By BYRON TAU and BERNARD CONDON
WASHINGTON (AP) — A satellite company owned by Elon Musk has the inside track to potentially take over a large federal contract to modernize the nation’s air traffic communications system.
By ISABEL DEBRE
SALFIT, West Bank (AP) — Order a Coke to wash down some hummus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank these days and chances are the waiter will shake his head disapprovingly — or worse, mutter “shame, shame” in Arabic — before suggesting the popular local alternative: a can of Chat Cola.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — A lot more moondust could be kicked up soon with three lunar landers headed simultaneously on missions for the first time in history.
The latest, Athena from Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is targeting a 7:17 p.m. launch Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A. It would join two commercial efforts already in transit, in a striking demonstration of the space industry’s current vigor.
“There’s no time in history that we’ve had three landers, lunar landers in space, traveling to the moon,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus. “We’ve ignited in the United States, the commercial sector, the innovation that’s coming out. We have different types of landers, different types of propulsion experiments, engineering demonstrations, all kinds of things are happening here to advance our understanding of how to fly to the moon, how to land softly on the moon, how to work on the moon.”
The two other landers — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R lander Resilience — shared a ride to space from KSC in January, but both had slower trajectories. Still Blue Ghost could be the first arrival, as early as Sunday.
CAPE CANAVERAL — Scientists have finally given the all-clear to Earth from a newly discovered asteroid.
After two months of observations, scientists have almost fully ruled out any threat from the asteroid 2024 YR4, NASA and the European Space Agency said Tuesday.
At one point, the odds of a strike in 2032 were as high as about 3% and topped the world’s asteroid-risk lists.
ESA has since lowered the odds to 0.001%. NASA has it down to 0.0017% — meaning the asteroid will safely pass Earth in 2032 and there’s no threat of impact for the next century.
Paul Chodas, who heads NASA’s Center for Near Earth Objects Studies, said there is no chance the odds will rise at this point and that an impact in 2032 has been ruled out.
“That’s the outcome we expected all along, although we couldn’t be 100% sure that it would happen,” he said in an email.
But there’s still a 1.7% chance that asteroid could hit the moon on Dec. 22, 2032, according to NASA. Chodas expects the odds of a moon strike will also fade.
Stalled lawsuits. Halted supervision and oversight. Suspended workforce. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in the midst of a complete overhaul that could cripple its ability to act as the consumer finance watchdog it was designed to be.