Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 4

SpaceX is about to make history by being the company to transport the first astronauts in a polar orbit under the mission "Fram2. The name is a reference to the Norwegian ship "Fram," which did Arctic to Antarctic expeditions during the 1800s and 1900s.

In a similar fashion SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft named "Resilience" will orbit over the both poles in a three to five-day journey. The capsule will be transported to orbit with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, and much like the Inspiration4 mission, the world's first private space mission with no professional astronauts aboard, Crew Dragon will be equipped with a cupola for unparalleled views of Earth.

Crew Dragon will have four soon-to-be astronauts aboard: Malta resident Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Pilot Rabea Rogge and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips. Wang has funded the mission for an undisclosed amount of money. The goal of the mission is for the four crew members to conduct twenty-two scientific and research experiments, such as sleep research, the world's first X-ray monitoring of bone density in space, world's first mushroom growing in space, glucose monitoring, and more.

We all know that the leather jacket that NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang wears is iconic, to say the least, but now he has a new one: gifted to him by a humanoid robot made by 1X Technologies.

Jensen recently visited the 1X Technologies HQ in San Francisco, where the NVIDIA CEO was greeted by a humanoid robot, gifting him one of the very best black leather jackets on the market, custom-made by California-based ERL clothing brand. 1X Technologies might be a name you haven't heard of, but the company has been working on its Neo Gamma humanoid robot, with plans to ship hundreds of thousands of them before the end of 2025.

As for Jensen's new leather jacket, but sports an NVIDIA logo embroidered into the clothing, and I'm sure will join the wardrobe of leather jackets that the NVIDIA CEO has in his house. It looks awesome, and I definitely want one.

FigureAI has developed a new AI-powered walking controller for its Figure 02 humanoid robot, taking the android movement patterns into slightly more natural territory.

Announced yesterday, the update was showcased in new footage comparing the previous and current movement systems. There's a clear difference - while the robot's gait still appears mechanical, it now includes more human-like elements such as heel strikes, toe-offs, and synchronized arm swings. It's a subtle improvement, but enough to push the Figure 02 away from the rigid, protocol-droid motion of earlier iterations.

The system was trained entirely in simulation using reinforcement learning - a method where virtual robots learn to walk through trial and error. That training was then transferred directly to the real-world robot without manual tuning, allowing for consistent performance across multiple machines.

Distinguished astronaut Koichi Wakata has shared a video from a past stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) where he celebrated the beginning of the Major League Baseball season in a quick video.

Wakata, the fourth Japanese astronaut in space and the first Japanese astronaut to command the ISS shared a video on his X account on March 19 that showed him celebrating the beginning of the Major League Baseball seasons during Expedition 68, which launched on October 5, 2022 and completed its mission on March 11, 2023. Wakata celebrated the MLB being back by sharing an awesome video of him playing a "solo game of baseball" in microgravity, where he says, "you don't need a whole team, you can play all of the positions!"

The video shows Wakata gently pitching a baseball to one side of the JAXA module attached to the ISS. Wakata then quickly pulls himself toward the other side of the module and picks up a makeshift bat, which he uses to tap the baseball back to where he came from. Wakata then makes a successful mid-air catch, getting himself out. Wakata completed 157 days in space as part of Expedition 68 and Crew-5, where he worked alongside NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and Anna Kikina, and other ISS crew members.

The two NASA astronauts who were initially going up to the International Space Station (ISS) for nine days but ended up staying there for 286 days weren't paid any overtime.

In a recent article by The New York Times, a NASA spokesperson revealed the two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, received a regular 40-hour-per-week salary, with no additional pay for holidays or weekends, despite the obvious egregious overtime they both ensued. Additionally, Mike Massimino, a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, said, "[There's] no hazard pay, there's no overtime, there's no comp time," and ultimately, "there's no incentive to stay in space longer."

However, astronauts do receive incidental amounts for reach they're in space, but since Suni and Butch were on a long-term stay, it only equated to about $5 per day, which totals out to just $1,430 for the entire duration of the trip - 286 days.

