AI, Space, Integrated Sensing And Cyber Dominate Pentagon⁘s S⁘T Funding Plans...

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The Department of Defense is requesting $17.2 billion for science and technology projects in fiscal 2025, and most of it would be dedicated to three capability areas ⁘ AI and autonomy, space, and integrated sensing and cyber ⁘ according to a presentation by the Pentagon⁘s CTO.

Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has identified 14 ⁘critical technology areas⁘ that she is prioritizing, including trusted AI and autonomy, space, integrated sensing and cyber, integrated network systems of systems, renewable energy generation and storage, and microelectronics. They also include human-machine interface, advanced materials, directed energy, advanced computing and software, hypersonics, biotech, quantum, and 5G/FutureG.

Although S⁘T funding for budget activities 6.1 basic research, 6.2 applied research and 6.3 advanced technology development only account for about 2% of the Pentagon⁘s overall budget, it⁘s considered critical for military modernization because it lays the seed corn for next-generation capabilities.

Of the $17.2 billion that the Pentagon has requested for these budget activities in fiscal 2025, 98% would be divided among those 14 critical tech areas, according to Shyu⁘s slide presentation during a webinar hosted by NDIA⁘s Emerging Technologies Institute on Tuesday.

Among DOD components, about $8.3 billion would go toward ⁘Defense-wide⁘ agencies not aligned with the services ⁘ also known as the Fourth Estate ⁘ such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Innovation Unit, Strategic Capabilities Office, Missile Defense Agency, and other agencies and field activities under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, according to Shyu⁘s slides.

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Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes: Australian Reboot Makes Evolutionary Leap

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If making any movie is risky, rebooting the Planet of the Apes franchise (again) must represent a particularly hairy leap into the unknown for everyone involved.

The first film – starring Charlton Heston as an astronaut who thinks he's travelled to a distant planet, only to realise in the final frames he has, in fact, travelled forward in time to his own – relied on make-up so advanced for its time that its designer was given an honorary Academy Award.

"Everywhere they go, there's this freakin' camera, so in my close-ups half their face is covered by a f---ing camera," says Ball. "That's the necessary process of it all."

Generally speaking, Ball likes to shoot on the run, to allow space for serendipitous moments on set to emerge. But a movie like this, in which he'd have to shoot a landscape with his mocap (motion capture) actor in it, then again without the actor so the two might be seamlessly merged in the editing suite, demands enormous rigour in the planning, and leaves little room to manoeuvre later.

"Because of the time it takes to put this stuff together, you have to choose the take you want to use six, seven, eight months in advance," Ball says. "You're basically creating a jigsaw puzzle, but you're doing it piece by piece all on its own, and you're carving that shape right there, so it fits into this shape over here, and they're all separate from each other until the last four weeks, when all those puzzles come together and you hope they fit.

"It's wild trying to create something that is real and authentic when it is such a process of craft."

China Selects New Space Missions Including Lunar Far Side Astronomy And Terrestrial Exoplanet Survey...

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HELSINKI — The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is backing a new suite of diverse, cutting edge missions, advancing its ambitious agenda in space science.

The initiatives—spanning lunar farside astronomy, astrophysics, exoplanets and heliophysics—aim to place China at the forefront of astronomical research and space exploration. Wang Chi, director of the National Space Science Center (NSSC) under CAS, revealed the missions at the annual Zhongguancun Forum meeting April 27.

Selected missions include Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelength (DSL), the Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission, and the ExoEarth Survey, an exoplanet-hunting spacecraft. Another mission will see a spacecraft sent to observe the solar poles. The Taiji mission will use three satellites to detect gravitational waves.

The missions are separate from the China National Space Administration's planetary and lunar exploration programs. These are known as Tianwen and Chang'e respectively.

The eXTP mission will be a powerful X-ray observatory to monitor the sky and enable multi-messenger studies for gravitational waves and neutrino sources. It will also study the universe under extreme states of matter density, gravity and magnetism.

DSL will consist of an array of 10 small satellites sent into lunar orbit. The nine spacecraft and one mother spacecraft will use the moon as a shield against Earthly electromagnetic interference to enable it to pick up faint, ultra-long wave signals from the early universe.

The ExoEarth Survey, likely a mission also referred to as "Earth 2.0," or ET, will use the transit, photometry and microlensing methods to search for terrestrial planets and rogue planets. The selected solar mission appears to refer to the previously proposed Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO). This aims to study poles of the Sun, orbiting at an inclination of greater than 80 degrees with respect to the plane of the ecliptic.

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He Hoped To Be The First Black Astronaut In Space, But Never Made It. Now 90, He's Going.

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Dwight was selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to enter an Air Force training program known as the path to NASA's Astronaut Corps.

When he got the letter in 1961 offering him the opportunity to be the first Black astronaut, "I thought these dudes were crazy," Dwight told national correspondent Jericka Duncan in 2022.

"So, all these White folks that I'm dealing with, I mean, my peers, the other guys that were astronaut candidates and the leadership was just horrified at the idea of my coming down to Edwards and the president appointing me to the position," Dwight said.

His dream of going to space fell by the wayside for more than 60 years. But Dwight has been selected as one of the six civilians to travel to the edge of space on the next Blue Origin flight in June.

During the first commercial flight, aviation pioneer Wally Funk became the oldest person to travel to space at age 82. At 90 years old, Shatner took the title of the oldest person in space.

The space trip takes the civilians about 62 miles away from Earth and into the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of space and Earth.

