NASA is going to launch a mission to what could almost be considered a journey to the centre of the Earth.&nbsp;

The US space agency's Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.&nbsp;

The spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/researchers-design-flying-saucer-that-can-levitate-on-moon-asteroids-441035" hreflang="en">Researchers design 'flying saucer' that can levitate on moon, asteroids</a>

Wall Street research firm Bernstein notes that a big asteroid called 16 Psyche, measuring some 200 km, may contain 17 million billion tones of nickel-iron, enough to satisfy mankind’s current demand for millions of years.

Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets' rocky mantles and crusts.&nbsp;

As we cannot see or measure Earth's core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/scientists-discover-hidden-passageway-beneath-panama-through-which-wind-from-earths-middle-layer-blows-440199" hreflang="en">Scientists discover hidden passageway beneath Panama through which wind from Earth's middle layer blows</a>

The Psyche spacecraft will give us more than a glimpse of our deep past; we could see the beginnings of our technological future.&nbsp;

Instead of traditional rocket fuel, Psyche will gradually build up speed using ion propulsion. Electricity from the space probe’s solar panels will power a new type of thruster, called a Hall thruster, for the first time in deep space.

Psyche will take a swing past Mars for a gravitational push during its 3.5-year cruise to the asteroid, then spend 21 months measuring and mapping, gradually tightening its orbit until it passes just above the surface.

The real value in asteroid mining is for further space travel, and so hydrogen and oxygen reserves are as attractive as any metal.

The energy released when hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water can power rockets. The presence of both elements in compounds found on asteroids offers scope to set up space factories to make fuel for missions to Mars and beyond as well as offering “pit stops” to extend the lives of satellites.

(With inputs from agencies)

NASA is going to launch a mission to what could almost be considered a journey to the centre of the Earth. The US space agency's Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA is going to launch a mission to what could almost be considered a journey to the centre of the Earth. The US space agency's Psyche mission is a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Also read | Researchers design 'flying saucer' that can levitate on moon, asteroids Wall Street research firm Bernstein notes that a big asteroid called 16 Psyche, measuring some 200 km, may contain 17 million billion tones of nickel-iron, enough to satisfy mankind’s current demand for millions of years. Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planets' rocky mantles and crusts. As we cannot see or measure Earth's core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets. Also read | Scientists discover hidden passageway beneath Panama through which wind from Earth's middle layer blows The Psyche spacecraft will give us more than a glimpse of our deep past; we could see the beginnings of our technological future. Instead of traditional rocket fuel, Psyche will gradually build up speed using ion propulsion. Electricity from the space probe’s solar panels will power a new type of thruster, called a Hall thruster, for the first time in deep space. Psyche will take a swing past Mars for a gravitational push during its 3.5-year cruise to the asteroid, then spend 21 months measuring and mapping, gradually tightening its orbit until it passes just above the surface. The real value in asteroid mining is for further space travel, and so hydrogen and oxygen reserves are as attractive as any metal. The energy released when hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water can power rockets. The presence of both elements in compounds found on asteroids offers scope to set up space factories to make fuel for missions to Mars and beyond as well as offering “pit stops” to extend the lives of satellites. (With inputs from agencies)

NASA to launch mission to massive, metal-rich asteroid called 'Psyche'

Amid a rise in criticism, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has denied all the claims that his Starlink satellite internet project is clogging the space in space.&nbsp;

While speaking to the &nbsp;Financial Times, Musk said that tens of billions of satellites can be accommodated in orbits close to Earth.

In an interview, Musk said, "Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny. This is not some situation where we're effectively blocking others in any way. We've not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to."&nbsp;

"A couple of thousand satellites is nothing. It's like, hey, here's a couple of thousand of cars on Earth, it's nothing," he added.&nbsp;

Recently, China accused the United States of irresponsible and unsafe conduct in space over two "close encounters" between the Chinese space station and satellites operated by Musk's SpaceX.

Tiangong, China's new space station, had to manoeuvre to avoid colliding with one Starlink satellite in July and with another in October, according to a note submitted by Beijing to the United Nations space agency this month.

The note said the incidents "constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station".

"The US... ignores its obligations under international treaties, posing a serious threat to the lives and safety of astronauts," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine briefing on Tuesday.

Starlink, a division of SpaceX, operates a constellation of close to 2,000 satellites that aims to provide internet access to most parts of Earth.

SpaceX is a private American company, independent of the US military and civilian space agency NASA.

(With inputs from agencies)

Amid a rise in criticism, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has denied all the claims that his Starlink satellite internet project is clogging the space in space. While speaking to the Financial Times, Musk said that tens of billions of satellites can be accommodated in orbits close to Earth.

Amid a rise in criticism, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has denied all the claims that his Starlink satellite internet project is clogging the space in space. While speaking to the Financial Times, Musk said that tens of billions of satellites can be accommodated in orbits close to Earth. In an interview, Musk said, "Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny. This is not some situation where we're effectively blocking others in any way. We've not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to." "A couple of thousand satellites is nothing. It's like, hey, here's a couple of thousand of cars on Earth, it's nothing," he added. Recently, China accused the United States of irresponsible and unsafe conduct in space over two "close encounters" between the Chinese space station and satellites operated by Musk's SpaceX. Tiangong, China's new space station, had to manoeuvre to avoid colliding with one Starlink satellite in July and with another in October, according to a note submitted by Beijing to the United Nations space agency this month. The note said the incidents "constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station". "The US... ignores its obligations under international treaties, posing a serious threat to the lives and safety of astronauts," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine briefing on Tuesday. Starlink, a division of SpaceX, operates a constellation of close to 2,000 satellites that aims to provide internet access to most parts of Earth. SpaceX is a private American company, independent of the US military and civilian space agency NASA. (With inputs from agencies)

'Space is extremely enormous': Amid criticism, Elon Musk says his satellites are not clogging the space

The year 2021, or Year Two of the pandemic as some of us would like to call it, was replete with space-related events that not only had scientific importance but which resonated with public as well. Some of these were once-in-decades developments while others marked advancement of human vision. NASA was at the forefront, as were other space agencies around the world. But what was different this year was even private players made successful forays into space missions. 2021 marked first-ever powered flight on the surface of any planet other than Earth.

Here are some events that made 2021 memorable in terms of space science

 
James Webb Space Telescope

<img alt="James Webb" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="dcb8f193-6a02-4224-898f-b23d730dea11" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/2021-12-28T115736Z_2_LYNXMPEHBO027_RTROPTP_4_SPACE-EXPLORATION-TELESCOPE.JPG" />

Humanity is on the verge of using entirely new generation of technology to peer even deeped in space. The iconic Hubble Space Telescope has its gaze fixed at distant stars, but launch of James Webb Space Telescope marks a genrational shift. The space telescope has better technology and instruments than Hubble. James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 24, 2021 and at the time of publishing this story, was in the process of unfolding.

Using the new space telescope, we will be able to observe galaxies which were formed when the universe was in its infancy.

Perseverance on Ingenuity on Mars

<img alt="Perseverance" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="2fa9d417-8485-4607-980e-15582d3f291f" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/perseverance.JPG" />

 
NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on March 5, 2021. The rover continues to study conditions on Mars and is sending invaluable scientific data back to Earth.

Ingenuity, the helicopter which is aiding Perseverance study Mars created history on April 19, 2021 by marking first-ever powered flight of a man-made craft on an alien planet. Martian atmosphere is very thin as compared to Earth. Hence, flying a helicopter on Mars is an extremely difficult task. Ingenuity's flight was initially supposed to be just an achievement. But the success prompted NASA to extend its mission. Ingenuity carried out several flights after it firt took off from Martian surface.

Private spaceflight

<img alt="SpaceX" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="b2e416bc-6383-46e6-b0a4-3560dbb13fd5" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/2021-12-29T184743Z_2_LYNXMPEHBS0N6_RTROPTP_4_SPACEX-FUNDING.JPG" />

An American millionaire became the world's first space tourist in 2001, but it took 20 more years for the promise of private space flight to finally materialize. 
In July, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson faced off against Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos to be the first non-professional astronaut to complete a suborbital spaceflight.&nbsp;

While the British tycoon won that battle by a few days, it was Blue Origin that raced ahead, launching three more flights with paying customers and celebrity guests. 
Elon Musk's SpaceX entered the fray in September with a three-day orbital mission around the Earth featuring an all-civilian crew on Inspiration 4.&nbsp;

"It's really exciting that finally, after so long this stuff is finally happening," said space industry analyst Laura Seward Forczyk, author of the forthcoming book "Becoming Off-Worldly," intended to prepare future space travelers.

But it was William Shatner, who played the swashbuckling Captain Kirk on the 1960s TV series "Star Trek," who stole the show with a moving account of his experience.

"What you're looking down on is Mother Earth, and it needs protecting," he told reporters.&nbsp;

A spacecraft 'touches' the Sun

It may be impossible for any human-made spacecraft to descend on the actual surface of the Sun, but this year marked a step in that direction. NASA's Parker solar probe 'touched' the Sun. This is to say that it entered 'Corona', the Sun's atmosphere. This is a great achievement. The probe entered the Corona in April 2021.

First film shot in space

A Russian crew shot the first feature film in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021, and Japanese tourists made their own visit there on a Russian rocket.&nbsp;

For a few minutes on December 11, there were a record 19 humans in space when Blue Origin carried out its third crewed mission, the Japanese team were on the ISS along with its normal crew, and Chinese taikonauts were in position on their station.

Discovery of Jupiter's new moon

Jupiter has 79 moons and scientists think there are many more that remain to be found. This year an amateur astronomer found one of those. Kai Ly, the astronomer, made the discovery by analysing data sets from 2003.

The moon has been named EJc0061. It belongs to the Carme group of Jovian moons.

(With inputs from agencies)

The year 2021, or Year Two of the pandemic as some of us would like to call it, was replete with space-related events that not only had scientific importance but which resonated with public as well.

The year 2021, or Year Two of the pandemic as some of us would like to call it, was replete with space-related events that not only had scientific importance but which resonated with public as well. Some of these were once-in-decades developments while others marked advancement of human vision. NASA was at the forefront, as were other space agencies around the world. But what was different this year was even private players made successful forays into space missions. 2021 marked first-ever powered flight on the surface of any planet other than Earth. Here are some events that made 2021 memorable in terms of space science James Webb Space Telescope Humanity is on the verge of using entirely new generation of technology to peer even deeped in space. The iconic Hubble Space Telescope has its gaze fixed at distant stars, but launch of James Webb Space Telescope marks a genrational shift. The space telescope has better technology and instruments than Hubble. James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 24, 2021 and at the time of publishing this story, was in the process of unfolding. Using the new space telescope, we will be able to observe galaxies which were formed when the universe was in its infancy. Perseverance on Ingenuity on Mars NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on March 5, 2021. The rover continues to study conditions on Mars and is sending invaluable scientific data back to Earth. Ingenuity, the helicopter which is aiding Perseverance study Mars created history on April 19, 2021 by marking first-ever powered flight of a man-made craft on an alien planet. Martian atmosphere is very thin as compared to Earth. Hence, flying a helicopter on Mars is an extremely difficult task. Ingenuity's flight was initially supposed to be just an achievement. But the success prompted NASA to extend its mission. Ingenuity carried out several flights after it firt took off from Martian surface. Private spaceflight An American millionaire became the world's first space tourist in 2001, but it took 20 more years for the promise of private space flight to finally materialize. In July, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson faced off against Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos to be the first non-professional astronaut to complete a suborbital spaceflight. While the British tycoon won that battle by a few days, it was Blue Origin that raced ahead, launching three more flights with paying customers and celebrity guests. Elon Musk's SpaceX entered the fray in September with a three-day orbital mission around the Earth featuring an all-civilian crew on Inspiration 4. "It's really exciting that finally, after so long this stuff is finally happening," said space industry analyst Laura Seward Forczyk, author of the forthcoming book "Becoming Off-Worldly," intended to prepare future space travelers. But it was William Shatner, who played the swashbuckling Captain Kirk on the 1960s TV series "Star Trek," who stole the show with a moving account of his experience. "What you're looking down on is Mother Earth, and it needs protecting," he told reporters. A spacecraft 'touches' the Sun It may be impossible for any human-made spacecraft to descend on the actual surface of the Sun, but this year marked a step in that direction. NASA's Parker solar probe 'touched' the Sun. This is to say that it entered 'Corona', the Sun's atmosphere. This is a great achievement. The probe entered the Corona in April 2021. First film shot in space A Russian crew shot the first feature film in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021, and Japanese tourists made their own visit there on a Russian rocket. For a few minutes on December 11, there were a record 19 humans in space when Blue Origin carried out its third crewed mission, the Japanese team were on the ISS along with its normal crew, and Chinese taikonauts were in position on their station. Discovery of Jupiter's new moon Jupiter has 79 moons and scientists think there are many more that remain to be found. This year an amateur astronomer found one of those. Kai Ly, the astronomer, made the discovery by analysing data sets from 2003. The moon has been named EJc0061. It belongs to the Carme group of Jovian moons. (With inputs from agencies)

Year ender: Space news that made 2021 special

After space satellites launched by tech mogul Elon Musk's aerospace business SpaceX almost crashed into its space station twice in the past year, Beijing has asked the United Nations to remind the US to abide by the treaty governing outer space.

Chinese residents also took to social media to criticise billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk's space ambitions.

In a recent report presented to the UN's Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space earlier this month, China stated its space station employed preventative collision avoidance control procedures in July and October to avoid colliding with Starlink satellites.

According to a statement provided by China earlier this month to the United Nations' space agency, satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a part of Musk's SpaceX aerospace business, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and October 21.

Scientists have urged governments to exchange data to lessen the possibility of catastrophic space collisions, with roughly 30,000 satellites and other junk believed to be orbiting the Earth.

SpaceX alone has roughly 1,900 satellites in orbit to operate its Starlink internet network, with more on the way.

NASA, the United States' space agency, was forced to cancel a spacewalk at the end of November due to threats posed by space debris. In response, Musk tweeted that the orbits of several Starlink satellites had been altered to lessen the risk of collisions.

With the launch of Tianhe, the largest of the space station's three modules, China began construction in April. After four crewed trips, the station is projected to be finished by the end of 2022.

At the Shanghai auto show in April, Musk has become a well-known figure in China, despite the fact that Tesla's electric-vehicle company has come under increasing scrutiny from regulators, particularly after a client protested bad customer service by climbing on top of a Tesla car.