The General of the US Space Force has warned foreign satellites appear to be practicing combat in space, according to statements released at the McAleese Defense Programs Conferences held in Washington.

The comments come from Vice Chief of Space Operations General Michael Guetlein, who said the US is currently developing new capabilities for warfare that's off-planet, with the goal being to assume "space superiority" over foreign nations such as China, Russia, and any other competing country. The main competitor here is China, as the general said officials have witnessed Chinese satellites performing maneuvers and displaying a level of control that is indicative of "dogfighting in space."

These maneuvers were first spotted by commercial satellites, and then the information was sent to Space Force. For quite some time, China has been expanding its presence in space with various satellites, and even the launch of a refueling station that was sent to geosynchronous orbit.

Space is a weird, beautiful, and terrifying place, but sometimes, it can produce some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of art, such as what veteran NASA astronaut Don Petitt just captured.

Petitt, who is stationed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), has captured what looks like the ending of Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" when Cooper passes through the black hole and is spat out the other side into the fourth dimension. However, unlike Interstellar, this is completely real footage captured by a real-life astronaut.

So, what is it? Petitt set up his camera to perform a long exposure shot of the Earth out of the window of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule called Freedom. The long streaks seen in the image/video are star trails created as the ISS flies over the Earth at 14,500 mph.

NVIDIA has announced at GTC a new partnership with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a new open-source physics engine designed to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings.

The new platform is built on top of the NVIDIA Warp framework and is designed to optimize robot learning and be compatible with other frameworks, such as Google DeepMind's MuJoCo-Warp and NVIDIA Isaac Lab. Additionally, NVIDIA, Disney, and Google DeepMind plan to enable Newton to be compatible with Disney's physics engine, which will be used to advance its robotic character platform, increasing the power of its next-generation entertainment robots.

In its press release, NVIDIA writes that Disney will be one of the first companies to use Newton. Newton will power Star Wars-inspired BDX droids that will now begin to appear in Disney theme parks. One of these droids joined NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on stage, with Huang saying that NVIDIA is committed to "bringing more characters to life in a way the world hasn't seen before."

The two astronauts that NASA assured us weren't stranded aboard the ISS, but just didn't have a viable means of transportation back to Earth, have finally touched back down on our home planet after nine months of being aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore took up Boeing's Starliner capsule to the ISS on June 5, and prior to launch and on the journey there, leaks were detected from the vessel. The leaks were helium, the fuel for the capsule, and after safely making it to the ISS to begin their week-long stay it was determined by NASA the capsule didn't meet the safety standards for a return journey.

The stay aboard the ISS extended from one week to nine months, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently stating the situation with the ISS turned into a political football for the Biden administration as SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back home early but was denied as the Biden administration didn't want "anyone who is supporting Trump [to] look good," according to Musk. However, Suni and Butch finally made it back home with the help of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which also transported fellow astronauts Nick Hauge and Aleksandr Gorbunov, a cosmonaut with Russia's federal corporation Roscomos.

NASA has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the world's most powerful space telescope, has captured direct images of multiple exoplanets within Earth's galactic neighborhood.

The space agency has taken to its blog to announce Webb has observed the planets within HR 8799, and through its imaging, it has gathered strong evidence that the system's four gas giant planets formed much like Jupiter and Saturn, which slowly built solid cores that eventually pulled in gas from a protoplanetary disk. The young star system is only located 130 light years away and has long been a target of planetary studies, given the age of HR8799 is only 30 million years old, which is just a fraction of our own solar system's 4.6 billion years old.

Webb's results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal. NASA explains in its blog post that gas giants can form in two ways. The first is by building solid cores with heavier elements that attract gas. The second is when particles of gas rapidly coalesce into massive objects from a young star's cooling disk. The first process is called core accretion, and the second is called disk instability. Webb's results indicate the planets within HR 8799 have taken the first route, and by understanding these processes, researchers can better distinguish between the two when hunting for more exoplanets while also contextualizing the evolution of our own solar system.

SpaceX is nearing its goal of putting humans on the surface of Mars, but before we go, the company will send humanoid robots, with the first slated to launch next year.

