Tausi Insider

NASA's new moon rocket, as seen from a marina on Florida's Merritt Island, lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on Nov. 16. Malcolm Denemark/Florida Today via AP Like a powerful beacon lighting the way to a distant shore, the Artemis I spacecraft sliced across the dark Florida sky early Wednesday setting a course for the moon and carrying with it dreams of a new chapter in human space flight. The 1:47 a.m. launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center comes one month shy of 50 years since an astronaut last set foot on the lunar surface, marking the end of the Apollo program. And while Artemis I carries no crew – in place of astronauts its capsule is occupied by three mannequins – the 26-day mission around the moon and back marks a critical step by the U.S. space agency toward repeating that historic feat and then surpassing it with visits to more daring landing sites for longer periods of time. Ultimately, the stated objective of the Artemis program is to lay t...

This handout image from NASA released on November 21, 2022, shows a view of the spacecraft, the Earth and the moon captured by a camera on Orion's solar array wing. HANDOUT/AFP/Getty Images NASA’s Artemis I achieved a key milestone on Monday, making what will be its closest approach to the moon for the duration of its 25-and-a-half-day test flight. During its closest approach, which occurred at 7:57 a.m. ET, the crewless Orion capsule was just 130 kilometres above the lunar surface. The encounter occurred about 15 minutes after the spacecraft fired its engine for a two-and-a-half minute burn to enter lunar orbit. The maneuver took place while the spacecraft was circling around the moon’s far side and out of direct contact with Earth. Shortly before flight controllers temporarily lost contact with Orion, the spacecraft’s cameras showed a poignant image of Earth as a small, blue sphere, about 370,000 kilometres distant, slipping behind the moon’s sunlit horizon. Contact with the sp...

A satellite, part of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, is shown in a handout. A piece of Canadian satellite radar technology will play a key role in a mission to observe 90 per cent of earth’s water. HO/The Canadian Press A spacecraft aided by Canadian technology has begun its mission to answer one of the most basic but challenging questions in climate science: Where is all the water? The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, or SWOT, was launched from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base early Friday morning aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket. The Earth-orbiting satellite was developed by NASA in partnership with the French space agency, CNES, with additional involvement from Britain and Canada. SWOT’s aim is to measure the surface heights of rivers, lakes and coastal waters with about 90 per cent coverage of the globe and track how they change over time. While the task may sound straightforward, the results promise to unlock a bounty of new information about t...

Despite the serious commercial interest, there is still a vanity play attached to visiting that big hunk of green cheese in the sky. John Raoux/The Associated Press Gus Carlson is a New York-based columnist for Tausi Insider. The moon, if you are old enough to remember, used to be a pretty cool place. Singers crooned about it, poets rhapsodized on it, movie makers dramatized it and Cold War powers competed for it. Ralph Kramden, the gruff 1950s television bus driver, considered it to be the perfect place for his wife, Alice. Now, after decades out of the spotlight in the United States, the moon is cool again. Earlier this month, the first U.S. rocket ship scheduled to land on the moon in 50 years lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But this next-generation space race is as much about commerce as it is about politics, poetry or passion. This latest mission aboard a SpaceX ship is mainly funded by ispace of Tokyo, which will be the first private company in history to l...