Blue Origin launched its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket for the first time last week, and news sites and social media feeds were quick to share dramatic images of the 98-meter-tall rocket heading toward the heavens.
At the same time, NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured the launch in a long exposure from the International Space Station (ISS) some 250 miles above Earth. The result is a rocket-launch photo unlike any you’ve seen before:
Sharing the image in a post on X, Pettit, who arrived at the orbital outpost in September, explained that it was captured over a period of four minutes, which explains the star trails that dominate the picture. With Earth at the bottom, the New Glenn rocket is visible as a faint streak crossing the image from the bottom right to the upper left.
“This was not an easy photograph to take,” Pettit wrote, adding that the space station was over Oklahoma at the beginning of the exposure and over central Gulf of Mexico at the end.
Pettit has earned a reputation for his impressive photography work during four missions to orbit over the last couple of decades. The experienced astronaut is particularly fond of shots filled with star trails, but this appears to be the first time that he’s been lucky enough to include a rocket launch in one.
Other notable images from Pettit’s current ISS mission include one showing a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft hurtling back to Earth, and another showing the bright glow of an aurora above Earth.
Always on the lookout for a stunning scene, he also captured this stunning image of waterways, which he described as “flowing silver snakes.”
Pettit recently took time out to talk about his photography work in an interview from the space station.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.