Maybe this asteroid will put us all out of our misery

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No, Biden did not “abandon” Starliner astronauts

In genuinely bizarre news, the president asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to “rescue” the “abandoned” Boeing Starliner astronauts on the International Space Station. To be clear, that’s not what’s happening.

If you followed my extensive coverage of this mission, you know that last June, Boeing Starliner launched on its crewed test flight with two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, aboard. It was supposed to be a minimum of about 8 days.

Well, problems with the thrusters and helium leaks meant that after extensive tests, NASA decided not to bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Instead, they became a part of Crew-9, which launched on a SpaceX Crew Dragon in September 2024 with two crew members. The plan was that Butch and Suni would remain on the ISS as part of this crew until the mission was over, which was originally scheduled for February 2024. This was decided back in August.

NASA did have to extend their mission further because processing for the vehicle for Crew-10 (note that it’s a SpaceX Crew Dragon) isn’t quite ready. NASA likes to do an in-person handover between crews. That means that Crew-9 wouldn’t return until the end of March, after Crew-10’s launch.

So now we get to this lovely turn of events. The president posted that he wanted Elon to go get the Boeing Starliner astronauts (apparently he wanted Musk to personally go to space to retrieve them??)

NASA sent reporters a statement as follows:

This may seem like it says nothing, but what it really says, without contradicting anything the president has said, is that the plan is exactly the same as it always was. Crew-9 will come home after a handover with Crew-10, and since they can’t really launch Crew-10 before late March, Butch and Suni will come home in late March.

This has been your breaking news bulletin to let you know that absolutely nothing has changed.

Boeing has lost $2 billion on Starliner

If you’ve been patiently waiting for an update on Boeing Starliner the spacecraft, well you’re not alone. This week, Boeing filed an annual report with the SEC, and apparently they incurred an additional $523 million in losses on the Starliner program. The total that Boeing has lost on the Starliner program is now $2 billion.

And we still don’t know what’s going on with the spacecraft and when it will fly again. My guess is that Starliner will fly again in some form; my bet is on Boeing performing another uncrewed test with Starliner, but NASA paying for it as a cargo mission, to ensure the thruster fixes have worked and to get it certified for human spaceflight. But we will see what happens, especially with this new administration.

JWST shows us the light echo in a supernova

We’ve seen the structures within a light echo of a supernova for the first time, thanks to JWST.

This is Cassiopeia A and it’s located about 11,000 light years away. JWST took a really cool photo of this supernova remnant back in 2023.

You can see the inner shell of the supernova remnant slamming into the gas that the star released before it violently exploded. Basically the core of the star collapsed, which released a shockwave that blasted outward with such force that it ripped apart the star.

We’re seeing now the results of this explosion.

From our point of view, Cassiopeia A exploded about 350 years ago. Now, as the gas has had that amount of time to travel, it’s reached interstellar material and warmed it up. What we’re seeing in below is the light echo from the supernova, which causes surrounding clumps of dust to shine.

What’s really cool here is the structures within the light echo, but also because JWST is so sensitive, we can actually monitor how it moves and changes over just a few weeks. We’re seeing the light echo in infrared moving at the speed of light through the supernova remnant.

In the above photo, you can see the larger supernova remnant, and what exactly we’re looking at in these different photos I’ve shown you. The bigger photo is from NASA’s now-retired Spitzer space telescope.

This is the dumbest space thing I have seen in awhile

You may remember that, back in 2018, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This is its heavy lift rocket, and it felt like there was a 50/50 chance of whether the rocket would explode on this demonstration flight. I was there, and I remember texting with my editor, Nathan Ingraham at Engadget, on the odds that the rocket would just explode on the launch pad. They weren’t low.

SpaceX wasn’t taking any chances with a payload on this flight, because they weren’t sure what would happen either. They ended up putting Elon Musk’s red Tesla roadster into the rocket as a test, because what we absolutely needed for this flight was more trash in space!

Well, surprisingly, the launch went off beautifully. It was a sight to see for sure (if you have followed me for awhile, you know how much I love a rocket launch).

But even cooler was the synchronized return and landing of two boosters. It was jaw dropping. Falcon Heavy successfully deployed the Tesla into space, and I hoped that was the last we’d ever hear of this story.

But because the things that irritate you to no end always come back to haunt you, that was not to be. Apparently on January 2, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced they’d discovered a strange asteroid. They called it 2018 CN41, and it was unusual because its orbit brought it closer to Earth than the orbit of the moon. They were concerned about its potential to one day slam into the Earth.

Well, you guessed it: that asteroid is actually the Tesla roadster launched in 2018. They figured it out less than 24 hours after the announcement and deleted the new asteroid from the records. It’s a funny story, but it also brings attention to a larger issue: the increasing amounts of space junk and the need to be more transparent and responsible about what is being launched into space.

Will this asteroid slam into the Earth and put us all out of our misery?

Speaking of asteroids, there is actually a new asteroid that has the potential to slam into the Earth at some point soon. It’s possible that there are six different times the asteroid 2024 YR4 could impact the Earth between 2032 and 2071. The greatest chance is 1 in 63 on December 22, 2032.

This asteroid is between 130 and 300 feet wide (40 to 90 meters). For an idea of what that impact could do to our planet, we can look at the Tunguska, Siberia asteroid impact from 1908. This was from an asteroid believed to be 160 to 190 feet wide (50 to 60 m), and it flattened basically 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of wilderness. If that were to happen in a populated area, it would be catastrophic.

This size asteroid, however, is not large enough to kill us all and put us out of our misery. It’s also very possible that if NASA did determine this asteroid was going to impact the Earth, we could redirect it. That’s what the DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was all about.

Back in 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if they could change its trajectory. The target was a binary asteroid called Didymos, and NASA determined that they significantly changed the orbit of the smaller asteroid Dimorphos around Didymos as a result of this test.

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