Tag Archives: Space Exploration/Travel

Science

Vast Cosmic Bubble Around the Sun Identified as Source of Baby Stars

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Astronomers have known since the 1970s that our sun lies at the center of a vast cavity within the hot gas that fills the gaps between stars in the Milky Way. But the origins of that ever-growing void, known as the Local Bubble, and its relationship to our starry neighbors remained elusive.

Now, using new data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, scientists have revealed that the genesis and growth of that bubble were due to a series of 15 supernovas—powerful explosions of collapsing stars—over the past 14 million years, and that every young star and star-forming region within 500 light years of Earth sits on the Local Bubble’s surface.

When stars die, the resulting explosions set off shock waves that travel outward, sweeping up and aggregating interstellar material like gas and cosmic dust. Eventually enough gas accumulates, condenses and cools at the edge of this shock wave to start birthing stars.

The Local Bubble is the result of such shock waves, as are the stellar nurseries that pepper its outer shell.

“For the first time, we can explain how nearby star formation began, and it’s because of this 1,000-light-year-wide bubble,” said

Catherine Zucker,

an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of a study about the new findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Imagine it’s like a snowplow,” she said, “At the edge of the shell there’s a sharp edge of piled-up interstellar material that essentially hosts all of these star-forming regions.”

How the Local Bubble Formed

Powerful supernovas begin to explode, creating a cavity of very thin, hot gas in space called the Local Bubble.

The Sun’s path takes it into the ever-expanding bubble. As the bubble expands, regions of dense, cold gas that can birth stars collect on its surface.

Today, many young stars sit on the bubble’s surface, but have not formed inside of it.

approx. 1,000 light years

Source: Space Telescope Science Institute with the

Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian

How the Local Bubble Formed

Powerful supernovas begin to explode, creating a cavity of very thin, hot gas in space called the Local Bubble.

The Sun’s path takes it into the ever-expanding bubble. As the bubble expands, regions of dense, cold gas that can birth stars collect on its surface.

Today, many young stars sit on the bubble’s surface, but have not formed inside of it.

approx. 1,000 light years

Source: Space Telescope Science Institute with the

Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian

How the Local Bubble Formed

Powerful supernovas begin to explode, creating a cavity of very thin, hot gas in space called the Local Bubble.

The Sun’s path takes it into the ever-

expanding bubble. As the bubble expands, regions of dense, cold gas that can birth stars collect on its surface.

How the Local Bubble Formed

Powerful supernovas begin to explode, creating a cavity of very thin, hot gas in space called the Local Bubble.

The Sun’s path takes it into the ever-

expanding bubble. As the bubble expands, regions of dense, cold gas that can birth stars collect on its surface.

Today, many young stars sit on the bubble’s surface, but have not formed inside of it.

approx. 1,000 light years

Source: Space Telescope Science Institute with

the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard

and Smithsonian

Gaia, which launched in 2013, has helped astronomers map the location and movement of stars in these regions with unprecedented accuracy over the past two years. By combining that data with models of supernova behavior, Dr. Zucker’s team could trace back where these stars were millions of years in the past, and calculate how many supernovas would have been required for the Local Bubble to grow to its current size—with those star-forming regions embedded on its surface.

They created an animation that reconstructs the bubble’s rate of expansion, and when those explosions began.

“We found that there was this massive cluster of stars lying right in the center of where we think the bubble started forming 14 million years ago,” Dr. Zucker said.

“This study is a perfect illustration of what the ESA Gaia space observatory allows,” said

Rosine Lallement,

a researcher who studies the solar environment at the Paris Observatory who wasn’t involved in the study, adding, “it is like going from simple photography to 3-D movies” of the Milky Way.

The study found seven well-known star-forming regions, or molecular clouds, that sit on the Local Bubble’s shell—including Corona Australis, which sits within the constellation of the same name. The young stars therein “go along for the ride” and get pushed farther away from the bubble’s center as the cavity expands, Dr. Zucker said.

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Does this discovery help you to better understand our galaxy or raise more questions about it? Join the conversation below.

Most stars, including the sun, are at least 1 billion years old, but the stars in these clouds are less than about 10 million years old, she added. The study suggests that these clouds, and the supernovas that helped form them, happened in at least four bursts, each roughly 4 million years apart beginning 14 million years ago.

“It would’ve been a series of correlated supernova explosions, it wouldn’t just be like, ‘Boom, boom, boom’ steadily,” said study co-author

Alyssa Goodman,

an astronomy professor at Harvard University.

That is because stars form in clusters, she said, and those of similar mass in these clusters all live about the same amount of time before exploding.

The Local Bubble is still growing, though the speed of its expansion has decreased to 14,400 miles an hour—at its peak, the void expanded about 15 times faster than that, Dr. Zucker said.