The other five people on the upcoming Blue Origin flight are venture capitalist Mason Angel, French brewery founder Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth L. Hess, retired CPA Carol Schaller and pilot and aviator Gopi Thotakura.

NASA Crew Announced For Simulated Mars Mission Next Month

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will not fly private missions yet, officials say | Space

The spacecraft's program manager, Mark Nappi, told reporters Thursday (April 25) the company is very focused on flying the first Starliner mission for NASA with astronauts on board. That mission, Crew Flight Test (CFT), will see NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams rocket to space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket no earlier than May 6.

"It [CFT] really is all of our attention at this point," Nappi said during a telephone press conference from the launch area at NASA's Kennedy Space Center near Orlando. After that, Boeing will make sure it has enough spacecraft manufactured for future NASA astronaut flights, which are expected to run to six or seven.

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'I'm sure we'll find things out': NASA astronauts fly to launch site for 1st crewed Boeing Starliner mission to ISS on...

The first Starliner crew is ready to fly on May 6, the team told reporters upon arriving at the launch site. This will mark the spacecraft's debut mission with humans on board.

The two NASA astronauts to fly aboard Boeing Starliner , commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) near Orlando, Florida today (April 25) for their historic launch. Aside from being the first humans to fly on Starliner, the astronauts (both former U.S. Navy test pilots) will also be the first people to ride on board the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket.

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Related: Tour the mock Mars habitat where 4 NASA analog astronauts will spend the next year (video)

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Meredith is a regional Murrow award-winning Certified Broadcast Meteorologist and science/space correspondent. She most recently was a Freelance Meteorologist for NY 1 in New York City ⁘ the 19 First Alert Weather Team in Cleveland. A self-described "Rocket Girl," Meredith's personal and professional work has drawn recognition over the last decade, including the inaugural Valparaiso University Alumni Association First Decade Achievement Award, two special reports in News 12's Climate Special "Saving Our Shores" that won a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award, multiple Fair Media Council Folio ⁘ Press Club of Long Island awards for meteorology ⁘ reporting, and a Long Island Business News ⁘ NYC TV Week "40 Under 40" Award.

China Returns To The Moon, SpaceX Keeps Up High Launch Cadence - NASASpaceFlight.Com

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This week, China returns to the Moon with the Chang'e-6 mission, making the first-ever attempt to collect samples from a site on the far side, near the lunar South Pole.

SpaceX also plans to keep up its high cadence with the launch of the long-delayed WorldView Legion satellites from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at the Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) in California. Additionally, two further Starlink missions are scheduled to launch this week, with the second Starlink mission possibly completing a record-breaking sub-three-day turnaround for Vandenberg.

Lastly, no launch permit was issued for Gilmour Space's Eris 1 orbital rocket, previously expected to make its maiden flight on May 4, this launch is now on hold.

Originally scheduled to launch from SLC-4E at VSFB on April 17, a Falcon 9 was set to carry two satellites massing a total of 1,500 kilograms into a Sun-synchronous orbit. This first launch attempt was postponed the day before launch and rescheduled for Wednesday, April 24, before being postponed again. SpaceX has not commented on the reason for the delays, but liftoff is now scheduled for Wednesday, May 2, at 11:30 AM PDT (18:30 UTC), at the start of a 54-minute launch window. The booster, which has yet to be confirmed, is expected to return to land on the pad at Landing Zone 4 located around 400 meters away from the launch pad.

The WorldView Legion satellite constellation is Maxar Technologies' next-generation constellation of Earth observation satellites, designed and built in-house at the company's facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, California. DigitalGlobe, which was later taken over by Maxar, first announced its selection of SpaceX as the launch provider in 2018 when the satellites were initially anticipated to launch in two blocks of six. Hardware-based delays, as well as the complexity of the technology, have caused several setbacks. The planned constellation will now consist of six satellites in total that will be launched in pairs and will orbit in polar and mid-inclination orbits.

Laser On NASA's Psyche Asteroid Probe Beams Data From 140 Million Miles Away

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Late last year, NASA scientists pressed start on a highly anticipated space mission. Basically, they launched a spacecraft toward an asteroid that could very well be made entirely of metal, a composition that appears to be a rarity ⁘ at least, in our solar system's vicinity. The robotic adventurer is called Psyche, and its namesake is the giant rock that guides its journey: 16 Psyche.

Not only did it transmit data to Earth from Psyche's location at the time, about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away ⁘ a record-breaking distance larger than the gap between our planet and the sun ⁘ but it also managed to beam back information gleaned straight from the spacecraft. This means that the DSOC transceiver actually interfaced with Psyche's radio transmitter and sent back concrete engineering data contained within the craft.

Still, this duplicated-data achievement, in itself, is a big deal for the experiment; though DSOC has been making headlines lately for various other milestones, there's been a caveat. For instance, in November of last year when it fired data back to Earth from 10 million miles (16 million km) away, and recently during a "turnaround test" in which scientists pinged the experiment with content, then got that content to be pinged back, DSOC wasn't beaming back any "real" information. It was pre-loaded test data that could be pulled out on command.

"We'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche," Srinivasan said. "This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft⁘s radio frequency comms system."

And now, if you're wondering about how the rate tests are going for DSOC, we'll have to get into the cat video.

And third, one part of the data was a stunning video of Taters . Who is Taters, you ask? Well, a sweet little orange Tabby cat, of course. (It would be an orange cat, wouldn't it?) This is also probably a good time to mention some of that recent "turnaround test" data involved pet pics as well.