#NASA astronaut who required evacuation from ISS ‘doing very well’, The astronaut who faced a health issue prompting the first-ever medical evacuation in International Space Station history is “doing very well,” he said in a statement issued by NASA on Wednesday.

Mike Fincke, 58, said he’s “doing very well and continuing standard post-flight reconditioning” at NASA’s center in Houston.

NASA had previously declined to identify which astronaut experienced the “medical event,” the details of which they still did not disclose in Wednesday’s statement.

The health issue prompted NASA to cut short the mission of a quartet including Americans Fincke and Zena Cardman along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.

Fincke said that his Jan. 7 health mishap required “immediate attention from my incredible crewmates.”

“Thanks to their quick response and the guidance of our NASA flight surgeons, my status quickly stabilized.”

The early flight home was not due to emergency, he said, but rather to “take advantage of advanced medical imaging not available on the space station.”

The crew splashed down off the California coast on Jan. 15.

“Spaceflight is an incredible privilege, and sometimes it reminds us just how human we are,” Fincke said.

#NASA targets March for first moon mission by Artemis astronauts after fueling test success.

Officials announced the decision Friday, two weeks ahead of the first targeted launch opportunity on March 6.

“This is really getting real, and it’s time to get serious and start getting excited,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s exploration systems development chief.

Administrator Jared Isaacman noted that launch teams made “major progress” between the first countdown rehearsal, which was disrupted by hydrogen leaks earlier this month, and the second test, which was completed with exceptionally low seepage Thursday night.

The test was “a big step toward America’s return to the lunar environment,” Isaacman said on the social media platform X. Astronauts last ventured to the moon more than half a century ago.

While more work remains at the pad, officials expressed confidence in being ready to launch four astronauts on the Artemis II lunar fly-around as soon as March 6 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. To keep their options open, the three Americans and one Canadian prepared to go into the mandatory two-week health quarantine Friday night in Houston.

The space agency has only five days in March to launch the crew aboard the Space Launch System rocket, before standing down until the end of April. February’s opportunities evaporated after dangerous amounts of liquid hydrogen leaked during the first fueling demonstration.

Technicians replaced two seals, leading to Thursday’s successful rerun. The countdown clocks went all the way down to the desired 29-second mark.

The removed Teflon seals had some light scratches but nothing else noticeable that could have caused such heavy leakage, officials said.

A bit of moisture also was found in the area that could have contributed to the problem. The fixes worked, with barely any leakage detected, said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

Commander Reid Wiseman and two of his crew monitored Thursday’s operation alongside launch controllers. The astronauts will be the first to fly to the moon since Apollo 17 closed out NASA’s first chapter in moon exploration in 1972.

Still ahead is the flight readiness review, scheduled for late next week. If that goes well, the astronauts will fly back to Kennedy around the beginning of March for a real countdown.

“Every night I look up at the moon and I see it and I get real excited because I can really feel she’s calling us, and we’re ready,” Glaze said.

The nearly 10-day mission is considered a test flight with astronauts soaring atop the 322-foot (98-metre) SLS rocket for the first time. The only other SLS flight, in 2022, had no one on board.

The next mission in the series, Artemis III, will attempt to land a pair of astronauts near the moon’s south pole in a few years.

Given all the details still to be worked out for that mission — including whether Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide the lunar lander — Glaze said it will be months, perhaps even a year, before NASA selects that first moon-landing crew.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

NASA boss blasts Boeing and space agency managers for Starliner’s botched astronaut flight.

NASA’s new boss blasted Boeing and the space agency Thursday for Starliner’s botched flight that left two astronauts stuck for months at the International Space Station.

Administrator Jared Isaacman said poor leadership and decision-making at Boeing led to Starliner’s troubles. He also blamed NASA managers for failing to intervene and get Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back more quickly.

The two test pilots, now retired from NASA, spent more than nine months at the station before catching a lift back with SpaceX last March.

Isaacman said Starliner’s problems must be better understood and fixed before any more astronauts strap in.