That is, of course, if Elon Musk's famously optimistic plans come to fruition in time and Starship development continues to make leaps and bounds. However, the latter doesn't seem to be the case as of late, or at least for the last two launches of Starship, the company's selected mode of transportation to Mars. SpaceX lost contact with Starship in the last two launches, resulting in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Protocol (RUD) having to be initiated, or boom.

SpaceX will need to overcome significant design hurdles in order to get Starship to a place where a Mars journey is viable, and one of those hurdles is getting the upper stage, or the cargo part of the rocket, back on the surface of Earth for evaluation and improvement. However, that requires a technological breakthrough in heatshield technology, according to Elon Musk, who explained the struggles of simply recovering that part of the rocket in his last appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.

The scientist who was sentenced to spend three years in jail for gene-hacking babies has posted to his X account criticizing ethics for slowing down scientific progress.

He Jiankui, along with his two collaborators, were found guilty of "illegal medical practices" and were sentenced to three years in jail for assisting in the genetic modification of babies. It's now been nearly three years since Jiankui was released from jail, and the scientist seems to still believe his direction is the right one, with Jiankui recently taking to X, formerly Twitter, to criticize the ethics surrounding gene modification, saying, "ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress."

While Jiankui doesn't directly state what he is referencing, it appears the jailed biophysicist is pointing to the ethical standards that caused him to be thrown in jail. For those who don't know what happened, in 2018, Jiankui used CRISPR to edit the DNA of twin girls pseudonymously known as "Lulu" and "Nana" in an attempt to make them immune to HIV.

While the surface of the Moon is a barren wasteland, there has been quite a bit of activity recently, as the Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on March 2, 2025. Now, sparks have been filmed.

Firefly's Blue Ghost lander is in full scientific operations mode since it landed on the surface of the Moon, specifically near the Mons Latreille, a lunar peak located within the basin called Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in the northeastern region of the Moon's near side, and since the lander was confirmed to be healthy, scientific operations kicked off, with the company behind the lander, Firefly Aerospace, sharing footage of a recent operation using LISTER, or NASA's Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload.

This scientific instrument is a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics, and it's designed to measure the temperature and flow of heat from within the Moon's interior. The operation seen above was conducted on March 3 and shows the drill creating explosive eruptions that generate sparks, which may be a result of the electrically charged lunar surface. The goal is for the probe to reach a depth of around 6 to 9 feet and measure the temperature of the Moon. The results will help researchers understand how heat flows through the Moon's interior.

SpaceX has released footage of the recent Starship Flight 8, showcasing the monstrous power of the Super Heavy booster from an extremely interesting camera angle.

The above footage shows the 33 Raptor engines equipped to the Super Heavy booster ignite and carry the rocket, which is approximately the size of a 20-story building, up to orbit. The recent flight marked the eighth test flight of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, and also marked a hat-trick for Mechazilla tower catches of the booster Super Heavy, which, after separating from the upper stage of the rocket, made its way back down to the launch pad to safely land in the arms of the launch tower - approximately two and half minutes after liftoff.

As for the recent footage released by SpaceX, I didn't think it was possible to capture the ignition of the 33 Raptor engines from beneath the booster, given the intense temperatures, especially at such a close distance. As I am not a rocket engineer, I decided to ask X's AI Grok what the temperature of the environment beneath Super Heavy during Flight 8, and the answer it provided can be found below. In short, each Raptor engine generates 8.75 GW (gigawatts) of thermal energy per second, which equates to 288 GW of thermal power during ignition and flight due to the presence of 33 Raptor engines.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were greeted with a spectacular sight thanks to SpaceX's recent Starship launch.

NASA astronaut and current ISS member Don Pettit took to X to share some photographs of the upper stage, which is the spacecraft itself or the part of the rocket that's designed to hold cargo and crew, exploding as a result of an "energetic event" causing the spacecraft to lose altitude and eventually communications with SpaceX. Shortly after communications were severed, Starship initiated its RUD protocol, or Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, which can be translated into boom.