“Most of the oomph that’s been injected into this expansion happened many millennia ago” when the most massive stars in our galactic neighborhood went supernova, she said, adding the bubble will eventually run out of steam.

It is only by chance that the sun and our solar system currently sit at the heart of this void—over the past 5 million years, our star’s path through the galaxy took it to what the study authors think is the bubble’s center.

But the sun won’t stay there forever, Dr. Zucker said, adding, “In like 8 million years we should be out of the bubble.”

“But in the future, we might be in another bubble,” she said.

“‘The whole structure of the interstellar medium may be bubbly, and stars may form at the intersection of these bubbles where stuff is smushed together.’”


— Alyssa Goodman, astronomy professor at Harvard University

In a September 2021 study, a team led by Dr. Zucker and Dr. Goodman identified a similar cavity in the Milky Way. They hypothesize that such bubbles are pervasive throughout our galaxy, as well as other galaxies in the universe.

“We actually do think that when supernovas go off in the interstellar medium, they all create bubbles,” Dr. Goodman said. “The whole structure of the interstellar medium may be bubbly, and stars may form at the intersection of these bubbles where stuff is smushed together.”

Write to Aylin Woodward at Aylin.Woodward@wsj.com

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Science

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Buzzes the Sun to Unlock Secrets of Our Host Star

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A car-size spacecraft described as the fastest human-made object zoomed inside the sun’s atmosphere for the first time ever last spring and gathered scientific data that could help unlock the secrets of our host star, scientists involved with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission said Tuesday.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe came within 8.1 million miles of the solar surface on April 28—marking humanity’s closest approach ever to the sun—as it made its eighth looping orbit around the star, the scientists said. Accelerated by the sun’s powerful gravity, the 1,400-pound, $1.5 billion probe at times has been clocked at speeds of up to 365,000 miles per hour since its 2018 launch.

Data beamed back from the heat-tolerant probe could help explain why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, which reaches temperatures of 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, according to the scientists. The data could also yield new insights into the origin of solar wind, the potentially dangerous stream of charged particles and hot gas that blasts out into space from the sun’s surface.

“These are mysteries that have been bugging us for decades,” said

Nour Raouafi,

an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for the probe.

Dr. Raouafi was one of five mission scientists who discussed the probe’s historic flyby in New Orleans at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The flyby was detailed in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Previously, scientific data about the solar wind came only from Earth- and space-based telescopes, other spacecraft operating farther from the sun and lunar experiments conducted decades ago by Apollo astronauts.

Images taken by a camera aboard the probe helped Dr. Raouafi’s team confirm that the probe had crossed the corona’s upper boundary, or what astronomers call the Alfvén critical surface. The boundary—which the probe showed to be wrinkly rather than smooth—marks the point at which material rising from the sun escapes the star’s gravity and magnetic forces, and streams outward as the solar wind at speeds of up to 1.7 million miles an hour.

Images taken by NASA’s Parker probe while flying through the sun’s upper atmosphere, called the corona, show streams of particles and magnetic forces.



Photo:

Naval Research Laboratory/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA

“What we’re seeing now is that the sun is like a balloon that has a bunch of little holes punched in it with the wind coming out of those little holes with different speeds and densities,” said

Stuart Bale,

a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist and one of the scientists who described the flyby at the meeting.

In addition to a camera, the probe is equipped with instruments that measure electromagnetic fields and charged particles inside the corona—all protected by an 8-foot-wide heat shield designed to withstand extreme temperatures.

With the probe to buzz the sun 14 more times over the next four years, Dr. Bale said he expects future data will help answer more questions about the sun. On the flybys to come, the probe is projected to come even closer to the sun—within 3.8 million miles during its final passes in 2024 and 2025.

The sun is about 93 million miles from Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is set to launch later this month. Scientists say its technology makes it 100 times more powerful than the Hubble and could give it the ability to see back to the first galaxies in the universe. Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ

The final flybys are expected to coincide with what astronomers call the solar maximum, a period that comes every 11 years during which outbursts of energy from the corona known as coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena are especially intense.

Scientists are eager to obtain reliable data on the solar maximum, as the outbursts have the potential to trigger electrical blackouts, scuttle banking systems and disable global positioning satellites, according to scientists. The outbursts also pose a threat to airplane passengers and astronauts—including those who one day might colonize the moon and Mars.

“Once we start talking about people leaving the magnetic bubble of earth, which protects us from cosmic rays and solar particles, we need to be able to predict how those particles propagate,” said

Cindy Cattell,

a University of Minnesota physicist who attended the meeting but isn’t involved with the mission. “Perhaps we can improve those predictions with data from the Parker probe.”

The probe was named for

Eugene Parker,

a University of Chicago astrophysicist who first predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958.