Isaacman upgraded the seriousness of Starliner’s troubled astronaut debut, declaring it a “Type A mishap,” something that could endanger a crew. Both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters also involved cultural and leadership missteps. It is a mistake that Starliner was not designated a serious mishap right from the start, Isaacman said, citing internal pressure to keep Boeing on board and flights on track.

“This is just about doing the right thing,” he said. “This is about getting the record straight.”

Thruster failures and other problems almost prevented Wilmore and Williams from reaching the space station following liftoff in 2024. The thruster analyses continue by Boeing.

“We almost did have a really terrible day,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, referring to a potential loss of life.

Boeing said the report by NASA will help the company move forward in ensuring crew safety, and stressed that the Starliner program would continue.

There is no timeline for when Boeing can launch Starliner on a supply run, essentially another test flight to prove its safety before astronaut flights. The grounding leaves SpaceX as the only U.S. taxi service for astronauts.

“Boeing has made substantial progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team,” Boeing said in a statement.

Even before the troubled astronaut flight, Boeing was struggling with Starliner issues. The first test flight in 2019, without anyone on board, ended up in the wrong orbit and forced a repeat mission, which had its own difficulties.

NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, in the wake of the space shuttles’ retirement, to ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting lab. Their contracts are worth billions. SpaceX just delivered its 13th crew to the space station for NASA since 2020.

Kshatriya said the space agency must do better moving forward.

“We have to own our part of this,” he said. As for Wilmore and Williams, “We failed them.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Four new astronauts arrive at the International Space Station to replace NASA’s evacuated crew.

SpaceX delivered the U.S., French and Russian astronauts a day after launching them from Cape Canaveral.

Last month’s medical evacuation was NASA’s first in 65 years of human spaceflight. One of four astronauts launched by SpaceX last summer suffered what officials described as a serious health issue, prompting their hasty return. That left only three crew members to keep the place running -- one American and two Russians -- prompting NASA to pause spacewalks and trim research.

Moving in for eight to nine months are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev. Meir, a marine biologist, and Fedyaev, a former military pilot, have lived up there before. During her first station visit in 2019, Meir took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

Adenot, a military helicopter pilot, is only the second French woman to fly in space. Hathaway is a captain in the U.S. Navy.

“Bonjour!” Adenot called out once the capsule docked to the space station 277 miles (446 kilometres) up. Added Meir: “Grateful to be on board, and we’re ready to get to work.”

NASA has refused to divulge the identity of the astronaut who fell ill in orbit on Jan. 7 or explain what happened, citing medical privacy. The ailing astronaut and three others returned to Earth more than a month sooner than planned. They spent their first night back on Earth at the hospital before returning to Houston.

The space agency said it did not alter its preflight medical checks for their replacements.

New #astronauts launch to the International Space Station after medical evacuation.

SpaceX launched the replacements as soon as possible at NASA’s request, sending the U.S., French and Russian astronauts on an expected eight- to nine-month mission stretching until fall. The four should arrive at the orbiting lab Saturday, filling the vacancies left by their evacuated colleagues last month and bringing the space station back to full staff.

“It turns out Friday the 13th is a very lucky day,” SpaceX Launch Control radioed once the astronauts reached orbit. “That was quite a ride,” replied the crew’s commander, Jessica Meir.

NASA had to put spacewalks on hold and deferred other duties while awaiting the arrival of Americans Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev. They’ll join three other astronauts -- one American and two Russians -- who kept the space station running the past month.

Satisfied with medical procedures already in place, NASA ordered no extra checkups for the crew ahead of liftoff and no new diagnostic equipment was packed. An ultrasound machine already up there for research went into overdrive Jan. 7 when used on the ailing crew member. #NASA has not revealed the ill astronaut’s identity or health issue. All four returning astronauts went straight to the hospital after splashing down in the Pacific near San Diego.

Chance glimpse of star collapse offers new insight into black hole formation.

A watched pot never boils and love happens when you least expect it -- turns out, the same logic applies to capturing a star as it collapses into a black hole.

At least that proved true for one group of researchers whose work took a turn when they accidentally witnessed what appears to be an example of the astronomical unicorn, a “surprise” discovery they detailed in findings published Thursday in the journal Science.