The event was captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who wrote on X, "We saw the Starship 8 breakup in the upper atmosphere and fall back to Earth from the ISS". While the spacecraft part of Starship exploded the booster, or Super Heavy returned back to the launch pad and was caught for the third time in a row by the Mechazilla launch tower.

SpaceX has recently wrapped up its eighth test flight of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, and while the launch was deemed an overall success it wasn't without it's hiccups.

The space fairing company explained on its official X account and website that Super Heavy, the booster half of Starship, successfully lit its 33 Raptor engines, and approximately two and a half minutes after liftoff, Super Heavy separated from the Ship half of Starship.

The Ship half then proceeded to ignite six of its Raptor engines and continue to its ascent, but prior to the end of its ascent burn an energetic event within the aft portion of Ship resulted in a loss of several Raptor engines. The loss of the engines meant the Ship began to lose altitude and then an eventual loss of communications with SpaceX, which resulted in the RUD protocol being initiated, or Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly -- boom. The last contact SpaceX had with Ship was approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff.

SpaceX's quest to achieve full reusability of Starship is expected to come to a close next year, according to company CEO Elon Musk.

Musk recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he explained SpaceX's goals with rocket development and how the company is aiming to first achieve full reusability and then rapid reusability. Musk explains that the Falcon 9 rocket, while technically reusable due to its booster being able to land, SpaceX still loses the upper stage, which costs $10 million and a few days of time to build before another launch can take place. The goal is to achieve full rapid reusability of both the upper and lower stage, the booster, and the ship (cargo part of the rocket).

It should be noted that full rapid reusability can be compared to an aircraft, which can take off and land without any damage at all. Full reusability would be defined as both the upper and lower stages of the rocket landing but sustaining some damage that requires repair time.

Musk says the orbital heat shield is currently SpaceX's biggest problem with making the Ship fully reusable, which is necessary to make Starship a fully reusable rocket.

Upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere, the rocket travels at extreme speeds through Earth's dense atmosphere. This resistance with the atmosphere causes friction, and just like a meteor, the increase in temperature eventually causes flames. This is where the orbital heat shield comes in.

SpaceX has equipped its rockets with a shield designed to disperse the heat generated by reentry, but unfortunately, no one has made a fully reusable heat shield. Musk briefly discussed what the orbital heat shield is made of, saying it needs to be constructed of extremely fine strands of glass and aluminum oxide (sapphire) fibers organized in a very specific geometry for the highest efficiency.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore were left "stranded" aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after Boeing's Starliner limped its way to the floating laboratory on June 5. The plan was to stay aboard the ISS for a week, but Williams and Butch are still yet to return to Earth - eight months later.

Boeing's first astronaut mission to the ISS ended in failure when the Starliner capsule returned to Earth without the astronauts in September last year. The capsule that transported the two NASA astronauts to the ISS for an intended week-long stay endured helium leaks on its way to the ISS, and after an evaluation by NASA it was determined the capsule didn't meet safety standards for the return journey, resulting in both NASA astronauts having to stay aboard the ISS.

NASA doesn't officially consider the astronauts "stranded" but instead has extended the mission duration for a return sometime in March 2025 aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. However, new information has come to light from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he said that SpaceX offered to return both astronauts "early," but the Biden administration rejected this offer for "political reasons."

A spacecraft preparing for its ambitious landing on the surface of the Moon has beamed back incredible footage showcasing the surface of our desolate neighbor.

Firefly Aerospace has shared some incredible footage captured by its Blue Ghost lander that is currently preparing for its landing on the surface of the Moon. The Full High Definition (FHD) footage was captured during the spacecraft's third lunar orbit maneuver on February 24, reducing the spacecraft's altitude and bringing it into a near-circular low lunar orbit. The above footage is sped up by 10X and was captured approximately 100 km (62.14 miles) above the surface of the Moon.

The robotic Blue Ghost spacecraft is scheduled to land in the Mare Crisium, a lava-covered basin on the near-side of the Moon, on March 2. The lander measures just 6.6 feet tall and carries an array of valuable scientific instruments and experiments that include testing methods for lunar regolith, or lunar soil.