(With inputs from agencies)

After space satellites launched by tech mogul Elon Musk's aerospace business SpaceX almost crashed into its space station twice in the past year, Beijing has asked the United Nations to remind the US to abide by the treaty governing outer space.

After space satellites launched by tech mogul Elon Musk's aerospace business SpaceX almost crashed into its space station twice in the past year, Beijing has asked the United Nations to remind the US to abide by the treaty governing outer space. Chinese residents also took to social media to criticise billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk's space ambitions. In a recent report presented to the UN's Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space earlier this month, China stated its space station employed preventative collision avoidance control procedures in July and October to avoid colliding with Starlink satellites. According to a statement provided by China earlier this month to the United Nations' space agency, satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a part of Musk's SpaceX aerospace business, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and October 21. Scientists have urged governments to exchange data to lessen the possibility of catastrophic space collisions, with roughly 30,000 satellites and other junk believed to be orbiting the Earth. SpaceX alone has roughly 1,900 satellites in orbit to operate its Starlink internet network, with more on the way. NASA, the United States' space agency, was forced to cancel a spacewalk at the end of November due to threats posed by space debris. In response, Musk tweeted that the orbits of several Starlink satellites had been altered to lessen the risk of collisions. With the launch of Tianhe, the largest of the space station's three modules, China began construction in April. After four crewed trips, the station is projected to be finished by the end of 2022. At the Shanghai auto show in April, Musk has become a well-known figure in China, despite the fact that Tesla's electric-vehicle company has come under increasing scrutiny from regulators, particularly after a client protested bad customer service by climbing on top of a Tesla car. (With inputs from agencies)

Near-crash in space: Musk faces backlash after China complains to UN

Chinese citizens slammed Elon Musk's company SpaceX for its ''close encounter'' with the country's space station.

They took to Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, and called the company "just a pile of space junk" while accusing America of "space warfare weapons."

A user called Chen Haiying said on Weibo "The risks of Starlink are being gradually exposed, the whole human race will pay for their business activities."

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/spacex-sends-detergent-to-space-to-help-astronauts-wash-clothes-439990" hreflang="en">SpaceX sends detergent to space to help astronauts wash clothes</a>

Some satellites under the Starlink programme of&nbsp;SpaceX nearly collided with China's space station&nbsp;on July 1 and October&nbsp;21.

The move reignites concerns about the growing space arms race, encompassing everything from the development of satellites capable of shunting others out of orbit to laser weapons.&nbsp;

According to a document submitted by China to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, "For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control."

Also see |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/want-to-become-a-space-tourist-here-is-all-you-need-to-do-399437" hreflang="en">Want to become a space tourist? Here is all you need to do</a>

There are currently more than 4,500 satellites whizzing around Earth, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, with companies like SpaceX planning to launch up to tens of thousands more, as the private space industry experiences rapid growth.

With the launch of Tianhe, China had the construction of the space station in April and it is expected to be completed by 2022.

Citing risks posed by space debris, US space agency NASA was forced to abruptly call off a spacewalk at the end of November.

(With inputs from agencies)

Chinese citizens slammed Elon Musk's company SpaceX for its ''close encounter'' with the country's space station. They took to Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, and called the company "just a pile of space junk" while accusing America of "space warfare weapons.

Chinese citizens slammed Elon Musk's company SpaceX for its ''close encounter'' with the country's space station. They took to Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, and called the company "just a pile of space junk" while accusing America of "space warfare weapons." A user called Chen Haiying said on Weibo "The risks of Starlink are being gradually exposed, the whole human race will pay for their business activities." Also read | SpaceX sends detergent to space to help astronauts wash clothes Some satellites under the Starlink programme of SpaceX nearly collided with China's space station on July 1 and October 21. The move reignites concerns about the growing space arms race, encompassing everything from the development of satellites capable of shunting others out of orbit to laser weapons. According to a document submitted by China to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, "For safety reasons, the China Space Station implemented preventive collision avoidance control." Also see | Want to become a space tourist? Here is all you need to do There are currently more than 4,500 satellites whizzing around Earth, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, with companies like SpaceX planning to launch up to tens of thousands more, as the private space industry experiences rapid growth. With the launch of Tianhe, China had the construction of the space station in April and it is expected to be completed by 2022. Citing risks posed by space debris, US space agency NASA was forced to abruptly call off a spacewalk at the end of November. (With inputs from agencies)

'Pile of space junk': Chinese citizens lambast SpaceX after space station near-misses

In a Christmas package, SpaceX seems to have sent laundry detergent along with presents and turkey to astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday. &nbsp;

Manufactured by Proctor and Gamble, the detergent seems to be a part of an experiment to see that can clothes be washed in space effectively. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
<div class="twitter-block" draggable="false">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Stage separation confirmed! The <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpaceX</a> Dragon is now floating freely and flying toward the <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Space_Station</a> with science, supplies, and holiday treats aboard for the <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA_Astronauts?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASA_Astronauts</a>. <a href="https://t.co/ncOPLLXNgd">pic.twitter.com/ncOPLLXNgd</a>
— NASA (@NASA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1473237438235652099?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></div>
<a class="close-mark close-div" href="#" id="jqclosemark">×</a></div>

In June, the experiment was announced in a press release. &nbsp;

Also Read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/watch-finally-revolutionary-james-webb-space-telescope-scales-sky-on-christmas-439928" hreflang="en">Watch: Finally, James Webb Space Telescope scales sky on Christmas</a>

Currently, astronauts wear clothes several times before they are replaced completely with new ones, which are sent from Earth. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Ready for launch! 🚀 <a href="https://twitter.com/tide?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Tide</a> is taking its low-resource 🧺 detergent solution to space aboard <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpaceX</a> CRS-24 – scheduled for launch at 5:06 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 21 (weather permitting). Read more: <a href="https://t.co/Qx8Mf9M8IC">https://t.co/Qx8Mf9M8IC</a> <a href="https://t.co/IIiinmgoTU">pic.twitter.com/IIiinmgoTU</a>
— Procter &amp; Gamble (@ProcterGamble) <a href="https://twitter.com/ProcterGamble/status/1472984313826316294?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2021</a></blockquote>
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"Without a proper laundry solution, 160 pounds of clothing per crew member per year are launched to ISS. Human roundtrip missions to Mars could be two to three years in length," the press release said. &nbsp;

Also Read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/explainer-what-is-james-webb-space-telescope-that-is-set-to-be-launched-today-439852" hreflang="en">Explainer: What is James Webb Space Telescope that is set to be launched today</a>

Mark Sivik, senior director and research fellow, Proctor and Gamble, told Space.com, "Once you start having extended trips out in space, laundry is a must-have. What we've developed here is fully degradable and designed to work within the space station's closed-loop system." &nbsp;

If the experiment gets successful, the detergent will help astronauts wash clothes in space. It would be helpful in long trips, such as to Mars, in the future. &nbsp;&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)&nbsp;

In a Christmas package, SpaceX seems to have sent laundry detergent along with presents and turkey to astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday.

In a Christmas package, SpaceX seems to have sent laundry detergent along with presents and turkey to astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday. Manufactured by Proctor and Gamble, the detergent seems to be a part of an experiment to see that can clothes be washed in space effectively. Stage separation confirmed! The @SpaceX Dragon is now floating freely and flying toward the @Space_Station with science, supplies, and holiday treats aboard for the @NASA_Astronauts. pic.twitter.com/ncOPLLXNgd — NASA (@NASA) December 21, 2021 × In June, the experiment was announced in a press release. Also Read | Watch: Finally, James Webb Space Telescope scales sky on Christmas Currently, astronauts wear clothes several times before they are replaced completely with new ones, which are sent from Earth. Ready for launch! 🚀 @Tide is taking its low-resource 🧺 detergent solution to space aboard @SpaceX CRS-24 – scheduled for launch at 5:06 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 21 (weather permitting). Read more: https://t.co/Qx8Mf9M8IC pic.twitter.com/IIiinmgoTU — Procter & Gamble (@ProcterGamble) December 20, 2021 × "Without a proper laundry solution, 160 pounds of clothing per crew member per year are launched to ISS. Human roundtrip missions to Mars could be two to three years in length," the press release said. Also Read: Explainer: What is James Webb Space Telescope that is set to be launched today Mark Sivik, senior director and research fellow, Proctor and Gamble, told Space.com, "Once you start having extended trips out in space, laundry is a must-have. What we've developed here is fully degradable and designed to work within the space station's closed-loop system." If the experiment gets successful, the detergent will help astronauts wash clothes in space. It would be helpful in long trips, such as to Mars, in the future. (With inputs from agencies)

SpaceX sends detergent to space to help astronauts wash clothes

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that political correctness is the biggest threat to modern civilisation.

In an interview with comedian Dave Chappelle, Musk said ''At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.''

''It basically gives mean people… a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,'' he added.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/in-fitting-reply-billionaire-elon-musk-vows-to-pay-over-11-bn-in-taxes-this-year-438306">Also read |&nbsp;In fitting reply, billionaire Elon Musk vows to pay over $11 bn in taxes this year</a>

The billionaire also defended his decision to sell his shares in Tesla. He said he wanted to reach his plan to sell 10 per cent&nbsp;of his shares in the world's most valuable car company.

"I sold enough stock to get to around 10 per cent&nbsp;plus the option exercise stuff and I tried to be extremely literal here," he said in the interview with satirical website Babylon Bee.

He asked ''Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate?'' and said ''Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool.''

Also read |&nbsp;Tesla CEO Elon Musk wealthier than Pakistan’s GDP

Talking about how it is "increasingly difficult to get things done" in California, Musk said, "California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is... becoming more so the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation."

Musk also spoke ambitiously about his interest in colonising Mars, and plans orbital flights next year as part of SpaceX's planned American return to the Moon.

The brash South African-born 50-year-old has seen his wealth soar during the pandemic to over $250 billion, according to Forbes' real-time billionaires' list.&nbsp;

He became the world's wealthiest person after overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this year.

(With inputs from agencies)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that political correctness is the biggest threat to modern civilisation. In an interview with comedian Dave Chappelle, Musk said ''At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that political correctness is the biggest threat to modern civilisation. In an interview with comedian Dave Chappelle, Musk said ''At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful.'' ''It basically gives mean people… a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,'' he added. Also read | In fitting reply, billionaire Elon Musk vows to pay over $11 bn in taxes this year The billionaire also defended his decision to sell his shares in Tesla. He said he wanted to reach his plan to sell 10 per cent of his shares in the world's most valuable car company. "I sold enough stock to get to around 10 per cent plus the option exercise stuff and I tried to be extremely literal here," he said in the interview with satirical website Babylon Bee. He asked ''Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate?'' and said ''Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool.'' Also read | Tesla CEO Elon Musk wealthier than Pakistan’s GDP Talking about how it is "increasingly difficult to get things done" in California, Musk said, "California used to be the land of opportunity and now it is... becoming more so the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation." Musk also spoke ambitiously about his interest in colonising Mars, and plans orbital flights next year as part of SpaceX's planned American return to the Moon. The brash South African-born 50-year-old has seen his wealth soar during the pandemic to over $250 billion, according to Forbes' real-time billionaires' list. He became the world's wealthiest person after overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this year. (With inputs from agencies)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes this is the 'biggest threat' to modern civilisation

As many as 132 employees of SpaceX at California headquarters have tested positive for coronavirus, making it the largest workplace outbreak in Los Angeles.

In a statement, SpaceX officials said not all the cases were reported in a single day, rather they were started adding up from September when several employees contracted COVID-19 outside of the workplace.

“Of the 132 reported ‘outbreak’ cases, only one case was suspected to have occurred at work. 132 is also the aggregate number of cases reported since the September case described above, and that number includes employees who may have been on vacation for several weeks, returned to work and received a COVID test at SpaceX that turned out positive. Again, it does not mean 132 employees in Hawthorne have COVID today or contracted it in the workplace,” it said in a statement.

“We will continue to work very hard to keep employees safe in the workplace,” it added.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/israel-announces-fourth-booster-dose-for-over-60s-and-medics-as-omicron-rages-438890">Israel announces fourth booster dose for over 60s and medics as Omicron rages</a>

The Hawthorne facility, which employs nearly 6,000 employees,&nbsp;serves as both the company's headquarters, mission control and manufacturing for Falcon 9 rockets.

According to a report released by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Monday, the Elon Musk-led company currently accounts for nearly 30 per cent of workplace COVID-19 cases in the county.

The outbreak comes amid rising cases in California and across the US that is witnessing a new wave of infections spurred by the Omicron strain.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/omicron-3-times-more-transmissible-than-delta-centre-askes-states-to-take-prompt-action-438911">‘Omicron 3 times more transmissible than Delta’: Centre askes states to take prompt action</a>

From Friday till Sunday, California on an average recorded 8,757 new cases each day, which is up by 29 per cent from last week earlier and the highest daily total since mid-September, according to reports.

The seven-day average of test positivity is up about 22 per cent compared to a week ago.

(With inputs from agencies)

As many as 132 employees of SpaceX at California headquarters have tested positive for coronavirus, making it the largest workplace outbreak in Los Angeles. In a statement, SpaceX officials said not all the cases were reported in a single day, rather they were started adding up from September when several employees contracted COVID-19 outside of the workplace.

