A college science professor and an aerospace data analyst were named on Tuesday to round out a four-member crew for a SpaceX launch into orbit planned later this year billed as the first all-civilian spaceflight in history.
The two latest citizen astronauts were introduced at a news briefing livestreamed from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida by SpaceX human spaceflight chief Benji Reed and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who conceived the mission in part as a charity drive.
Isaacman, founder and CEO of e-commerce firm Shift4 Payments , is forking over an unspecified but presumably exorbitant sum to fellow billionaire and SpaceX owner Elon Musk to fly himself and three others into orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
The flight, scheduled for no earlier than Sept. 15, is expected to last three to four days from launch to splashdown.
“When this mission is complete, people are going to look at it and say this was the first time that everyday people could go to space,” Isaacman, 38, told reporters.
Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission is designed primarily to raise awareness and support for one of Isaacman’s favorite causes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading pediatric cancer center. He has pledged $100 million personally to the institute.
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Assuming the role of mission “commander,” Isaacman in February designated St. Jude physician’s assistant Haley Arceneaux, 29, a bone cancer survivor and onetime patient at the Tennessee-based hospital, as his first crewmate.
Announced on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski, 41, a Seattle-area aerospace industry employee and U.S. Air Force veteran, was selected through a sweepstakes that drew 72,000 applicants and has raised $113 million in St. Jude donations.
Sian Proctor, 51, a geoscience professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and entrepreneur who was once a NASA astronaut candidate, was chosen separately through an online business contest run by Shift4 Payments.
All four will undergo extensive training modeled after the curriculum NASA astronauts use to prepare for SpaceX missions.
The Inspiration4 mission may mark a new era in spaceflight, but it is not the only all-civilian crewed rocket launch in the works.
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British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic enterprise is developing a spaceplane to carry paying customers on suborbital excursions.
SpaceX plans a separate launch, possibly next year, of a retired NASA astronaut, a former Israeli fighter pilot and two other people in conjunction with Houston-based private spaceflight company Axiom Space.
Musk also intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon in 2023. Fees charged for those flights will help finance the development of Musk’s new, heavy-lift Starship rocket for missions to the moon and Mars.
Inspiration4 is about more than a billionaire’s joyride through space, organizers say, promising the crew will conduct a number of as-yet undetermined science experiments during its brief voyage. (Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Karishma Singh)
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A University of Victoria micropaleontologist found that marine plankton may act as an early alert system before a mass extinction occurs.
With help from collaborators at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy Fraass’ newest paper in the Nature journal shows that after an analysis of fossil records showed that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.
“One of the major findings of the paper was how communities respond to climate events in the past depends on the previous climate,” Fraass said in a news release. “That means that we need to spend a lot more effort understanding recent communities, prior to industrialization. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since, to do a better job at predicting what will happen in the future.”
According to the release, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyses to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans dating back millions of years.
A key finding of the study was that during the “early eocene climatic optimum,” a geological era with sustained high global temperatures equivalent to today’s worst case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities moved to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures prevented higher amounts of biodiversity.
“Considering that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,” paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the release.
Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.
In the new work, scientists looked at a set of trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, which is the technical term for those objects that sit out at the edge of the solar system, beyond Neptune
The new work looked at those objects that have their movement made unstable because they interact with the orbit of Neptune. That instability meant they were harder to understand, so typically astronomers looking at a possible Planet Nine have avoided using them in their analysis.
Researchers instead looked towards those objects and tried to understand their movements. And, Dr Bogytin claimed, the best explanation is that they result from another, undiscovered planet.
The team carried out a host of simulations to understand how those objects’ orbits were affected by a variety of things, including the giant planets around them such as Neptune, the “Galactic tide” that comes from the Milky Way, and passing stars.
The best explanation was from the model that included Planet 9, however, Dr Bogytin said. They noted that there were other explanations for the behaviour of those objects – including the suggestion that other planets once influenced their orbit, but have since been removed – but claim that the theory of Planet 9 remains the best explanation.
A better understanding of the existence or not of Planet 9 will come when the Vera C Rubin Observatory is turned on, the authors note. The observatory is currently being built in Chile, and when it is turned on it will be able to scan the sky to understand the behaviour of those distant objects.
Planet Nine is theorised to have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the Sun.
You may be tempted to ask how an entire planet could ‘hide’ in our solar system when we have zooming capabilities such as the new iPhone 15 has, but consider this: If Earth was the size of a marble, the edge of our solar system would be 11 kilometres away. That’s a lot of space to hide a planet.
NASA has confirmed that its exciting Dragonfly mission, which will fly a drone-like craft around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will cost $3.35 billion and launch in July 2028.
Titan is the only other world in the solar system other than Earth that has weather and liquid on the surface. It has an atmosphere, rain, lakes, oceans, shorelines, valleys, mountain ridges, mesas and dunes—and possibly the building blocks of life itself. It’s been described as both a utopia and as deranged because of its weird chemistry.
Set to reach Titan in 2034, the Dragonfly mission will last for two years once its lander arrives on the surface. During the mission, a rotorcraft will fly to a new location every Titan day (16 Earth days) to take samples of the giant moon’s prebiotic chemistry. Here’s what else it will do:
Search for chemical biosignatures, past or present, from water-based life to that which might use liquid hydrocarbons.
Investigate the moon’s active methane cycle.
Explore the prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface.
Spectacular Mission
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
It comes in the wake of the Mars Helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, which flew 72 times between April 2021 and its final flight in January 2023 despite only being expected to make up to five experimental test flights over 30 days. It just made its final downlink of data this week.
Dense Atmosphere
However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple. Gravity on Titan is just 14% of the Earth’s. It sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth.
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The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. Its seas and lakes are not water but liquid ethane and methane. The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but on its surface, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice on its surface.
COVID-Affected
Dragonfly was a victim of the pandemic. Slated to cost $1 billion when it was selected in 2019, it was meant to launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034 after an eight-year cruise phase. However, after delays due to COVID, NASA decided to compensate for the inevitable delayed launch by funding a heavy-lift launch vehicle to massively shorten the mission’s cruise phase.
The end result is that Dragonfly will take off two years later but arrive on schedule.
Previous Visit
Dragonfly won’t be the first time a robotic probe has visited Titan. As part of NASA’s landmark Cassini mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, a small probe called Huygens was despatched into Titan’s clouds on January 14, 2005. The resulting timelapse movie of its 2.5 hours descent—which heralded humanity’s first-ever (and only) views of Titan’s surface—is a must-see for space fans. It landed in an area of rounded blocks of ice, but on the way down, it saw ancient dry shorelines reminiscent of Earth as well as rivers of methane.
The announcement by NASA makes July 2028 a month worth circling for space fans, with a long-duration total solar eclipse set for July 22, 2028, in Australia and New Zealand.