If you’ve been spending much of the last 24 hours inside a secure building fearing that a spent Soviet spacecraft part might land on your head, then the good news is that it’s safe to come out now.
The object — part of the Kosmos-482 spacecraft that launched 53 years ago — crashed to Earth at around 9:24 a.m. Moscow time (2:24 a.m. ET) on Saturday, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
While there have been no eyewitness reports of the 1,000-pound part coming down, Roscosmos has said it believes the object landed in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Debris from spent rockets or satellites enters Earth’s atmosphere all the time, but most of it burns up before reaching our planet’s surface. Kosmos-482, however, was made of sterner stuff, as it had been designed to withstand the extreme pressure and heat of Venus, the planet where it was supposed to have landed just over 100 days after its launch back in 1972.
The Kosmos-482 mission was over shortly after it began, when a rocket malfunction during launch meant that it would never be able to reach its destination. After the vehicle’s upper stage failed to properly ignite, it remained trapped in a highly elliptical Earth orbit where it stayed for more than half a century before eventually reentering Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday.
While some folks may have had concerns about the great lump of metal landing on their head, the European Space Agency had tried to put things into perspective prior to its return, saying: “The risk of any satellite reentry causing injury is extremely remote. The annual risk of an individual human being injured by space debris is under 1 in 100 billion. In comparison, a person is about 65,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning.”
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.