As many as 132 employees of SpaceX at California headquarters have tested positive for coronavirus, making it the largest workplace outbreak in Los Angeles. In a statement, SpaceX officials said not all the cases were reported in a single day, rather they were started adding up from September when several employees contracted COVID-19 outside of the workplace. “Of the 132 reported ‘outbreak’ cases, only one case was suspected to have occurred at work. 132 is also the aggregate number of cases reported since the September case described above, and that number includes employees who may have been on vacation for several weeks, returned to work and received a COVID test at SpaceX that turned out positive. Again, it does not mean 132 employees in Hawthorne have COVID today or contracted it in the workplace,” it said in a statement. “We will continue to work very hard to keep employees safe in the workplace,” it added. Also read | Israel announces fourth booster dose for over 60s and medics as Omicron rages The Hawthorne facility, which employs nearly 6,000 employees, serves as both the company's headquarters, mission control and manufacturing for Falcon 9 rockets. According to a report released by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Monday, the Elon Musk-led company currently accounts for nearly 30 per cent of workplace COVID-19 cases in the county. The outbreak comes amid rising cases in California and across the US that is witnessing a new wave of infections spurred by the Omicron strain. Also read | ‘Omicron 3 times more transmissible than Delta’: Centre askes states to take prompt action From Friday till Sunday, California on an average recorded 8,757 new cases each day, which is up by 29 per cent from last week earlier and the highest daily total since mid-September, according to reports. The seven-day average of test positivity is up about 22 per cent compared to a week ago. (With inputs from agencies)

132 employees from SpaceX test Covid positive as Omicron spurs new wave of infections

Another fake account on Facebook, which is running scams related to cryptocurrency after impersonating Tesla owner Elon Musk has been identified. Surprisingly, the account has a blue tick, meaning it is verified and has a following of over 71k&nbsp;and follows 57 accounts.&nbsp;

The billionaire's name is used as the page's name with a little tweak in the spelling of Elon Musk - it is written as 'ellonnmusk'. However, the user name on the account appears as 'Elon Musk'.&nbsp;

A report on Web News Observer stated that a 25-year-old security researcher Ehraz Ahmed came across the Facebook page that is running a scam. Earlier, Ahmed had reported a similar scam.&nbsp;

ALSO READ | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/trending/spot-the-real-elon-musk-deepfake-or-doppelganger-netizens-cant-decide-437678">Spot the real Elon Musk: Deepfake or doppelganger? netizens can't decide</a>

After analysing the activity on the account, it appeared that the page was made active after the previous one was shut. The activity on the page pointed out that the page came into use on November 26.&nbsp;

As quoted by Web News Observer, Ahmed said, "Since Bitcoin scams are becoming frequent and common, I was once again busy researching about them. To my surprise, I came across another verified page of Elon Musk."

"By visiting the Page Transparency section, I noticed that this page, unlike the previous ones, was created back in May 2015. The location of the admins is, once again, Germany and Spain, which may mean that these scammers are the same people who were behind the previous similar scams," he added.&nbsp;

Ahmed also talked about the latest post by the scammer where they are announcing that Musk is all set to come up with a new digital currency named Musk Coin.&nbsp;

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
<div class="twitter-block" draggable="false"><iframe allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="168" scrolling="no" src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fellonnmusk%2Fposts%2F414316640242165&amp;show_text=true&amp;width=500" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" width="500"></iframe></div>
<a class="close-mark close-div" href="#" id="jqclosemark">×</a></div>

&nbsp;

<img alt="Musk Coin" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="5a4ec2ed-9cb5-43dc-895b-df3a24c926d0" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Musk%20Coin.jpg" />

Here's a grab of the fake Facebook profile, which is made using Elon Musk's name.&nbsp;

<img alt="Elon Musk" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="ab449bb1-d404-46bc-858c-864a821f9983" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/elon%20musk.jpg" />

Here are some of the reactions on the post.

ALSO READ | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/worst-choice-ever-time-magazine-faces-backlash-for-naming-elon-musk-person-of-the-year-for-2021-436799">‘Worst choice ever’: Time magazine faces backlash for naming Elon Musk 'Person of the Year’ for 2021</a>

For the unversed, Elon Musk favours cryptocurrencies and has influenced the trading of digital currencies with his tweets. His post about crypto often sends the market prices soaring of the mentioned digital currency.&nbsp;

And it looks like the scammers are using cryptocurrencies and the buzz around them to fool people and investors.&nbsp;

At the time of filing this news article, the fake page was still active. The profile picture resembles the current display picture of Musk on his official Twitter handle. The scenario is quite alarming, although some people have pointed out that the account is not real.&nbsp;

Another fake account on Facebook, which is running scams related to cryptocurrency after impersonating Tesla owner Elon Musk has been identified. Surprisingly, the account has a blue tick, meaning it is verified and has a following of over 71k and follows 57 accounts.

Another fake account on Facebook, which is running scams related to cryptocurrency after impersonating Tesla owner Elon Musk has been identified. Surprisingly, the account has a blue tick, meaning it is verified and has a following of over 71k and follows 57 accounts. The billionaire's name is used as the page's name with a little tweak in the spelling of Elon Musk - it is written as 'ellonnmusk'. However, the user name on the account appears as 'Elon Musk'. A report on Web News Observer stated that a 25-year-old security researcher Ehraz Ahmed came across the Facebook page that is running a scam. Earlier, Ahmed had reported a similar scam. ALSO READ | Spot the real Elon Musk: Deepfake or doppelganger? netizens can't decide After analysing the activity on the account, it appeared that the page was made active after the previous one was shut. The activity on the page pointed out that the page came into use on November 26. As quoted by Web News Observer, Ahmed said, "Since Bitcoin scams are becoming frequent and common, I was once again busy researching about them. To my surprise, I came across another verified page of Elon Musk." "By visiting the Page Transparency section, I noticed that this page, unlike the previous ones, was created back in May 2015. The location of the admins is, once again, Germany and Spain, which may mean that these scammers are the same people who were behind the previous similar scams," he added. Ahmed also talked about the latest post by the scammer where they are announcing that Musk is all set to come up with a new digital currency named Musk Coin. × Here's a grab of the fake Facebook profile, which is made using Elon Musk's name. Here are some of the reactions on the post. ALSO READ | ‘Worst choice ever’: Time magazine faces backlash for naming Elon Musk 'Person of the Year’ for 2021 For the unversed, Elon Musk favours cryptocurrencies and has influenced the trading of digital currencies with his tweets. His post about crypto often sends the market prices soaring of the mentioned digital currency. And it looks like the scammers are using cryptocurrencies and the buzz around them to fool people and investors. At the time of filing this news article, the fake page was still active. The profile picture resembles the current display picture of Musk on his official Twitter handle. The scenario is quite alarming, although some people have pointed out that the account is not real.

Don't fall for the blue tick: This verified 'Elon Musk' page on Facebook is fake

The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway.

Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change.

The latest richest human, Elon Musk, has taken a rather different tack. There was the public spat with the director of the World Food Programme on Twitter, for instance, announcing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

There was the online poll asking whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares in order to pay taxes on at least part of his wealth, like most people do without running a survey first. And, of course, there is the ongoing insistence that his moneymaking efforts, running both the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX are already bettering humankind, thank you very much.

Musk is practicing “troll philanthropy.”

That’s what Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, has called it, noting that Musk seems to be having fun with this novel approach.

“He doesn’t seem to care much about using his philanthropy to curry public favor,” Soskis said. “In fact, he seems to enjoy using his identity as a philanthropist in part to antagonize the public.” Before this year, one estimate put his giving at $100 million, a lot by almost any standard, except for multibillionaires like Musk.

Most wealthy people do the opposite. They use philanthropy to burnish their image or distract the public from the business practices that earned them their enormous wealth in the first place.

When, how and why the ultrarich choose to give their fortunes away matters more than ever because so much money is concentrated in their hands and so little of it is taxable under current rules. Society is to some extent presently stuck relying on voluntary disbursements from those with the greatest means.

“The idea that philanthropy, that any single individual, has enough money to affect something at a global scale is a very new phenomenon,” said Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Most billionaires have “accumulated their wealth because the world economy is now globalized, but to sustain a globalized world economy we need to have more inclusive growth.”

There are many different kinds of givers, like Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has focused her billions on diversity and equity. There are the self-declared “effective altruists,” like the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, part of a movement searching for evidence-based approaches to find causes where their money does the most good. And there are the traditionalists, like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, who have built institutions to handle their funding.

Musk and Bezos are, with $268 billion and $202 billion respectively, the two richest Americans for the time being, drawing sharper contrasts between their approaches to giving back.

Earlier this year, Bezos took the stage with United Nations Deputy Secretary General Amina J. Mohammed and listened as former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sang his praises, saying, “He is stepping up in a way that an awful lot of people who have the wherewithal do not step up.”

Musk, meanwhile, replied to a tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders demanding “that the extremely wealthy pay their share,” by replying, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.”

Musk’s nontraditional approach to giving doesn’t stop people who need his donations, like David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, from seeking his help. “The resources at his disposal are so vast and potentially consequential that we have to engage him, and accept some of that trolling, if we want to try to exert some pressure on him and shape his somewhat inchoate philanthropic priorities,” Soskis said.

Musk did not respond to an email asking him to discuss his philanthropic giving.

The notion that rich people have a moral obligation to give is an ancient one. Soskis, a historian of philanthropy, notes that wealthy citizens in ancient Rome tried to outdo one another paying for public baths and theaters. The inscriptions on those edifices could count as a form of early donor lists.

The idea that the richest might need charity to improve their public relations is also longstanding, driven home in the Gilded Age by the 1882 outburst by railway magnate William Henry Vanderbilt, “The public be damned!” that shadowed him to the end of his days.

Efforts to track the charitable giving of the very wealthy in the United States date to the late 19th century, when the ranks of millionaires exploded. Before long, newspapers were running front-page lists of who had made the biggest gifts. The original duo to capture public attention were John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, whose feelings on publicizing philanthropy were diametrically opposed.

Cartoons from the era showed Carnegie, often dressed in a kilt to reference his Scottish origin, showering coins from enormous bags of money. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie wrote in “The Gospel of Wealth,” his treatise on giving. Rockefeller preferred to keep his giving more private and had to be convinced to announce his gifts.

To those who think the trolling started on Twitter, philanthropy was never quite as polite as we imagine today. George Eastman, one of the founders of Eastman-Kodak, called those who did not give their money away during their lifetimes “pie-faced mutts.” Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. and a major philanthropist in his day, insisted that the accumulation of wealth had nothing to do with smarts, adding, “Some very rich men who made their own fortunes have been among the stupidest men I have ever met in my life.”

But the idea that giving helps the reputation is at best only partially true. Givers are celebrated at times but just as often the higher profile means their motives and choices are picked apart. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth over $120 billion, per Forbes, but none of them receives the level of scrutiny that Gates does, for instance.

“If you put your head above the philanthropic parapet and say, ‘I’m interested in the environment,’ or whatever cause area, people can start to question it,” said Beth Breeze, author of the recent book “In Defence of Philanthropy.” Breeze has pushed back against the recent trend of criticizing philanthropists, who, she says, are regularly described as “tax dodging, egotistical, irritating” — criticism they may earn, but not comments that she views as useful to the greater good.

“My concern is not for the thin skins of the rich people. They can take care of themselves. My concern is if the money dries up,” said Breeze, who was a fundraiser for a youth homeless center before becoming an academic and identifies as a left-wing Labour Party supporter in Britain.

A troll philanthropist might be an easy target for criticism. But donating money in all the usual ways is no break from critical rebukes.

There are several different schools of criticism deployed for different kinds of givers. There is the structural argument that philanthropy serves as another means of using wealth to cement power and influence. Large grants are often compared with the giver’s total net worth to show that as a percentage of their wealth the gifts are much smaller than they appear in absolute terms. Gifts to cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ivy League schools are now regularly assailed for reinforcing the status quo. Even gifts to rebuild the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris after it caught fire earned significant blowback.

Technocratic institutions that set exacting benchmarks for gifts and place strict limits on how their money can be spent are tagged as controlling and hierarchical. In contrast, general operating support without guidance on how the money can be used has been applauded by many lately as the best approach.

Bezos was named by the Chronicle of Philanthropy this past February to the top spot on its 2020 “Philanthropy 50” list, even though most of that was for his $10 billion pledge to his own Bezos Earth Fund, which had barely gotten up and running. It was a bit like Barack Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency in the way that it seemed to sharpen critiques rather than dull them.

But after a slow start to his giving, Bezos has begun to look like the good pupil. He gave $100 million to the Feeding America food bank network and another $100 million to Obama’s presidential center. The money has been flowing more quickly out of the Bezos Earth Fund as well. Just this past week he announced another 44 grants worth a total of $443 million to groups working on issues including climate justice and conservation, part of that $10 billion pledge.

“You need to have a pretty sharp pencil of analysis in order to allocate funds well,” said Andrew Steer, president of the Bezos Earth Fund, in an interview.

Musk himself started out with what seemed like a somewhat conventional approach to giving. He created the Musk Foundation in 2002 and signed the nonbinding Giving Pledge to give away half his wealth in 2012. (The Musk Foundation website could, itself, be considered a bit of a troll, with its 33 words in black text on a white background.)

For the fiscal year ending June 2020, the Musk Foundation made donations of a little less than $3 million to nine groups, mostly related to education, and gave $20 million to Fidelity Charitable, which operates the kind of donor-advised funds that critics say can function as a parking lot for charitable dollars. That was out of nearly $1 billion available in the Musk Foundation coffers by the end of the fiscal year.

Since then he has announced $150 million in gifts, including a $100 million innovation prize for carbon removal and $30 million to nonprofits in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Those may have been at least as much about a legal requirement as a newfound sense of munificence. Tax laws require private foundations to pay out roughly 5% of their endowments annually.

“The particular barrier for donors from a tech background is they don’t just think their genius has made them good at what they do, they also think what they do commercially also makes society better,” said Rhodri Davies, a philanthropy commentator who wrote a piece on Musk called “The Edgelord Giveth.”

Musk, for instance, has said that getting humankind to Mars through SpaceX is an important contribution and has written and spoken acerbically about what he calls “anti-billionaire BS,” including attempts to target taxes at billionaires.

“It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” Musk said Monday at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, Kharas said a more charitable reading of Musk’s exchange with the World Food Programme is possible. He could just genuinely want to know how the money will be spent and is putting in public, on Twitter, the due diligence work that institutional giving does behind closed doors.

“I think this idea that he was willing to engage was really good,” Kharas of the Brookings Institution said of Musk. “I think his response was extremely sensible. It was basically, ‘Show me what you can do. Demonstrate it. Provide me with some evidence. I’ll do it.’” The WFP published a breakdown of how they would spend the $6.6 billion, but there’s no word yet on whether Musk will make a donation.

MacKenzie Scott’s latest letter about her giving included a lot of philosophical musings most billionaires do not routinely share. But she left out precisely the details everyone was waiting for — how many billion dollars went to which groups? Instead she said, stop paying so much attention to billionaires and think about what you can give.

In a winking gesture to everyone waiting for the latest cash tally, she wrote the whole thing without using a single dollar sign. Classic troll move.

The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway. Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change.

