OrbitalHub

Wikipedia dicit:

Starship is a super heavy-lift space vehicle under development by SpaceX. At 120 metres (394 feet) in height and with a liftoff mass of 5,000 metric tons (11,023,000 pounds), Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, surpassing the Saturn V rocket of the 1960s Apollo Program.

The space vehicle consists of the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the second-stage spacecraft also named Starship. Both stages are powered by Raptor rocket engines, which burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants in a full-flow staged combustion power cycle. Both are designed to be fully reusable, performing controlled landings on the launch tower and reflown within hours. Starship is designed to have a payload capacity of 150 tonnes (330,000 lb) to low Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration and 250 t (550,000 lb) when expended. Starship vehicles in low Earth orbit are planned to be refilled with propellant launched in tanker Starships to enable transit to higher energy destinations such as geosynchronous orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

Plans for a heavy-lift vehicle at SpaceX date to 2005, with the earliest concept resembling the modern vehicle announced in 2016. SpaceX’s Starship development follows an iterative and incremental approach involving frequent, and often destructive, test flights of prototype vehicles. The first orbital test flight was attempted on 20 April 2023, when an anomaly caused the vehicle to tumble out of control four minutes after launch. SpaceX activated the flight termination system, which fired the explosive charges but did not destroy the vehicle. Approximately 40 seconds later both stages were destroyed due to increased aerodynamic forces. After the test, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the launch program pending results of a standard “mishap investigation.”

SpaceX intends Starship to become its primary space vehicle, superseding the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles as well as the Dragon spacecraft currently used as part of NASA’s commercial crew program to the International Space Station. Starship is often coupled with the company’s Mars ambitions. Planned Starship flights include the development of SpaceX’s Starlink internet constellation, crewed flights under the Polaris and dearMoon programs, and a crewed lunar landing with a modified Starship spacecraft under the Artemis program.

Video credit: SpaceX

NASA dicit:

The animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.

Any light crossing the event horizon – the black hole’s point of no return – becomes trapped forever, and any light passing close to it is redirected by the black hole’s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a “shadow” about twice the size of the black hole’s actual event horizon.

The animation shows 10 supersized black holes that occupy center stage in their host galaxies, including the Milky Way and M87, scaled by the sizes of their shadows. Starting near the Sun, the camera steadily pulls back to compare ever-larger black holes to different structures in our solar system.

First up is 1601+3113, a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole packed with the mass of 100,000 Suns. The matter is so compressed that even the black hole’s shadow is smaller than our Sun.

The black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), boasts the weight of 4.3 million Suns based on long-term tracking of stars in orbit around it. It’s shadow diameter spans about half that of Mercury’s orbit in our solar system.

The animation shows two monster black holes in the galaxy known as NGC 7727. Located about 1,600 light-years apart, one weighs 6 million solar masses and the other more than 150 million Suns. Astronomers say the pair will merge within the next 250 million years.

At the animation’s larger scale lies M87’s black hole, now with a updated mass of 5.4 billion Suns. Its shadow is so big that even a beam of light – traveling at 670 million mph (1 billion kph) – would take about two and a half days to cross it.

The movie ends with TON 618, one of a handful of extremely distant and massive black holes for which astronomers have direct measurements. This behemoth contains more than 60 billion solar masses, and it boasts a shadow so large that a beam of light would take weeks to traverse it.

Video credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dicit:

The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission move their Dragon Endeavour spacecraft between docking ports on the International Space Station. Aboard are: NASA astronauts Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

The crew will undock from the space-facing port of the station’s Harmony module, then dock at the station’s forward Harmony port. Endeavour is relocating to make room for SpaceX’s 28th cargo resupply mission, currently scheduled to arrive in June.

Video credit: NASA