It’s the strongest observational record yet of the long-theorized phenomenon that some stars simply fade into black holes, the authors say.

Lead author and astrophysicist Kishalay De told AFP the project began as something quite different, a study of stars under infrared light in the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy.

But the team encountered an unusual stellar object that brightened... and then dimmed until it disappeared.

“That’s where the mystery really started,” said De, a professor at New York’s Columbia University and researcher at the Flatiron Institute.

Researchers were using long-term observations from NASA’s NEOWISE mission, which used a space telescope that surveyed the sky in infrared to detect and characterize near-Earth objects.

They were able to piece together a large data set, going back through those archives and others more than a decade to study what they’d seen.

It’s not the first time scientists have spotted a convincing example of a “failed supernova” -- when a star’s core collapses directly into a black hole and starts shedding its turbulent outer layers without a dazzling explosion.

Another prime candidate was identified in research published about a decade ago.

De said this new observation offers another clue -- and one that comes from the closest galaxy to ours, about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, meaning it was much brighter and easier to examine.

Daniel Holz -- a University of Chicago astrophysicist focused on black holes, who was not involved in the study -- told AFP the “serendipitous” nature of the latest example makes it particularly exciting.

Because it popped up within a larger-scale data collection, there was a backlog of images to analyze -- what Holz likened to “baby pictures,” or earlier documentation that could tie together the research.
‘Dying gasp’

Scientists have long carried out efforts trying to find individual stars in nearby galaxies that abruptly disappear, “but to catch them in the act is hard,” Holz said, explaining that the death of a star often comes after billions of years of living.

“You have to be really lucky,” he said. “You can’t just look at one star and say, ‘I’m just going to sit here and wait.’”

De said that’s precisely why this new research could be door-opening.

When stars die they’re thought to shed their outer layers and thus appear brighter for a time -- in this case, that shift “was flagged to us in infrared light, and that’s what led to the discovery,” De said.

“It really points us to a completely new method of identifying the disappearance of stars, by not just looking for the individual stars disappearing, but to look for the infrared brightening that’s associated with the process,” De said, what he called the star’s “dying gasp.”

The astronomer also said the star identified was slightly smaller than one scientists would “nominally expect to turn into a black hole.”

At the end of its life, De said it would have been approximately five times the mass of the Sun -- giant, but about half the size they might have anticipated.

“What this really tells us is that what we’ve assumed about the landscape of stars that turn into black holes might be much wider than what we’ve anticipated in the past,” he said.

Holz said this latest research is an “exciting step” in “teasing out the role of black holes in the universe.”

“This is another example of, you know, they’re really out there,” he said. “And that’s just really, unbelievably cool.”

Launch to ISS delayed again over weather: NASA. It is targeting Feb. 13 for the lift-off of Crew-12’s mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with a window opening at 5:15 a.m. local time.

“Mission teams completed a weather review Tuesday morning and have waived off the Thursday, Feb. 12, launch opportunity due to forecast weather conditions along Crew-12’s flight path,” #NASA said in a statement.

Weather at the site in Florida has been in fact favourable, NASA officials told a briefing Monday, but higher winds forecast across the rest of the East Coast are to blame for the delays.

These winds could complicate any potential emergency manoeuvres, like an early splashdown of the spacecraft carrying the astronauts, for example.

If Friday’s launch goes as planned, the astronauts should arrive at the space station by approximately 3:15 p.m. on Saturday.

Crew-12 is composed of Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, along with French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

They remain in quarantine in NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, waiting to blast off.

The travellers will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January a month earlier than planned in the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.

ISS, a scientific laboratory orbiting 400 kilometres above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three.

Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited and crashed into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.

NASA confirms first flight to ISS since medical evacuation. Four astronauts will blast off to re-staff the International Space Station (ISS) next week, NASA said Friday, after an emergency medical evacuation of the previous crew.

Crew-12 will lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early Wednesday, the US space agency said, with launch time “targeted for no earlier than 6:01 am” local time (1101 GMT).

The confirmation provides a sliver of certainty for the Crew-12 mission, which had faced last-minute rocket problems and staffing changes.