The richest people on earth typically devote a share of their vast resources to charity. That is the bargain and the expectation, anyway. Jeff Bezos, until very recently the world’s richest human, has been applying himself dutifully if a bit cautiously to the task, giving money to food banks and homeless families while pledging $10 billion of the fortune he earned through the online retailer Amazon to fight climate change. The latest richest human, Elon Musk, has taken a rather different tack. There was the public spat with the director of the World Food Programme on Twitter, for instance, announcing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.” There was the online poll asking whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla shares in order to pay taxes on at least part of his wealth, like most people do without running a survey first. And, of course, there is the ongoing insistence that his moneymaking efforts, running both the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX are already bettering humankind, thank you very much. Musk is practicing “troll philanthropy.” That’s what Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, has called it, noting that Musk seems to be having fun with this novel approach. “He doesn’t seem to care much about using his philanthropy to curry public favor,” Soskis said. “In fact, he seems to enjoy using his identity as a philanthropist in part to antagonize the public.” Before this year, one estimate put his giving at $100 million, a lot by almost any standard, except for multibillionaires like Musk. Most wealthy people do the opposite. They use philanthropy to burnish their image or distract the public from the business practices that earned them their enormous wealth in the first place. When, how and why the ultrarich choose to give their fortunes away matters more than ever because so much money is concentrated in their hands and so little of it is taxable under current rules. Society is to some extent presently stuck relying on voluntary disbursements from those with the greatest means. “The idea that philanthropy, that any single individual, has enough money to affect something at a global scale is a very new phenomenon,” said Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Most billionaires have “accumulated their wealth because the world economy is now globalized, but to sustain a globalized world economy we need to have more inclusive growth.” There are many different kinds of givers, like Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has focused her billions on diversity and equity. There are the self-declared “effective altruists,” like the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, part of a movement searching for evidence-based approaches to find causes where their money does the most good. And there are the traditionalists, like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, who have built institutions to handle their funding. Musk and Bezos are, with $268 billion and $202 billion respectively, the two richest Americans for the time being, drawing sharper contrasts between their approaches to giving back. Earlier this year, Bezos took the stage with United Nations Deputy Secretary General Amina J. Mohammed and listened as former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sang his praises, saying, “He is stepping up in a way that an awful lot of people who have the wherewithal do not step up.” Musk, meanwhile, replied to a tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders demanding “that the extremely wealthy pay their share,” by replying, “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” Musk’s nontraditional approach to giving doesn’t stop people who need his donations, like David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, from seeking his help. “The resources at his disposal are so vast and potentially consequential that we have to engage him, and accept some of that trolling, if we want to try to exert some pressure on him and shape his somewhat inchoate philanthropic priorities,” Soskis said. Musk did not respond to an email asking him to discuss his philanthropic giving. The notion that rich people have a moral obligation to give is an ancient one. Soskis, a historian of philanthropy, notes that wealthy citizens in ancient Rome tried to outdo one another paying for public baths and theaters. The inscriptions on those edifices could count as a form of early donor lists. The idea that the richest might need charity to improve their public relations is also longstanding, driven home in the Gilded Age by the 1882 outburst by railway magnate William Henry Vanderbilt, “The public be damned!” that shadowed him to the end of his days. Efforts to track the charitable giving of the very wealthy in the United States date to the late 19th century, when the ranks of millionaires exploded. Before long, newspapers were running front-page lists of who had made the biggest gifts. The original duo to capture public attention were John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, whose feelings on publicizing philanthropy were diametrically opposed. Cartoons from the era showed Carnegie, often dressed in a kilt to reference his Scottish origin, showering coins from enormous bags of money. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie wrote in “The Gospel of Wealth,” his treatise on giving. Rockefeller preferred to keep his giving more private and had to be convinced to announce his gifts. To those who think the trolling started on Twitter, philanthropy was never quite as polite as we imagine today. George Eastman, one of the founders of Eastman-Kodak, called those who did not give their money away during their lifetimes “pie-faced mutts.” Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. and a major philanthropist in his day, insisted that the accumulation of wealth had nothing to do with smarts, adding, “Some very rich men who made their own fortunes have been among the stupidest men I have ever met in my life.” But the idea that giving helps the reputation is at best only partially true. Givers are celebrated at times but just as often the higher profile means their motives and choices are picked apart. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth over $120 billion, per Forbes, but none of them receives the level of scrutiny that Gates does, for instance. “If you put your head above the philanthropic parapet and say, ‘I’m interested in the environment,’ or whatever cause area, people can start to question it,” said Beth Breeze, author of the recent book “In Defence of Philanthropy.” Breeze has pushed back against the recent trend of criticizing philanthropists, who, she says, are regularly described as “tax dodging, egotistical, irritating” — criticism they may earn, but not comments that she views as useful to the greater good. “My concern is not for the thin skins of the rich people. They can take care of themselves. My concern is if the money dries up,” said Breeze, who was a fundraiser for a youth homeless center before becoming an academic and identifies as a left-wing Labour Party supporter in Britain. A troll philanthropist might be an easy target for criticism. But donating money in all the usual ways is no break from critical rebukes. There are several different schools of criticism deployed for different kinds of givers. There is the structural argument that philanthropy serves as another means of using wealth to cement power and influence. Large grants are often compared with the giver’s total net worth to show that as a percentage of their wealth the gifts are much smaller than they appear in absolute terms. Gifts to cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ivy League schools are now regularly assailed for reinforcing the status quo. Even gifts to rebuild the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris after it caught fire earned significant blowback. Technocratic institutions that set exacting benchmarks for gifts and place strict limits on how their money can be spent are tagged as controlling and hierarchical. In contrast, general operating support without guidance on how the money can be used has been applauded by many lately as the best approach. Bezos was named by the Chronicle of Philanthropy this past February to the top spot on its 2020 “Philanthropy 50” list, even though most of that was for his $10 billion pledge to his own Bezos Earth Fund, which had barely gotten up and running. It was a bit like Barack Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency in the way that it seemed to sharpen critiques rather than dull them. But after a slow start to his giving, Bezos has begun to look like the good pupil. He gave $100 million to the Feeding America food bank network and another $100 million to Obama’s presidential center. The money has been flowing more quickly out of the Bezos Earth Fund as well. Just this past week he announced another 44 grants worth a total of $443 million to groups working on issues including climate justice and conservation, part of that $10 billion pledge. “You need to have a pretty sharp pencil of analysis in order to allocate funds well,” said Andrew Steer, president of the Bezos Earth Fund, in an interview. Musk himself started out with what seemed like a somewhat conventional approach to giving. He created the Musk Foundation in 2002 and signed the nonbinding Giving Pledge to give away half his wealth in 2012. (The Musk Foundation website could, itself, be considered a bit of a troll, with its 33 words in black text on a white background.) For the fiscal year ending June 2020, the Musk Foundation made donations of a little less than $3 million to nine groups, mostly related to education, and gave $20 million to Fidelity Charitable, which operates the kind of donor-advised funds that critics say can function as a parking lot for charitable dollars. That was out of nearly $1 billion available in the Musk Foundation coffers by the end of the fiscal year. Since then he has announced $150 million in gifts, including a $100 million innovation prize for carbon removal and $30 million to nonprofits in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Those may have been at least as much about a legal requirement as a newfound sense of munificence. Tax laws require private foundations to pay out roughly 5% of their endowments annually. “The particular barrier for donors from a tech background is they don’t just think their genius has made them good at what they do, they also think what they do commercially also makes society better,” said Rhodri Davies, a philanthropy commentator who wrote a piece on Musk called “The Edgelord Giveth.” Musk, for instance, has said that getting humankind to Mars through SpaceX is an important contribution and has written and spoken acerbically about what he calls “anti-billionaire BS,” including attempts to target taxes at billionaires. “It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” Musk said Monday at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Kharas said a more charitable reading of Musk’s exchange with the World Food Programme is possible. He could just genuinely want to know how the money will be spent and is putting in public, on Twitter, the due diligence work that institutional giving does behind closed doors. “I think this idea that he was willing to engage was really good,” Kharas of the Brookings Institution said of Musk. “I think his response was extremely sensible. It was basically, ‘Show me what you can do. Demonstrate it. Provide me with some evidence. I’ll do it.’” The WFP published a breakdown of how they would spend the $6.6 billion, but there’s no word yet on whether Musk will make a donation. MacKenzie Scott’s latest letter about her giving included a lot of philosophical musings most billionaires do not routinely share. But she left out precisely the details everyone was waiting for — how many billion dollars went to which groups? Instead she said, stop paying so much attention to billionaires and think about what you can give. In a winking gesture to everyone waiting for the latest cash tally, she wrote the whole thing without using a single dollar sign. Classic troll move.

Elon Musk's latest innovation: Troll philanthropy

Russia is gearing up to send a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station, breaking its ongoing pause of welcoming tourists in Russia’s space tourism programme.<o:p></o:p>

Yusaku Maezawa, a 46-year-old billionaire, is one of the richest men in Japan. On Wednesday, he will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan accompanied by his assistant Yozo Hirano.<o:p></o:p>

This will be the first time the Russia’s space tourism programme will welcome a tourist since 2009. It has been more than a decade since Canada's Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberte&nbsp;was welcomed in this manner.

<o:p><a href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/elon-musk-spacex-faces-bankruptcy-risk-433456">WATCH |</a></o:p>

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/elon-musk-spacex-faces-bankruptcy-risk-433456/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

His launch comes at a crucial time for the Russian space industry, which is trying to prove its standing in the industry at a time when western companies (such as SpaceX) are emerging as strong competitors. Elon Musk-owned SpaceX had last year lausnched a crew of astronauts in Crew Dragon capsule, ending Russia’s monopoly on manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS).<o:p></o:p>

Maezawa will be flying in the Soyuz spacecraft which now has a Japanese flag and an ‘MZ’ logo (for Maezawa) painted on it. It has now been moved onto the launch pad in Baikonur.<o:p></o:p>

The Japanese billionaire is the founder of one of the largest online fashion malls of Japan has been labelled to be country’s 30th richest man by Forbes. "I am almost crying because of my impressions, this is so impressive," Maezawa said in late November after arriving at Baikonur for the final days of preparation.<o:p></o:p>

He admitted that the training was one of the hardest things he has ever done and training in the spinning chair "almost feels like torture".<o:p></o:p>

Russia is gearing up to send a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station, breaking its ongoing pause of welcoming tourists in Russia’s space tourism programme.

Russia is gearing up to send a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station, breaking its ongoing pause of welcoming tourists in Russia’s space tourism programme. Yusaku Maezawa, a 46-year-old billionaire, is one of the richest men in Japan. On Wednesday, he will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan accompanied by his assistant Yozo Hirano. This will be the first time the Russia’s space tourism programme will welcome a tourist since 2009. It has been more than a decade since Canada's Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberte was welcomed in this manner. WATCH | His launch comes at a crucial time for the Russian space industry, which is trying to prove its standing in the industry at a time when western companies (such as SpaceX) are emerging as strong competitors. Elon Musk-owned SpaceX had last year lausnched a crew of astronauts in Crew Dragon capsule, ending Russia’s monopoly on manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS). Maezawa will be flying in the Soyuz spacecraft which now has a Japanese flag and an ‘MZ’ logo (for Maezawa) painted on it. It has now been moved onto the launch pad in Baikonur. The Japanese billionaire is the founder of one of the largest online fashion malls of Japan has been labelled to be country’s 30th richest man by Forbes. "I am almost crying because of my impressions, this is so impressive," Maezawa said in late November after arriving at Baikonur for the final days of preparation. He admitted that the training was one of the hardest things he has ever done and training in the spinning chair "almost feels like torture".

Competing with SpaceX, Russia to send Yusaku Maezawa to space

Elon Musk is selling $50 whistles on the Tesla website. Is it a message to whistleblowers who exposed abuses at his company? Does Musk have time for such shenanigans amid a looming bankruptcy at Spacex? Palki Sharma tells you.

Gravitas: Why is Elon Musk selling whistles?

Elon Musk has sounded the alarm for a potential bankruptcy of his space exploration firm SpaceX. The technology entrepreneur has warned SpaceX employees in a recent mail that the company is facing a major crisis with its production efforts for the new Raptor engine.

Elon Musk: SpaceX faces bankruptcy risk

Running a big business in a competitive environment may get tricky sometimes as there is always a fear of losing revenue, customers or going bankrupt. The same seems to be happening with billionaire Elon Musk. &nbsp;&nbsp;

On Twitter, Musk said that SpaceX needs to come up with many next-generation Starship engines soon to keep growing its Starlink broadband constellation and eventually, stay in business.

Also Read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/over-one-third-of-world-never-used-internet-says-un-body-433111" hreflang="en">Over one third of world never used internet, says UN body&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>

Musk tweeted, "If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink (and) Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible." &nbsp;&nbsp;

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If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink &amp; Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible. 
 
GM &amp; Chrysler went BK last recession. 
 
“Only the paranoid survive.” – Grove
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465793233729069063?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 30, 2021</a></blockquote>
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The statement seems to have been given in response to a leaked email, which was sent by the billionaire to employees over the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. In it, Musk asked for "all hands-on deck." &nbsp;

The email talked about a "production crisis" within the company. SpaceX looks to fly a Starship prototype to space in 2022. &nbsp;

Also Read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twitter-tightens-rules-bans-sharing-peoples-photos-without-consent-433129" hreflang="en">Twitter tightens rules, bans sharing people's photos without consent</a>

"The consequences for SpaceX if we cannot get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can't fly Starship, which means we then can't fly Starlink Satellite V2. Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong," reads the email, which was first obtained by SpaceExplored. &nbsp;

Musk warned in the email that SpaceX could face "genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year." &nbsp;&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)&nbsp;

Running a big business in a competitive environment may get tricky sometimes as there is always a fear of losing revenue, customers or going bankrupt. The same seems to be happening with billionaire Elon Musk.

Running a big business in a competitive environment may get tricky sometimes as there is always a fear of losing revenue, customers or going bankrupt. The same seems to be happening with billionaire Elon Musk. On Twitter, Musk said that SpaceX needs to come up with many next-generation Starship engines soon to keep growing its Starlink broadband constellation and eventually, stay in business. Also Read: Over one third of world never used internet, says UN body Musk tweeted, "If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink (and) Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible." If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible. GM & Chrysler went BK last recession. “Only the paranoid survive.” – Grove — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2021 × The statement seems to have been given in response to a leaked email, which was sent by the billionaire to employees over the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. In it, Musk asked for "all hands-on deck." The email talked about a "production crisis" within the company. SpaceX looks to fly a Starship prototype to space in 2022. Also Read: Twitter tightens rules, bans sharing people's photos without consent "The consequences for SpaceX if we cannot get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can't fly Starship, which means we then can't fly Starlink Satellite V2. Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong," reads the email, which was first obtained by SpaceExplored. Musk warned in the email that SpaceX could face "genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year." (With inputs from agencies)

Elon Musk fears SpaceX may go bankrupt, needs to produce more Starship engines

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has asked NASA to ''avenge the dinosaurs'' in its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

It comes after the US space agency did a test run should humanity ever need to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth.

