communications, GPS, satellite operations and even the power grid.

Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft, a demonstration satellite that could inform future space junk cleanup efforts, is now in orbit after a successful launch from New Zealand on Sunday. The satellite was sent to space atop an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab. Its mission, which was selected by Japan’s space agency (JAXA) for Phase I of the Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration program, will see ADRAS-J rendezvous with an old Japanese rocket upper stage that’s been in orbit since 2009.

The accumulation of waste in Earth’s orbit from decades of spaceflight is an issue of growing concern, and space agencies around the world are increasingly working to address it, in many cases tapping private companies to develop potential solutions. One of the most effective ways to deal with space junk could be to deorbit it, or move it to a lower altitude so it can burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. ADRAS-J will be the first to target a piece of existing large debris and attempt to safely approach and characterize it, relying on ground-based data to hone in on its position.

Over the next few months, it’ll make its way to the target and eventually try to get close enough to take images and assess its condition to determine if it can be removed. “ADRAS-J is officially on duty and ready to rendezvous with some space debris!” the company tweeted. “Let the new era of space sustainability begin!”

Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander is well on its way to the moon after launching without a hitch on Thursday, but it managed to snap a few incredible images of Earth while it was still close to home. The company shared the first batch of images from the IM-1 mission on X today after confirming in an earlier post that the spacecraft is “in excellent health.” Along with a view of Earth and some partial selfies of the Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, you can even see the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage falling away in the distance after separation.

Odysseus is on track to make its moon landing attempt on February 22, and so far appears to be performing well. The team posted a series of updates on X at the end of the week confirming the lander has passed some key milestones ahead of its touchdown, including engine firing. This marked “the first-ever in-space ignition of a liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine,” according to Intuitive Machines.

If extreme challenges are your cup of tea, NASA has the perfect opportunity for you. The space agency put out a call on Friday for volunteers to participate in its second yearlong simulated Mars mission, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA 2). For the duration of the mission, which will start in spring 2025, the four selected crew members will be housed in a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston. NASA is accepting applications on the CHAPEA website from now through April 2. It’s a paid gig, but NASA hasn’t publicly said how much participants will be compensated.

The Mars Dune Alpha habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center is designed to simulate what life might be like for future explorers on the red planet, where the environment is harsh and resources will be limited. There’s a crew currently living and working there as part of the first CHAPEA mission, which is now more than halfway through its 378-day assignment. During their stay, volunteers will perform habitat maintenance and grow crops, among other tasks. The habitat also has a 1,200-square-foot sandbox attached to it for simulated spacewalks.

To be considered, applicants must be a US citizen aged 30-55, speak English proficiently and have a master’s degree in a STEM field, plus at least two years of professional experience, a minimum of one thousand hours piloting an aircraft or two years of work toward a STEM doctoral program. Certain types of professional experience may allow applicants without a master’s to qualify too. CHAPEA 2 is the second of three mission NASA has planned for the program, the first of which began on June 25, 2023.