The agency is once again calling on citizen innovators to help design the future, this time through a new HeroX challenge to develop better wheels and more robust tires for lunar rovers. The competition, called the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge, offers $155,000 in prizes for top designs that can handle the punishing surface of the moon. As with previous NASA and HeroX challenges, everyone from amateur inventors working out of their garages to teams of students or professional companies are welcome to participate.
Since Donald Trump retook the White House earlier this year, the relationship between NASA staffers and government leadership has become unbelievably fraught. From the point-of-view of the rank and file, it's been a deluge of unforced errors as layoffs, budget cuts, and asset liquidations take a devastating toll on morale. According to the group Goddard Engineers, Scientists and Technicians Association (GESTA), which represents a broad swath of NASA staff,
It's an astonishing twist, showing that NASA is growing wary of SpaceX and its enormous Starship spacecraft falling behind schedule. The rocket's development has been mired in setbacks over the last couple of years, raising concerns among NASA officials that a Human Landing Systems variant may not be ready to deliver astronauts from the Moon's orbit down to the surface as soon as 2027, as part of its Artemis 3 mission.
On an unassuming morning in rural West Texas, a woman named Ann Walter was puzzled whena huge hunk of metal descendedfrom the sky and crash landed in her neighbor's wheat field. There were NASA logos on the parachutes that carried the truck-sized object, which itself bore NASA markings. "It's crazy, because when you're standing on the ground and see something in the air, you don't realize how big it is," Walter told the Associated Press. "It was probably a 30-foot parachute. It was huge."
Long before Congress failed to pass a funding bill, the Trump administration essentially started shutting down the government bit by bit, Gorman says. At NASA, entire offices have been shuttered, including her own at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She had been using data science to predict the cost of future NASA missions. Due to cuts proposed in Trump's budget request, she was reassigned to a new position working on a lunar communications project.
For the last month, NASA's interim administrator, Sean Duffy, has been giving interviews and speeches around the world, offering a singular message: "We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon." This is certainly what the president who appointed Duffy to the NASA post wants to hear. Unfortunately, there is a very good chance that Duffy's sentiment is false.
The chilling warning comes as a new culture of fear and silence has descended on NASA after Trump officials instituted dramatic staff reductions, along with alleged unilateral budget cuts and the gagging of an important program that allows people to air safety and performance issues without fear of reprisals, according to the report released by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Following countless delays plaguing its efforts to return the first astronauts to the lunar surface in over half a century, NASA could finally be bucking the trend. NASA officials revealed today that the agency's Artemis 2 mission, which will see a crew of four astronauts travel around the Moon and back, could launch as soon as February 5, roughly two months earlier than previously anticipated.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand why NASA implemented this policy: In July, dual Chinese/American citizen Chenguang Gong admitted to a lengthy industrial espionage campaign that saw him download information on sensors used by aircraft to confuse infrared-seeking missiles, plus data on radiation-hardened cameras that the US placed in orbit to give an early warning of incoming rockets and hypersonic vehicles. China has also recruited spies at the US Navy.
The White House issued an executive order at the end of last week that added NASA to the National Security Exclusions list. Being on the list means that NASA employees no longer have the same protections under US federal labor laws. Union rights have been stripped away, meaning that collective bargaining and negotiation regarding potential cuts will not be possible under the order. The move also repudiates existing collective bargaining agreements.
Back in 1957, something spectacular happened that would change the world forever: the first human-created satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space. Orbiting our planet in low-Earth orbit, its unique signatures could be seen across the world. Unlike the stars, planets, or meteors that illuminated the night sky, this artificial satellite would glow with the reflected light of the Sun, streaking across the skies overhead whenever it passed within a couple of hundred kilometers of an observer's location.
NASA is officially not continuing its work studying global warming and will instead just stick to space exploration. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy stated during a live interview that all climate science will be moved aside to focus solely on exploration, citing NASA's fundamental mission.
"There were claims of a tail, but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion."