The mission aims to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid in a demonstration of the world's first planetary defense system.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/watch-nasa-mission-to-test-out-armageddon-scenario-blasts-off-431550" hreflang="en">Watch | NASA mission to test out Armageddon scenario blasts off</a>

Its target is an asteroid "moonlet" the size of a football stadium that orbits a chunk of rock five times larger in a binary asteroid system named Didymos, the Greek word for twin.

The impact should take place in the fall of 2022 when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, almost the nearest point they ever get.

According to Matthew Stuttard, head of R&amp;D for Airbus Defence and Space Ltd in the Space Systems division, ''hitting an asteroid dead on with a direct hit is something that has never been done before, so it would be a first human achievement.''

Also see |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/who-is-winning-space-tourism-race-between-bezos-branson-and-musk-396420" hreflang="en">Who is winning space tourism race between Bezos, Branson and Musk?</a>

"You need a fantastic guidance and navigation system because you're travelling so fast and the asteroid is travelling so fast towards you... It's a very small target, even though it's the size of a pyramid, it's a very small target in the vastness of space to go and rendezvous with and to hit dead on."

The SpaceX rocket carrying DART mission's spacecraft had lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday.

DART is the latest of several NASA missions of recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.

There are 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids 460 feet in size or greater, but none has a significant chance to hit in the next 100 years.&nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has asked NASA to ''avenge the dinosaurs'' in its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. It comes after the US space agency did a test run should humanity ever need to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has asked NASA to ''avenge the dinosaurs'' in its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. It comes after the US space agency did a test run should humanity ever need to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth. The mission aims to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid in a demonstration of the world's first planetary defense system. Also read | Watch | NASA mission to test out Armageddon scenario blasts off Its target is an asteroid "moonlet" the size of a football stadium that orbits a chunk of rock five times larger in a binary asteroid system named Didymos, the Greek word for twin. The impact should take place in the fall of 2022 when the binary asteroid system is 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, almost the nearest point they ever get. According to Matthew Stuttard, head of R&D for Airbus Defence and Space Ltd in the Space Systems division, ''hitting an asteroid dead on with a direct hit is something that has never been done before, so it would be a first human achievement.'' Also see | Who is winning space tourism race between Bezos, Branson and Musk? "You need a fantastic guidance and navigation system because you're travelling so fast and the asteroid is travelling so fast towards you... It's a very small target, even though it's the size of a pyramid, it's a very small target in the vastness of space to go and rendezvous with and to hit dead on." The SpaceX rocket carrying DART mission's spacecraft had lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday. DART is the latest of several NASA missions of recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago. There are 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids 460 feet in size or greater, but none has a significant chance to hit in the next 100 years. (With inputs from agencies)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk asks NASA to 'avenge the dinosaurs' in its DART mission

Do you think dinosaurs ever stood a chance against the asteroid that wiped off the mighty creatures? If they were sentient beings and could have protected themselves. Does humanity stand a chance when it comes to something like that...an asteroid so massive it can wipe out the entire planet?

The answer is yes, we actually might. Scientists at NASA are planning a mission to deliberately crash a spacecraft into an asteroid -- as a test run, in case a giant space rock is heading towards us to wipe out life on Earth one day.

Just to be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our planet.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/to-avert-armageddon-nasa-to-collide-spacecraft-into-asteroid-to-alter-its-orbit-431319">To avert Armageddon, NASA to collide spacecraft into asteroid to alter its orbit</a>

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is not science fiction, but a real proof-of-concept experiment launching Tuesday night at 10:21 pm Pacific Time (0621 GMT Wednesday) on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

"All systems and weather are looking good for tonight's Falcon 9 launch," Elon Musk's company tweeted.

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All systems and weather are looking good for tonight’s Falcon 9 launch of <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASA</a>’s DART into an asteroid-intercepting interplanetary trajectory → <a href="https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK">https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK</a> <a href="https://t.co/BBrMndhpkQ">pic.twitter.com/BBrMndhpkQ</a>
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1463211847281090560?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 23, 2021</a></blockquote>
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This mission will slightly alter Dimorphos' trajectory, a "moonlet" that is about 525 feet (160 meters) wide and circles a much larger asteroid known as Didymos (2,500 feet in diameter). The two, orbit the Sun together.

The impact will likely occur in the fall of 2022 when the binary asteroid system will be 6.8 million miles away (11 million kilometres), which is the nearest they will ever be to Earth.&nbsp;

"What we're trying to learn is how to deflect a threat," NASA's top scientist Thomas Zuburchen said of the $330 million project, the first of its kind.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/hubble-telescope-captures-violent-process-of-star-formation-431507" hreflang="en">Hubble telescope captures violent process of star formation</a>

While the asteroids in question pose no threat to Earth, nevertheless, they belong to a class of bodies known as Near-Earth Objects (NEO), asteroids and comets that approach within 30 million miles of our planet.

Specifically, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is more interested in space objects larger than 460 feet in size, which can destroy entire cities and regions with more energy than an average nuclear bomb.

At present, there are 10,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than 460 feet, but none has a significant chance of hitting the Earth within a century.&nbsp;

However, one major caveat: It is important to note that scientists believe there are still 15,000 more such objects just waiting to be found.

While planetary scientists can simulate miniature impacts in laboratories and use the results to generate sophisticated models about how to divert an asteroid, models are never as effective as real-world experiments.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/strange-rock-thought-to-be-gold-turns-out-far-more-valuable-431237" hreflang="en">Strange rock thought to be gold turns out far more valuable</a>

Didymos-Dimorphos is considered an "ideal natural laboratory," since Earth-based telescopes can easily measure the brightness variation of the pair and calculate how long it takes the moonlet to orbit its big brother.

And since the current orbit period is known, the change in this period will reveal the impact's effect, which is scheduled between September 26 and October 1, 2022.

DART investigation team leader Andy Rivkin said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, but the kick is expected to shave around 10 minutes off that time.

In addition, since these asteroids do not intersect our planet's orbit, they are considered to be safer to study.

Watch |&nbsp;A giant asteroid just whizzed past Earth, and no one had a clue!

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/a-giant-asteroid-just-whizzed-past-earth-and-no-one-had-a-clue-239162/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

To put it into perspective, the DART probe, which is a box as big as a large fridge with solar panels the size of limousines on either side, will crash into Dimorphos at approximately 15,000 miles an hour.

What else can be done to protect the Earth from space objects?

While the so-called "kinetic impactor" method isn't the only way to divert an asteroid, it is the only one that can be deployed today.

Another possibility includes flying a spacecraft nearby to produce a small gravitational force.&nbsp;

A third option is to explode a nuclear device close by, but not on the object, as in the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact. However, this would likely create even more hazardous objects.

Do you think dinosaurs ever stood a chance against the asteroid that wiped off the mighty creatures? If they were sentient beings and could have protected themselves.

Do you think dinosaurs ever stood a chance against the asteroid that wiped off the mighty creatures? If they were sentient beings and could have protected themselves. Does humanity stand a chance when it comes to something like that...an asteroid so massive it can wipe out the entire planet? The answer is yes, we actually might. Scientists at NASA are planning a mission to deliberately crash a spacecraft into an asteroid -- as a test run, in case a giant space rock is heading towards us to wipe out life on Earth one day. Just to be clear, the asteroids in question pose no threat to our planet. Also read | To avert Armageddon, NASA to collide spacecraft into asteroid to alter its orbit DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is not science fiction, but a real proof-of-concept experiment launching Tuesday night at 10:21 pm Pacific Time (0621 GMT Wednesday) on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. "All systems and weather are looking good for tonight's Falcon 9 launch," Elon Musk's company tweeted. All systems and weather are looking good for tonight’s Falcon 9 launch of @NASA’s DART into an asteroid-intercepting interplanetary trajectory → https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK pic.twitter.com/BBrMndhpkQ — SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 23, 2021 × This mission will slightly alter Dimorphos' trajectory, a "moonlet" that is about 525 feet (160 meters) wide and circles a much larger asteroid known as Didymos (2,500 feet in diameter). The two, orbit the Sun together. The impact will likely occur in the fall of 2022 when the binary asteroid system will be 6.8 million miles away (11 million kilometres), which is the nearest they will ever be to Earth. "What we're trying to learn is how to deflect a threat," NASA's top scientist Thomas Zuburchen said of the $330 million project, the first of its kind. Also read | Hubble telescope captures violent process of star formation While the asteroids in question pose no threat to Earth, nevertheless, they belong to a class of bodies known as Near-Earth Objects (NEO), asteroids and comets that approach within 30 million miles of our planet. Specifically, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is more interested in space objects larger than 460 feet in size, which can destroy entire cities and regions with more energy than an average nuclear bomb. At present, there are 10,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than 460 feet, but none has a significant chance of hitting the Earth within a century. However, one major caveat: It is important to note that scientists believe there are still 15,000 more such objects just waiting to be found. While planetary scientists can simulate miniature impacts in laboratories and use the results to generate sophisticated models about how to divert an asteroid, models are never as effective as real-world experiments. Also read: Strange rock thought to be gold turns out far more valuable Didymos-Dimorphos is considered an "ideal natural laboratory," since Earth-based telescopes can easily measure the brightness variation of the pair and calculate how long it takes the moonlet to orbit its big brother. And since the current orbit period is known, the change in this period will reveal the impact's effect, which is scheduled between September 26 and October 1, 2022. DART investigation team leader Andy Rivkin said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, but the kick is expected to shave around 10 minutes off that time. In addition, since these asteroids do not intersect our planet's orbit, they are considered to be safer to study. Watch | A giant asteroid just whizzed past Earth, and no one had a clue! To put it into perspective, the DART probe, which is a box as big as a large fridge with solar panels the size of limousines on either side, will crash into Dimorphos at approximately 15,000 miles an hour. What else can be done to protect the Earth from space objects? While the so-called "kinetic impactor" method isn't the only way to divert an asteroid, it is the only one that can be deployed today. Another possibility includes flying a spacecraft nearby to produce a small gravitational force. A third option is to explode a nuclear device close by, but not on the object, as in the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact. However, this would likely create even more hazardous objects.

NASA, SpaceX to launch spacecraft today and kick an asteroid off course. Are we in danger?

A NASA mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if its course can be altered blasted off Tuesday from California.

The SpaceX rocket carrying the experiment lifted off at 10:21 pm Pacific Time (0621 GMT Wednesday) from Vandenberg Space Force Base, NASA TV's live stream showed. &nbsp;&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/nasa-spacex-to-launch-spacecraft-today-and-kick-an-asteroid-off-course-are-we-in-danger-431513">NASA, SpaceX to launch spacecraft today and kick an asteroid off course. Are we in danger?</a>

After the launch, taking to Twitter NASA announced "Asteroid Dimorphos: we're coming for you!"

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Asteroid Dimorphos: we're coming for you! 
 
Riding a <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpaceX</a> Falcon 9 rocket, our <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DARTMission?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DARTMission</a> blasted off at 1:21am EST (06:21 UTC), launching the world's first mission to test asteroid-deflecting technology. <a href="https://t.co/FRj1hMyzgH">pic.twitter.com/FRj1hMyzgH</a>
— NASA (@NASA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1463392778398973953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 24, 2021</a></blockquote>
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SpaceX also tweeted a live feed of the launch:

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Watch Falcon 9 launch <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASA</a>’s DART mission – humanity’s first planetary defense test to redirect an asteroid <a href="https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK">https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK</a> <a href="https://t.co/XMKYOGAjbB">https://t.co/XMKYOGAjbB</a>
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1463388253625589765?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 24, 2021</a></blockquote>
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The DART mission is a planetary defence-driven test of technologies to prevent an impact of an asteroid on Earth. In this demonstration, a kinetic impactor technique will be used to change the motion of an asteroid in space for the first time.&nbsp;

Under the leadership of APL, the program is managed by NASA's Solar System Exploration Program at Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, as well as the Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division.

The DART spacecraft was designed to impact an asteroid as a test of the technology. It must be noted that the asteroid being impacted is not a threat to Earth.&nbsp;

Watch the spacecraft's journey here:

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On our way! 
 
55 minutes into its flight, the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DARTMission?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DARTMission</a> spacecraft has separated from the <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpaceX</a> Falcon 9 second stage, and will soon begin to orient itself toward the Sun. <a href="https://t.co/hI6NoQ11zw">pic.twitter.com/hI6NoQ11zw</a>
— NASA (@NASA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1463407550087503875?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 24, 2021</a></blockquote>
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However, if an Earth-threatening asteroid is discovered in the future, NASA believes this asteroid system is a great place to test whether intentionally crashing into an asteroid can change its trajectory.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/to-avert-armageddon-nasa-to-collide-spacecraft-into-asteroid-to-alter-its-orbit-431319">To avert Armageddon, NASA to collide spacecraft into asteroid to alter its orbit</a>

The spacecraft contains sophisticated navigation and imaging instruments, including the Italian Space Agency's Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), which will monitor the crash and its after-effects.

"The CubeSat is going to give us, we hope, the shot, the most spectacular image of DART's impact and the ejecta plume coming off the asteroid. That will be a truly historic, spectacular image," said Tom Statler, DART program scientist.

The DART probe, which is a box as big as a large fridge with solar panels the size of limousines on either side, will crash into Dimorphos at approximately 15,000 miles an hour.

DART investigation team leader Andy Rivkin said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, but the kick is expected to shave around 10 minutes off that time.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/hubble-telescope-captures-violent-process-of-star-formation-431507" hreflang="en">Hubble telescope captures violent process of star formation</a>

Because the moonlet's internal composition and porosity are unknown, it is unclear how much energy will be transferred by the impact.

Apparently, the more debris generated, the greater the force exerted on Dimorphos.

"Every time we show up at an asteroid, we find stuff we don't expect," said Rivkin.

There are 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids 460 feet in size or greater.&nbsp;Despite the fact that no known asteroid larger than 140 meters could potentially strike Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 per cent of all asteroids have been discovered and/or identified&nbsp;as of October 2021.

Scientists estimate that a 460-foot asteroid strikes the Earth every 20,000 years, and asteroids wider than six miles, like the one which caused the extinction of most life on Earth (including dinosaurs) 66 million years ago, occur every 100-200 million years.

(With inputs from agencies)

A NASA mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if its course can be altered blasted off Tuesday from California. The SpaceX rocket carrying the experiment lifted off at 10:21 pm Pacific Time (0621 GMT Wednesday) from Vandenberg Space Force Base, NASA TV's live stream showed.