Earlier this week, SpaceX had grounded its Falcon 9 rockets while investigating what the Federal Aviation Administration said was a “stage 2 engine’s failure to ignite.”

“The Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to flight,” an FAA spokesman told AFP Friday.

The temporary pause from SpaceX raised concerns the Crew-12 flight could have been delayed.

The mission will be replacing Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January, a month earlier than planned, during the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.

The scientific laboratory, which orbits 250 miles (400 kilometres) above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three.

NASA has declined to disclose any details about the health issue that cut the mission short.

Additionally, the mission’s crew changed in November, when Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev was suddenly replaced by Andrey Fedyaev.

Reports from independent media in Russia suggested Artemyev had been photographing and sending classified information with his phone. Russian space agency Roscosmos merely said he had been transferred to a different job.

In addition to Fedyaev, Crew-12 comprises Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway and French astronaut Sophie Adenot.

Once the astronauts finally get on board, they will be one of the last crews to live on board the football field-sized space station.

Continuously inhabited for the last quarter century, the ageing ISS is scheduled to be pushed into #Earth’s orbit before crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.

HELSINKI — China’s main space contractor says it will push into new commercial space domains in the coming years as the country formulates its latest Five-year plan.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned main space contractor, outlined plans for space tourism, digital infrastructure, resource development and space traffic management, state media China Central Television (CCTV) reported Jan. 29.

The statement comes as China prepares for annual political sessions in Beijing in March at which the country’s 15th Five-year plan (2026-2030) will be approved. The CASC statements indicate the corporation’s broad strategic intent rather than confirmed funding and schedules, but appears to fit into the Chinese government’s wider support for commercial space and strategic areas such as digital and AI infrastructure.

On space resources, CASC calls for feasibility studies for a proposed “Tiangong Kaiwu” major initiative, referring to an earlier-proposed, multi-decade roadmap for solar system-wide resource utilization. It will also seek breakthroughs for technology needed for celestial small body resource prospecting, autonomous extraction technologies and low-cost transport and on-orbit processing. While vague and in some cases far off in terms of implementation, the calls reflect China’s already known longer-term interests in asteroid exploration, cislunar infrastructure and space resource governance.

Regarding space-based digital infrastructure, CASC proposes gigawatt-scale space-based computing infrastructure, envisioning integrated cloud-edge-terminal architecture in orbit. Concepts include space data processed in space and joint space-ground computing. This aligns with Chinese interests in reducing reliance on downlink bandwidth, autonomous satellite operations and space-based AI and data processing, as demonstrated by experimental satellites and push to develop capabilities including optical inter-satellite links.

Mysterious dark matter may be better understood through a new map of far-off galaxies.

The ordinary matter all around us — stars, planets and people — makes up just 5 per cent of the universe. For decades, researchers have hoped to demystify what’s known as dark matter, a material that comprises just over a quarter of our universe. Another equally mysterious force called dark energy makes up the rest.

Dark matter doesn’t absorb or give off light so scientists can’t study it directly. But they can observe how its gravity warps and bends the star stuff around it — for example, the light from distant galaxies. By studying these distortions across large swathes of the universe, scientists can get closer to unmasking dark matter and its various hiding places.

The latest map, created with images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, is the most detailed yet over such a large patch of sky. It has twice the resolution of previous attempts using the Hubble Space Telescope and captures hundreds of thousands of galaxies over the past 10 billion years.

“Now, we can see everything more clearly,” said study author Diana Scognamiglio with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The latest map, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, includes information on new galaxy clusters and the strands of dark matter that connect them. Piece by piece, these structures help form the skeleton of the universe. Scientists can study this map to see how dark matter has clumped up over billions of years.

Dark matter doesn’t have much of an impact on your midday lunch order or your nightly bedtime ritual. But it silently passes through your body all the time and has shaped the universe.

As humans, we’re naturally curious to know more about where we come from and that story can’t be told without dark matter, said #astrophysicist Rutuparna Das with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

“Our home is the universe and we want to understand what the nature of it is,” said Das, who was not involved with the new study.