A NASA mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if its course can be altered blasted off Tuesday from California. The SpaceX rocket carrying the experiment lifted off at 10:21 pm Pacific Time (0621 GMT Wednesday) from Vandenberg Space Force Base, NASA TV's live stream showed. Also read | NASA, SpaceX to launch spacecraft today and kick an asteroid off course. Are we in danger? After the launch, taking to Twitter NASA announced "Asteroid Dimorphos: we're coming for you!" Asteroid Dimorphos: we're coming for you! Riding a @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, our #DARTMission blasted off at 1:21am EST (06:21 UTC), launching the world's first mission to test asteroid-deflecting technology. pic.twitter.com/FRj1hMyzgH — NASA (@NASA) November 24, 2021 × SpaceX also tweeted a live feed of the launch: Watch Falcon 9 launch @NASA’s DART mission – humanity’s first planetary defense test to redirect an asteroid https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK https://t.co/XMKYOGAjbB — SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 24, 2021 × The DART mission is a planetary defence-driven test of technologies to prevent an impact of an asteroid on Earth. In this demonstration, a kinetic impactor technique will be used to change the motion of an asteroid in space for the first time. Under the leadership of APL, the program is managed by NASA's Solar System Exploration Program at Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, as well as the Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division. The DART spacecraft was designed to impact an asteroid as a test of the technology. It must be noted that the asteroid being impacted is not a threat to Earth. Watch the spacecraft's journey here: On our way! 55 minutes into its flight, the #DARTMission spacecraft has separated from the @SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage, and will soon begin to orient itself toward the Sun. pic.twitter.com/hI6NoQ11zw — NASA (@NASA) November 24, 2021 × However, if an Earth-threatening asteroid is discovered in the future, NASA believes this asteroid system is a great place to test whether intentionally crashing into an asteroid can change its trajectory. Also read | To avert Armageddon, NASA to collide spacecraft into asteroid to alter its orbit The spacecraft contains sophisticated navigation and imaging instruments, including the Italian Space Agency's Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), which will monitor the crash and its after-effects. "The CubeSat is going to give us, we hope, the shot, the most spectacular image of DART's impact and the ejecta plume coming off the asteroid. That will be a truly historic, spectacular image," said Tom Statler, DART program scientist. The DART probe, which is a box as big as a large fridge with solar panels the size of limousines on either side, will crash into Dimorphos at approximately 15,000 miles an hour. DART investigation team leader Andy Rivkin said the current orbital period is 11 hours 55 minutes, but the kick is expected to shave around 10 minutes off that time. Also read | Hubble telescope captures violent process of star formation Because the moonlet's internal composition and porosity are unknown, it is unclear how much energy will be transferred by the impact. Apparently, the more debris generated, the greater the force exerted on Dimorphos. "Every time we show up at an asteroid, we find stuff we don't expect," said Rivkin. There are 10,000 known near-Earth asteroids 460 feet in size or greater. Despite the fact that no known asteroid larger than 140 meters could potentially strike Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 per cent of all asteroids have been discovered and/or identified as of October 2021. Scientists estimate that a 460-foot asteroid strikes the Earth every 20,000 years, and asteroids wider than six miles, like the one which caused the extinction of most life on Earth (including dinosaurs) 66 million years ago, occur every 100-200 million years. (With inputs from agencies)

Watch | NASA mission to test out Armageddon scenario blasts off

The most riveting — and frequently delicious — evocation of upper-class class warfare came to us this past week not via an episode of “Succession” but rather during a Zoom hearing, more than three hours long, of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The matter at hand was whether the city ought to let a billionaire hedge-fund manager build a two-story glass pavilion above the top-floor apartment he owns in a 1927 building in Manhattan. But really it was about where the retaining wall ought to be erected against the desires of the magnificently wealthy to configure the world precisely to their specifications.

The apartment, on West 77th Street, belongs to Bill Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, who commissioned celebrated British architect Norman Foster (addressed by nearly all during the proceedings according to his honorific, “Lord Foster”) to design the 3,000-square-foot addition that would replace an existing structure of the same size.

The arguments against it have not necessarily been rooted in aesthetics, although some made the case that the addition would feel incongruously pastoral, or too beach-y, or just “intrusive.” Calling to mind Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the design is tasteful in the minimalist vernacular. But if this were permitted, what hellish billionaire fantasies might materialize later?

Many testimonies that called on commissioners to reject Ackman’s plans were based on the fear of precedent this project might set, which itself stems from the feeling that the selfishly rich have inflicted so many traumas already. Even on the outlying chance that you could concede that the thing itself was unobjectionable — stunning, even — what would prevent the landmarks committee, as one speaker remarked, from someday allowing Elon Musk to build whatever he wanted, say, on top of the Dakota?

Among those who have stood in opposition to the venture is Bill Moyers, the longtime PBS host and former White House press secretary, now 87, who had planned to appear at the hearing until a medical issue intervened. When we talked on the phone the next day, he said he worried about the disruptive glare of light the glass penthouse would produce at night and what that would do to the evening skyline at the periphery of Central Park. At the crux of his concern seemed something much deeper. “I think this undermines the soul of the city at the vanity of one person,” he said. “If the commission is going to cave to the glitter of one billionaire, there’s no hope for this city as a place where everyday people hope and live and die.”

Ackman, who turned an early pandemic hunch about how investors might approach risky securities into a $27 million bet that yielded a $2.6 billion return, is not restrained by fears of controversy or provocation. (A few days before the hearing, he used Twitter to express what would inevitably count as an unpopular view on the Upper West Side, that Kyle Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense.)

Billionaires generally don’t care what you think of them, but Ackman diverges from some of the other stereotypes in subtle ways, among them his interest in living in an old co-op without golf simulators and $125 million units.

For years, he has lived nearby in the Beresford. The building in which he hopes to move, designed in the neo-Renaissance style, overlooks the Museum of Natural History on one of the most beautiful blocks in Manhattan. And like others that went up during the same distinguished period in the city’s architectural history, it has transformed over the past two decades as the moneyed class has demanded more of tradition.

Even by the standard in which apartments are routinely combined and made larger, Ackman’s plans are ambitious. Typically, a municipal hearing on the viability of a residential addition would not feature a roster of speakers that might make up a lecture series at the Century Association. But Ackman, seemingly having planned for every contingency, had supporters to counter all possible lines of opposition.

Was the design too aggressively modern? Here was Kenneth Jackson, a preeminent historian of New York City to explain that no, it was not (because New York isn’t “Charleston” and it should never become “Dubuque,” and please let it remain always all about “change”).

Would the new structure improve on what it would replace — a pink stucco box that had originally been built to house servants? Here was Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, an Upper West Side neighbor of Ackman’s who has advised him on the project, to say that yes, of course it would.

How would integration play out with the building’s immediate neighbors? Fantastically. That was the opinion of Louise Mirrer, president of the New-York Historical Society, which is next door and an organization to which, it is worth noting, Ackman has been an enormously generous donor.

Soon enough, the audience also heard from venerable Betsy Gotbaum, who was president of the historical society in the 1990s, after she had served as the city’s first female parks commissioner and before she became public advocate, a background that seemed to swaddle Ackman’s agenda in the warmth of civic virtue. Was it possible to be blown away by the beauty of this proposal? Gotbaum was indeed “blown away,” as she put it, recalling how she and her colleagues at the historical society would snicker about the pink structure on the roof but were hamstrung to complain too much about it because media executive Norman Pearlstine, a longtime trustee, lived there.

Pearlstine moved in when he became involved with Nancy Friday, a bestselling author and loopy analyst of sexual politics who bought the original apartment in the late 1970s and added on to it, at a time when writers might conceivably live in 13-room apartments off Central Park. The couple divorced in 2005, and Ackman bought the apartment after Friday died in autumn 2017. Even her former caretaker appeared at the hearing to declare himself “spectacularly in favor” of Ackman’s proposal.

At the end of the hearing, the landmarks commission asked that Ackman and his architects come back with an amended plan that would scale back the second story of the penthouse. Although the committee could still turn him down, the enthusiasm its members displayed made that seem unlikely. Exactly how much goodwill there is for the project within the building itself is not especially clear. Ackman believes it is extensive; opponents estimate that there is a roughly even split. Recently, a vacancy on the co-op board resulted in the election of an architect who is in favor of Ackman’s plan. The candidate who lost to her is not. Some residents have asked for an audit of the vote.

Before the commissioners announced their decision, Ackman spoke, offering himself up as a benevolent rich person, an asset. Since the beginning of COVID, he said, he had given away approximately $100 million, much of it to organizations that serve the interests of the city. Unlike many in his industry, he pointed out, he had not fled to Miami or Austin, Texas, to escape high taxes. He did not abandon a place he had been committed to for a long time. But did it have to be that way? If things didn’t work out, he said, as graciously as he could, he could always pack his bags. 
&nbsp;

The most riveting — and frequently delicious — evocation of upper-class class warfare came to us this past week not via an episode of “Succession” but rather during a Zoom hearing, more than three hours long, of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The most riveting — and frequently delicious — evocation of upper-class class warfare came to us this past week not via an episode of “Succession” but rather during a Zoom hearing, more than three hours long, of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The matter at hand was whether the city ought to let a billionaire hedge-fund manager build a two-story glass pavilion above the top-floor apartment he owns in a 1927 building in Manhattan. But really it was about where the retaining wall ought to be erected against the desires of the magnificently wealthy to configure the world precisely to their specifications. The apartment, on West 77th Street, belongs to Bill Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, who commissioned celebrated British architect Norman Foster (addressed by nearly all during the proceedings according to his honorific, “Lord Foster”) to design the 3,000-square-foot addition that would replace an existing structure of the same size. The arguments against it have not necessarily been rooted in aesthetics, although some made the case that the addition would feel incongruously pastoral, or too beach-y, or just “intrusive.” Calling to mind Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the design is tasteful in the minimalist vernacular. But if this were permitted, what hellish billionaire fantasies might materialize later? Many testimonies that called on commissioners to reject Ackman’s plans were based on the fear of precedent this project might set, which itself stems from the feeling that the selfishly rich have inflicted so many traumas already. Even on the outlying chance that you could concede that the thing itself was unobjectionable — stunning, even — what would prevent the landmarks committee, as one speaker remarked, from someday allowing Elon Musk to build whatever he wanted, say, on top of the Dakota? Among those who have stood in opposition to the venture is Bill Moyers, the longtime PBS host and former White House press secretary, now 87, who had planned to appear at the hearing until a medical issue intervened. When we talked on the phone the next day, he said he worried about the disruptive glare of light the glass penthouse would produce at night and what that would do to the evening skyline at the periphery of Central Park. At the crux of his concern seemed something much deeper. “I think this undermines the soul of the city at the vanity of one person,” he said. “If the commission is going to cave to the glitter of one billionaire, there’s no hope for this city as a place where everyday people hope and live and die.” Ackman, who turned an early pandemic hunch about how investors might approach risky securities into a $27 million bet that yielded a $2.6 billion return, is not restrained by fears of controversy or provocation. (A few days before the hearing, he used Twitter to express what would inevitably count as an unpopular view on the Upper West Side, that Kyle Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense.) Billionaires generally don’t care what you think of them, but Ackman diverges from some of the other stereotypes in subtle ways, among them his interest in living in an old co-op without golf simulators and $125 million units. For years, he has lived nearby in the Beresford. The building in which he hopes to move, designed in the neo-Renaissance style, overlooks the Museum of Natural History on one of the most beautiful blocks in Manhattan. And like others that went up during the same distinguished period in the city’s architectural history, it has transformed over the past two decades as the moneyed class has demanded more of tradition. Even by the standard in which apartments are routinely combined and made larger, Ackman’s plans are ambitious. Typically, a municipal hearing on the viability of a residential addition would not feature a roster of speakers that might make up a lecture series at the Century Association. But Ackman, seemingly having planned for every contingency, had supporters to counter all possible lines of opposition. Was the design too aggressively modern? Here was Kenneth Jackson, a preeminent historian of New York City to explain that no, it was not (because New York isn’t “Charleston” and it should never become “Dubuque,” and please let it remain always all about “change”). Would the new structure improve on what it would replace — a pink stucco box that had originally been built to house servants? Here was Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, an Upper West Side neighbor of Ackman’s who has advised him on the project, to say that yes, of course it would. How would integration play out with the building’s immediate neighbors? Fantastically. That was the opinion of Louise Mirrer, president of the New-York Historical Society, which is next door and an organization to which, it is worth noting, Ackman has been an enormously generous donor. Soon enough, the audience also heard from venerable Betsy Gotbaum, who was president of the historical society in the 1990s, after she had served as the city’s first female parks commissioner and before she became public advocate, a background that seemed to swaddle Ackman’s agenda in the warmth of civic virtue. Was it possible to be blown away by the beauty of this proposal? Gotbaum was indeed “blown away,” as she put it, recalling how she and her colleagues at the historical society would snicker about the pink structure on the roof but were hamstrung to complain too much about it because media executive Norman Pearlstine, a longtime trustee, lived there. Pearlstine moved in when he became involved with Nancy Friday, a bestselling author and loopy analyst of sexual politics who bought the original apartment in the late 1970s and added on to it, at a time when writers might conceivably live in 13-room apartments off Central Park. The couple divorced in 2005, and Ackman bought the apartment after Friday died in autumn 2017. Even her former caretaker appeared at the hearing to declare himself “spectacularly in favor” of Ackman’s proposal. At the end of the hearing, the landmarks commission asked that Ackman and his architects come back with an amended plan that would scale back the second story of the penthouse. Although the committee could still turn him down, the enthusiasm its members displayed made that seem unlikely. Exactly how much goodwill there is for the project within the building itself is not especially clear. Ackman believes it is extensive; opponents estimate that there is a roughly even split. Recently, a vacancy on the co-op board resulted in the election of an architect who is in favor of Ackman’s plan. The candidate who lost to her is not. Some residents have asked for an audit of the vote. Before the commissioners announced their decision, Ackman spoke, offering himself up as a benevolent rich person, an asset. Since the beginning of COVID, he said, he had given away approximately $100 million, much of it to organizations that serve the interests of the city. Unlike many in his industry, he pointed out, he had not fled to Miami or Austin, Texas, to escape high taxes. He did not abandon a place he had been committed to for a long time. But did it have to be that way? If things didn’t work out, he said, as graciously as he could, he could always pack his bags.

What if Elon Musk wants to build a rocket on the roof of the Dakota?

In a major setback to NASA, its plan to send humans to the moon could be delayed by several years according to a new report.

The prediction has been made by the auditors of the US space agency's Artemis programme.&nbsp;

It highlights how NASA's most ambitious and costly activity is facing hurdles such as schedule, procurement, technical, and funding risks.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/nasas-mars-rover-probing-undisturbed-ancient-time-capsule-on-red-planet-428788" hreflang="en">NASA's Mars rover probing undisturbed ancient time capsule on Red planet</a>

The report states ''Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years.''

It will cost as much as $93 billion by the fiscal year 2025, according to the report's estimates, with a cost per launch of $4.1 billion for the first four missions.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/astronomers-offer-hint-on-how-suns-death-might-unfold-428057" hreflang="en">Astronomers offer hint on how Sun's death might unfold</a>

Meanwhile, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said that the Starship developed by his company and selected by NASA for the Americans' return to the Moon would attempt its first orbital flight early next year.

It is significant because NASA is betting on Starship to become the lander used as part of its Artemis program to take humans back to the Moon, in 2025 at the earliest.&nbsp;

It comes after NASA chief Bill Nelson said ''We lost nearly seven months in litigation and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025.''

NASA announced in May that it plans to land Americans back on the moon by 2024 with the Artemis initiative, named after Apollo's twin sister who was goddess of the hunt and the moon.

 
(With inputs from agencies)

In a major setback to NASA, its plan to send humans to the moon could be delayed by several years according to a new report. The prediction has been made by the auditors of the US space agency's Artemis programme.

In a major setback to NASA, its plan to send humans to the moon could be delayed by several years according to a new report. The prediction has been made by the auditors of the US space agency's Artemis programme. It highlights how NASA's most ambitious and costly activity is facing hurdles such as schedule, procurement, technical, and funding risks. Also read | NASA's Mars rover probing undisturbed ancient time capsule on Red planet The report states ''Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years.'' It will cost as much as $93 billion by the fiscal year 2025, according to the report's estimates, with a cost per launch of $4.1 billion for the first four missions. Also read | Astronomers offer hint on how Sun's death might unfold Meanwhile, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said that the Starship developed by his company and selected by NASA for the Americans' return to the Moon would attempt its first orbital flight early next year. It is significant because NASA is betting on Starship to become the lander used as part of its Artemis program to take humans back to the Moon, in 2025 at the earliest. It comes after NASA chief Bill Nelson said ''We lost nearly seven months in litigation and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025.'' NASA announced in May that it plans to land Americans back on the moon by 2024 with the Artemis initiative, named after Apollo's twin sister who was goddess of the hunt and the moon. (With inputs from agencies)

Auditors say NASA's Artemis programme likely to be delayed by several years

SpaceX chief Elon Musk while mentioning people who have walked on the Moon in a tweet said "soon, that list will grow much longer as humanity reaches new heights."

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
List of people that have walked on the Moon: 
Neil Armstrong 🇺🇸🪦 
Buzz Aldrin 🇺🇸 91 yo 
Pete Conrad 🇺🇸🪦 
Alan Bean 🇺🇸🪦 
Alan Shepard 🇺🇸🪦 
Edgar Mitchell 🇺🇸🪦 
David Scott 🇺🇸 89 yo 
James Irwin 🇺🇸🪦 
John Young 🇺🇸🪦 
Charles Duke 🇺🇸 86 yo 
Eugene Cernan 🇺🇸🪦 
Harrison Schmitt 🇺🇸 86 yo
— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) <a href="https://twitter.com/fermatslibrary/status/1459890422776430592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></div>
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Musk's latest tweet on space travel&nbsp;comes as a&nbsp;SpaceX capsule landed at the International Space Station(ISS) last week carrying four astronauts as part of its partnership with NASA.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/i-keep-forgetting-youre-still-alive-elon-musk-take-a-jibe-at-bernie-sanders-offers-to-sell-more-stock-429392">Also Read:&nbsp;'I keep forgetting you're still alive': Elon Musk takes a jibe at Bernie Sanders</a>

The current mission named Crew-3 had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying astronauts Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron and Raja Chari. The spaceship Endurance docked at ISS last Thursday.

Watch:&nbsp;Musk is willing to spend $6 billion to fight world hunger

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/elon-musk-is-willing-to-spend-6-billion-to-fight-world-hunger-but-with-a-plan-426189/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Chari, 44 who is a US Air Force colonel along with Marshburn, 61, a medical doctor and Maurer,34, are set to stay in space for six months.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/musk-on-stock-selling-spree-tesla-ceo-sells-another-12-bn-worth-shares-428941">Also Read:&nbsp;Musk on stock selling spree? Tesla CEO sells another $1.2 bn worth shares</a> &nbsp;

Maurer is a science engineer while Barron served in the Navy. Marshburn had travelled space on two earlier occasions and had also taken spacewalks.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/indian-american-hired-woman-to-slap-him-for-using-facebook-elon-musk-approves-428710">Also Read:&nbsp;Indian-American hired woman to slap him for using Facebook; Elon Musk approves</a>

The US astronauts will conduct space exploration and carry out scientific research and are likely to undertake spacewalks to upgrade sections of the space station. They were accompanied by German astronaut Matthias Maurer from the European Space Agency.

(With inputs from Agencies)

SpaceX chief Elon Musk while mentioning people who have walked on the Moon in a tweet said "soon, that list will grow much longer as humanity reaches new heights.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk while mentioning people who have walked on the Moon in a tweet said "soon, that list will grow much longer as humanity reaches new heights." List of people that have walked on the Moon: Neil Armstrong 🇺🇸🪦 Buzz Aldrin 🇺🇸 91 yo Pete Conrad 🇺🇸🪦 Alan Bean 🇺🇸🪦 Alan Shepard 🇺🇸🪦 Edgar Mitchell 🇺🇸🪦 David Scott 🇺🇸 89 yo James Irwin 🇺🇸🪦 John Young 🇺🇸🪦 Charles Duke 🇺🇸 86 yo Eugene Cernan 🇺🇸🪦 Harrison Schmitt 🇺🇸 86 yo — Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) November 14, 2021 × Musk's latest tweet on space travel comes as a SpaceX capsule landed at the International Space Station(ISS) last week carrying four astronauts as part of its partnership with NASA. Also Read: 'I keep forgetting you're still alive': Elon Musk takes a jibe at Bernie Sanders The current mission named Crew-3 had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying astronauts Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron and Raja Chari. The spaceship Endurance docked at ISS last Thursday. Watch: Musk is willing to spend $6 billion to fight world hunger Chari, 44 who is a US Air Force colonel along with Marshburn, 61, a medical doctor and Maurer,34, are set to stay in space for six months. Also Read: Musk on stock selling spree? Tesla CEO sells another $1.2 bn worth shares Maurer is a science engineer while Barron served in the Navy. Marshburn had travelled space on two earlier occasions and had also taken spacewalks. Also Read: Indian-American hired woman to slap him for using Facebook; Elon Musk approves The US astronauts will conduct space exploration and carry out scientific research and are likely to undertake spacewalks to upgrade sections of the space station. They were accompanied by German astronaut Matthias Maurer from the European Space Agency. (With inputs from Agencies)

Soon, that list will grow much longer, says Musk on space travel

Four astronauts on Thursday have arrived at the International Space Station as they docked their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with the orbiting laboratory, kicking off a 6-month long mission. Out of these four scientists, three come from NASA and one comes from the European Space Agency.

Known as Crew-3, the mission is a part of NASA's multibillion-dollar partnership with Elon Musk's space company. This was signed after the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, with an aim of restoring US capacity to carry out human spaceflight.

The crew consists of three Americans, including flight commander Raja Chari, mission pilot Tom Marshburn, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, and German astronaut Matthias Maurer. “Floating in space and shining like a diamond," said astronaut Matthias Maurer.&nbsp;

“We're all very thrilled, very excited.”

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/watch-spacex-capsule-with-four-iss-astronauts-wearing-adult-diapers-splashes-down-off-florida-427872">Also read |&nbsp;Watch | SpaceX capsule with four ISS astronauts, wearing adult diapers, splashes down off Florida</a>

The crew will be hosting up to two groups of visiting tourists. Russia will launch the first bunch in December and SpaceX will be launching the second in February.

The flight was initially planned for October 31. However, it had to be postponed. First because of the weather, then a "minor medical issue" affecting one of the crew. NASA did not say who it was but said it was not COVID-related.&nbsp;

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Watch Falcon 9 launch Dragon with four astronauts on board to the <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@space_station</a> → <a href="https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK">https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK</a> <a href="https://t.co/6UDoESJHyW">https://t.co/6UDoESJHyW</a>
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1458551869505040388?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 10, 2021</a></blockquote>
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The mission includes an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media. Another experiment will include building optical fibres in microgravity.

The astronauts will also be conducting spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station's solar panels.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, four astronauts from the Crew-2 mission, which has been in orbit since spring, splashed down off the coast of Pensacola in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday night.&nbsp;

Following a dramatic re-entry fall through Earth's atmosphere, the Dragon vehicle, named Endeavour, parachuted into the sea as planned at around 10:30 p.m. EST on Monday (0330 GMT Tuesday).

The astronauts had to wear adult diapers on their return journey, after a leak was discovered in the SpaceX-made capsule's toilet.

(With inputs from agencies)

Four astronauts on Thursday have arrived at the International Space Station as they docked their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with the orbiting laboratory, kicking off a 6-month long mission.

Four astronauts on Thursday have arrived at the International Space Station as they docked their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with the orbiting laboratory, kicking off a 6-month long mission. Out of these four scientists, three come from NASA and one comes from the European Space Agency. Known as Crew-3, the mission is a part of NASA's multibillion-dollar partnership with Elon Musk's space company. This was signed after the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, with an aim of restoring US capacity to carry out human spaceflight. The crew consists of three Americans, including flight commander Raja Chari, mission pilot Tom Marshburn, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, and German astronaut Matthias Maurer. “Floating in space and shining like a diamond," said astronaut Matthias Maurer. “We're all very thrilled, very excited.” Also read | Watch | SpaceX capsule with four ISS astronauts, wearing adult diapers, splashes down off Florida The crew will be hosting up to two groups of visiting tourists. Russia will launch the first bunch in December and SpaceX will be launching the second in February. The flight was initially planned for October 31. However, it had to be postponed. First because of the weather, then a "minor medical issue" affecting one of the crew. NASA did not say who it was but said it was not COVID-related. Watch Falcon 9 launch Dragon with four astronauts on board to the @space_station → https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK https://t.co/6UDoESJHyW — SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 10, 2021 × The mission includes an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media. Another experiment will include building optical fibres in microgravity. The astronauts will also be conducting spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station's solar panels. Meanwhile, four astronauts from the Crew-2 mission, which has been in orbit since spring, splashed down off the coast of Pensacola in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday night. Following a dramatic re-entry fall through Earth's atmosphere, the Dragon vehicle, named Endeavour, parachuted into the sea as planned at around 10:30 p.m. EST on Monday (0330 GMT Tuesday). The astronauts had to wear adult diapers on their return journey, after a leak was discovered in the SpaceX-made capsule's toilet. (With inputs from agencies)

SpaceX capsule with crew of four welcomed aboard International Space Station

Elon Musk's SpaceX has sent four astronauts to the International Space Station in its fifth crewed mission.

The company's Dragon capsule roared into outer space atop a Falcon 9 rocket, including the 600th person to reach space in 60 years, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Crew3?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Crew3</a>... 2... 1... and liftoff! 
 
Three <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA_Astronauts?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NASA_Astronauts</a> and one <a href="https://twitter.com/esa?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ESA</a> astronaut are on their way to the <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Space_Station</a> aboard the <a href="https://twitter.com/SpaceX?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpaceX</a> Crew Dragon Endurance: <a href="https://t.co/dxobsFb4Pa">pic.twitter.com/dxobsFb4Pa</a>
— NASA (@NASA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1458616859385868290?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 11, 2021</a></blockquote>
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According to mission commander Raja Chari, ''It was a great ride, better than we imagined.''

The crew launch marked SpaceX’s fourth for NASA and the company’s fifth passenger flight overall, including a September charter flight for four that skipped the space station.&nbsp;

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The Dragon capsule’s toilet leaked during their three days in orbit, necessitating a quick redesign of the flushing system in the newest capsule, named Endurance by its crew.

SpaceX launch director Mark Soltys told the crew, ''Enjoy your holidays among the stars. We’ll be waving as you fly by.''

"Crew-3" includes two members of NASA's latest graduating class of astronauts, Indian-origin Raja Chari, 44, a US Air Force combat jet and test pilot serving as mission commander, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, 34, a US Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/no-plumber-in-space-toilet-leak-pushes-astronauts-to-use-diapers-on-way-back-to-earth-427309" hreflang="en">No plumber in space? Toilet leak pushes astronauts to use diapers on way back to Earth</a>

Chari's father, Sreenivas is from Telangana in India, while his mother, Peggy Egbert is from Iowa in the United States.

The list of 600 travelers ranges from those who have barely scratched space, like actor William Shatner last month, to US and Russian astronauts who have spent a year or more in orbit.&nbsp;

This year’s surge in space tourists helped push the tally over the 600 mark. That averages out to 10 people per year since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961.

NASA has extolled space station missions in low-Earth orbit as critical training grounds and incubators for technologies that will help achieve the goals of a sustainable lunar presence and eventual human flights to Mars.

(With inputs from agencies)

Elon Musk's SpaceX has sent four astronauts to the International Space Station in its fifth crewed mission. The company's Dragon capsule roared into outer space atop a Falcon 9 rocket, including the 600th person to reach space in 60 years, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has sent four astronauts to the International Space Station in its fifth crewed mission. The company's Dragon capsule roared into outer space atop a Falcon 9 rocket, including the 600th person to reach space in 60 years, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. #Crew3... 2... 1... and liftoff! Three @NASA_Astronauts and one @ESA astronaut are on their way to the @Space_Station aboard the @SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance: pic.twitter.com/dxobsFb4Pa — NASA (@NASA) November 11, 2021 × According to mission commander Raja Chari, ''It was a great ride, better than we imagined.'' The crew launch marked SpaceX’s fourth for NASA and the company’s fifth passenger flight overall, including a September charter flight for four that skipped the space station. Also read | Astronomers offer hint on how Sun's death might unfold The Dragon capsule’s toilet leaked during their three days in orbit, necessitating a quick redesign of the flushing system in the newest capsule, named Endurance by its crew. SpaceX launch director Mark Soltys told the crew, ''Enjoy your holidays among the stars. We’ll be waving as you fly by.'' "Crew-3" includes two members of NASA's latest graduating class of astronauts, Indian-origin Raja Chari, 44, a US Air Force combat jet and test pilot serving as mission commander, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, 34, a US Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer. Also read | No plumber in space? Toilet leak pushes astronauts to use diapers on way back to Earth Chari's father, Sreenivas is from Telangana in India, while his mother, Peggy Egbert is from Iowa in the United States. The list of 600 travelers ranges from those who have barely scratched space, like actor William Shatner last month, to US and Russian astronauts who have spent a year or more in orbit. This year’s surge in space tourists helped push the tally over the 600 mark. That averages out to 10 people per year since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961. NASA has extolled space station missions in low-Earth orbit as critical training grounds and incubators for technologies that will help achieve the goals of a sustainable lunar presence and eventual human flights to Mars. (With inputs from agencies)

Watch | Indian-origin astronaut leads SpaceX's mission to International Space Station

NASA to monitor space station operation, SpaceX launch 4 more astronauts into orbit on flight to space station

Four more astronauts rocketed into space

Four astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station in April for a long-duration science mission began their return voyage to Earth as their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule separated from the orbiting laboratory for a flight home.

SpaceX capsule with four astronauts returns to earth

A leaky toilet in the SpaceX capsule seems to have left astronauts with no choice but to use diapers while coming back home from the International Space Station.

SpaceX leaky toilet leads ISS astronauts to return to earth wearing diapers

SpaceX astronauts were forced to wear diapers on their trip back to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) due to a broken toilet on the Dragon capsule.

Faulty toilet pushes astronauts to use diapers on way back to Earth

NASA has unveiled a spacecraft that will act as Earth's 'planetary defence' against asteroids.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a test mission that will be launched by the US space agency on November 24&nbsp;aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

According to Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defence Officer, ''Although there isn't a currently known asteroid that's on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there.''

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"The key to planetary defence is finding them well before they are an impact threat," Johnson said.

"We don't want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed towards Earth and then have to test this capability."

The spacecraft weighs 1,210 pounds and will change the course of asteroids at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph).&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/in-a-first-nasas-mars-curiosity-rover-detects-organic-molecules-on-the-surface-of-red-planet-426481" hreflang="en">In a first, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover detects organic molecules on the surface of Red Planet</a>

DART will target a double asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos that are approximately 6.8 million miles away from the Earth.

''We are targeting to be as nearly head-on as possible to cause the biggest deflection,'' said Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who built the DART spacecraft.

The amount of deflection will depend to a certain extent on the composition of Dimorphos and scientists are not entirely certain how porous the asteroid is.

The mission will enhance modelling and predictive capabilities to help scientists better prepare for an actual asteroid threat should one ever be discovered.

More than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids have been catalogued by NASA.

An asteroid discovered in 1999 known as Bennu that is 1,650 feet wide will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact is considered very slight.

(With inputs from agencies)

NASA has unveiled a spacecraft that will act as Earth's 'planetary defence' against asteroids. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a test mission that will be launched by the US space agency on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA has unveiled a spacecraft that will act as Earth's 'planetary defence' against asteroids. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a test mission that will be launched by the US space agency on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. According to Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defence Officer, ''Although there isn't a currently known asteroid that's on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there.'' Also read | 'Dragon' black holes that defy norms of physics can mess with your future "The key to planetary defence is finding them well before they are an impact threat," Johnson said. "We don't want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed towards Earth and then have to test this capability." The spacecraft weighs 1,210 pounds and will change the course of asteroids at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kph). Also read | In a first, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover detects organic molecules on the surface of Red Planet DART will target a double asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos that are approximately 6.8 million miles away from the Earth. ''We are targeting to be as nearly head-on as possible to cause the biggest deflection,'' said Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who built the DART spacecraft. The amount of deflection will depend to a certain extent on the composition of Dimorphos and scientists are not entirely certain how porous the asteroid is. The mission will enhance modelling and predictive capabilities to help scientists better prepare for an actual asteroid threat should one ever be discovered. More than 27,000 near-Earth asteroids have been catalogued by NASA. An asteroid discovered in 1999 known as Bennu that is 1,650 feet wide will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact is considered very slight. (With inputs from agencies)

Earth's 'planetary defence': NASA unveils spacecraft that targets asteroids

In a rare health-related pause, NASA has delayed a SpaceX rocket launch of four astronauts to the international space station (ISS). &nbsp;

This is the second postponement of the mission in a week. The agency cited an unspecified medical issue with one of the crew member as the reason behind this decision. &nbsp;

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On Monday, the space agency described it as a “minor medical issue” that was “not a medical emergency and not related to Covid”. It declined to elaborate on the nature of the issue or say which astronaut was involved. &nbsp;

Originally set for Sunday, the launch has been postponed until Wednesday because of unsuitable weather conditions and then had been rescheduled for Saturday night, said NASA. &nbsp;

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The SpaceX-built vehicle is set to fly this weekend. It consists of a Crew Dragon capsule and a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. It is now set for liftoff at 11.36 pm on Saturday from NASA’s Kennedy space centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida. &nbsp;

If everything goes smoothly, the three US astronauts and their European Space Agency (ESA) crewmate will reach 22 hours later and dock with the space station 400km (250 miles) above the Earth to begin a six-month science mission. &nbsp;

(With inputs from agencies)&nbsp;

In a rare health-related pause, NASA has delayed a SpaceX rocket launch of four astronauts to the international space station (ISS). This is the second postponement of the mission in a week.

In a rare health-related pause, NASA has delayed a SpaceX rocket launch of four astronauts to the international space station (ISS). This is the second postponement of the mission in a week. The agency cited an unspecified medical issue with one of the crew member as the reason behind this decision. Also Read: During Halloween weekend, solar flare helps northern lights become visible to US On Monday, the space agency described it as a “minor medical issue” that was “not a medical emergency and not related to Covid”. It declined to elaborate on the nature of the issue or say which astronaut was involved. Originally set for Sunday, the launch has been postponed until Wednesday because of unsuitable weather conditions and then had been rescheduled for Saturday night, said NASA. Also Read: Opinion: Would Russia or China help us if we were invaded by space aliens? The SpaceX-built vehicle is set to fly this weekend. It consists of a Crew Dragon capsule and a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. It is now set for liftoff at 11.36 pm on Saturday from NASA’s Kennedy space centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida. If everything goes smoothly, the three US astronauts and their European Space Agency (ESA) crewmate will reach 22 hours later and dock with the space station 400km (250 miles) above the Earth to begin a six-month science mission. (With inputs from agencies)

After ‘medical issue’ with astronaut, NASA delays SpaceX rocket launch to ISS

It may be a rare chance where an astronaut has had to worry about exploring "other means" to dispose their bodily fluids while in space.<o:p></o:p>

In a rare order, all astronauts aboard the SpaceX endeavour have been asked to limit the use of the toilet facility made available to them in the craft while they return to the Earth.<o:p></o:p>

"Our intent is to not use the system at all for the return leg home because of what we've seen with the fluids we are talking about," NASA's Commercial Crew program manager, Steve Stitch said on Friday. "We have other means to allow the crew to perform the functions they need to do."

<o:p>Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/bathroom-bother-spacex-aims-to-fix-leaking-toilets-before-launch-424458">Bathroom bother! SpaceX aims to fix leaking toilets before launch</a></o:p>

Those other means talked about in the statement by Stich is an undergarment designed for waste management that astronauts can use to relieve themselves in their space suits while on a mission such as landing, spacewalks or launches.<o:p></o:p>

SpaceX's Dragon crew has faced the problem of leaky bathroom as urine had accumulated beneath the floor panels. "Anytime the crew is suited they use an undergarment in that suit, and it's a short mission coming home," Stitch explained. "So, it's pretty typical to have an undergarment on and they can use that on the way home."<o:p></o:p>

NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Meghan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency have been asked to use that same undergarment when their spacecraft heads back to the Earth.<o:p></o:p>

These astronauts had left for the space station in April and are scheduled to return back to Earth on November 04 off the Florida coast. However, their return date might change as the launch date of the Crew-2’s relief mission, Crew-3, has been delayed due to bad weather conditions.<o:p></o:p>

This has come a little after SpaceX had claimed that the problem has been fixed the problem, for now, but need to make sure it is completely gone. "We've fixed this problem in the tank by essentially making it an all-welded structure, with no longer a joint in there that can come unglued and become disconnected,"&nbsp;William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice-president said.<o:p></o:p>

It may be a rare chance where an astronaut has had to worry about exploring "other means" to dispose their bodily fluids while in space. In a rare order, all astronauts aboard the SpaceX endeavour have been asked to limit the use of the toilet facility made available to them in the craft while they return to the Earth.

It may be a rare chance where an astronaut has had to worry about exploring "other means" to dispose their bodily fluids while in space. In a rare order, all astronauts aboard the SpaceX endeavour have been asked to limit the use of the toilet facility made available to them in the craft while they return to the Earth. "Our intent is to not use the system at all for the return leg home because of what we've seen with the fluids we are talking about," NASA's Commercial Crew program manager, Steve Stitch said on Friday. "We have other means to allow the crew to perform the functions they need to do." Also read | Bathroom bother! SpaceX aims to fix leaking toilets before launch Those other means talked about in the statement by Stich is an undergarment designed for waste management that astronauts can use to relieve themselves in their space suits while on a mission such as landing, spacewalks or launches. SpaceX's Dragon crew has faced the problem of leaky bathroom as urine had accumulated beneath the floor panels. "Anytime the crew is suited they use an undergarment in that suit, and it's a short mission coming home," Stitch explained. "So, it's pretty typical to have an undergarment on and they can use that on the way home." NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Meghan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency have been asked to use that same undergarment when their spacecraft heads back to the Earth. These astronauts had left for the space station in April and are scheduled to return back to Earth on November 04 off the Florida coast. However, their return date might change as the launch date of the Crew-2’s relief mission, Crew-3, has been delayed due to bad weather conditions. This has come a little after SpaceX had claimed that the problem has been fixed the problem, for now, but need to make sure it is completely gone. "We've fixed this problem in the tank by essentially making it an all-welded structure, with no longer a joint in there that can come unglued and become disconnected," William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice-president said.

No more leaks? SpaceX tells astronauts to limit use of toilet after urine leaks

As SpaceX gears up to launch more astronauts into space and create record-worthy discoveries, the Elon Musk-owned company will first have to fix their leaky toilets.<o:p></o:p>

As per reports, SpaceX capsules are facing problems of leaky toilets, which experts fear can cause delay in the launch. William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice-president, had reported that during the first private flight in September, a tube had come unglued which had caused urine being spilled on to fans and also beneath the floor.<o:p></o:p>

In the Dragon capsule, which is currently in the orbit, urine had accumulated beneath the floor panels. The same problem had occurred on a similar flight that had carried a billionaire and three other people on a three-day flight. However, the problem was at a bigger scale in the billionaire's flight.

<o:p>Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/spacexs-first-all-civilian-orbital-mission-returns-to-earth-414078">SpaceX's first all-civilian orbital mission returns to Earth</a></o:p>

If the problem continues, this can compromise the launch of the space capsule on Sunday, which is scheduled to take place from the Kennedy Space Center.<o:p></o:p>

Now, the company is claiming that the problem has been fixed the problem, for now, but need to make sure it is completely gone. "We've fixed this problem in the tank by essentially making it an all-welded structure, with no longer a joint in there that can come unglued and become disconnected,"&nbsp;Gerstenmaier said. Nasa is currently reviewing the last-minute fix.

<o:p>Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/jeff-bezos-firm-blue-origin-unveils-plan-to-build-commercial-space-station-424048">Jeff Bezos firm Blue Origin unveils plan to build commercial space station</a></o:p>

Meanwhile, experts are now running final checks to make sure all problems have been rectified. "We at the commercial crew program have a little bit of work to do with SpaceX leading forward to flight," said&nbsp;Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew program manager in a press briefing on Monday night.<o:p></o:p>

Gerstenmaier has also reported that experts are making sure that the spilled urine did not damage the capsule in the last six months.<o:p></o:p>

"What we're looking for is tiny clues or tiny, tiny imperfections, that somebody might look at a plot and wonder: why did that temperature go up here, or this pressure change here," Stich said. "So you really just try to dig into all those sorts of things and try to understand those, and then improve things and fly safely."<o:p></o:p>

As SpaceX gears up to launch more astronauts into space and create record-worthy discoveries, the Elon Musk-owned company will first have to fix their leaky toilets.

As SpaceX gears up to launch more astronauts into space and create record-worthy discoveries, the Elon Musk-owned company will first have to fix their leaky toilets. As per reports, SpaceX capsules are facing problems of leaky toilets, which experts fear can cause delay in the launch. William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice-president, had reported that during the first private flight in September, a tube had come unglued which had caused urine being spilled on to fans and also beneath the floor. In the Dragon capsule, which is currently in the orbit, urine had accumulated beneath the floor panels. The same problem had occurred on a similar flight that had carried a billionaire and three other people on a three-day flight. However, the problem was at a bigger scale in the billionaire's flight. Also read | SpaceX's first all-civilian orbital mission returns to Earth If the problem continues, this can compromise the launch of the space capsule on Sunday, which is scheduled to take place from the Kennedy Space Center. Now, the company is claiming that the problem has been fixed the problem, for now, but need to make sure it is completely gone. "We've fixed this problem in the tank by essentially making it an all-welded structure, with no longer a joint in there that can come unglued and become disconnected," Gerstenmaier said. Nasa is currently reviewing the last-minute fix. Also read | Jeff Bezos firm Blue Origin unveils plan to build commercial space station Meanwhile, experts are now running final checks to make sure all problems have been rectified. "We at the commercial crew program have a little bit of work to do with SpaceX leading forward to flight," said Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew program manager in a press briefing on Monday night. Gerstenmaier has also reported that experts are making sure that the spilled urine did not damage the capsule in the last six months. "What we're looking for is tiny clues or tiny, tiny imperfections, that somebody might look at a plot and wonder: why did that temperature go up here, or this pressure change here," Stich said. "So you really just try to dig into all those sorts of things and try to understand those, and then improve things and fly safely."

Bathroom bother! SpaceX aims to fix leaking toilets before launch

From spy satellites to mobile networks: South Korea gets new rocket space programme off ground

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