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Science

NASA Planetary Defense Mission Aims to Push Distant Asteroid Off Its Path

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The first planetary defense mission got under way early Wednesday, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a space probe designed to deflect a distant asteroid in a test of technology that might one day save the world.

The $324 million Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission—a practice run for future efforts to protect Earth from collisions with asteroids and comets—launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:21 a.m. EST from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Next fall, after a journey of more than 6 million miles, the probe will crash at 15,000 miles an hour into Dimorphos, a tiny moonlet that orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos.

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Science

How the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Helped Make Your Smartphone’s Screen Possible

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In December, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its partners plan to launch the James Webb Space Telescope. A technological marvel 100 times as powerful as the Hubble telescope, it has enough visual acuity to examine the atmospheres of planets far outside our solar system for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The Webb, a NASA collaboration with space agencies in Europe and Canada, will do its work at an orbit around the sun 1 million miles away from our world. Here on Earth, though, part of the technology that went into the giant telescope is also visible when you look at the screen of a smartphone, smartwatch, tablet, or laptop computer with the latest high-resolution displays.

The connection between humanity’s boldest experiment in deep-space exploration and the gadgets in your hands is the technology to produce giant, ultrahigh-precision mirrors and lenses. Such “optics” weren’t possible until NASA asked a handful of companies more than 20 years ago to bid on the rights to figure out a way.

The result, developed by a company called Tinsley Integrated Optical Systems, was a technique that enabled production of very large mirror surfaces that are so nearly flawless that any imperfections on their surface are only a few atoms thick. And that technology can also be involved in producing many displays—using lasers to transform extra-large sheets of silicon deposited on glass—significantly reducing the costs of electronic components for some displays.

The transfer of know-how from space telescopes to the manufacture of displays is the latest in a long line of commercial technologies with similar lineage, from digital-camera sensors to the Dustbuster, which was developed by

Black & Decker

out of its partnership with NASA.

Laser company Coherent’s linebeam system, used for producing high-resolution OLED displays, incorporates advances from the Webb telescope’s optics.



Photo:

Coherent, Inc.

One classic example is the Apollo guidance computer—the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer—which was present on both the Apollo command module and the lunar lander. In its use of then-novel components like some of the world’s first silicon microchips (aka integrated circuits), it paved the way for our modern world, from the internet to the innards of the same smartphones whose displays are in part due to the James Webb Space Telescope.

Since the Apollo missions, NASA’s need for engineers to accomplish feats that are impossible at the time it first sets forth its requirements, combined with its willingness to fund such development, have spurred companies to develop new technologies that end up affecting everyday life.

Funding innovation through NASA and the Defense Department has long been America’s favored method of “industrial policy”—that is, using government money to supplement private investment in new technologies. The difference between American industrial policy and the kind practiced in many other countries is that the U.S. government has long favored paying for research and development rather than aiding the scaling up of industries based on those innovations. This often means technologies like the LCD display are invented here but lead to giant industries elsewhere.

With the Webb telescope, the connection between space tech and regular-life tech is more than just the transfer of insights gained from research and development conducted on NASA’s dime. It turns out that the very same factory where the mirrors for the space telescope were polished are now where the optics required for manufacture of OLED displays—short for organic light emitting diode, the screens in the latest generation of smartphones—are made.

Nearly flawless silicon lenses like the one above are essential for high-end displays, and arose thanks to advances made during development of the Webb telescope.



Photo:

Coherent, Inc.

The Webb telescope’s primary mirror, which collects the interstellar snapshots, is made up of 18 hexagonal sections, each 1.32 meters in diameter, that will fold origami-style for flight, then unfold in space to make a surface 6.5 meters across, or more than 21 feet. All the gold-plated beryllium mirror sections must be so unblemished that they can collectively focus even the faintest whisper of the most distant celestial body into a detectable image.

​​Tinsley had already provided the corrective lenses that astronauts installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, fixing a glitch that had caused blurry images and enabling it to capture the pictures from deep space for which Hubble has been famous ever since. Later, Tinsley won the contract to make the mirrors for the Webb.

The timing of the completion of the manufacture of those mirrors was fortuitous, says Brandon Turk, a vice president of Tinsley, which since 2015 has been a subsidiary of laser-systems company Coherent. In 2012, when engineers finished the last of the Webb telescope’s primary mirror sections, engineers at Coherent, who were in contact with their counterparts at Tinsley, were looking for ways to make bigger, more precise lenses for the machines that prepare silicon to be transformed into one of the most important parts of many high-resolution flat-panel displays.

These new lenses for display manufacture were up to 1.85 meters across, more than twice as wide as those used previously. This is important because, in the fabrication of displays, as in the fabrication of microchips, the bigger the sheet of near-perfect silicon a company can use, the more displays (or microchips) it can etch onto and then cut out of that sheet. That means significantly more efficiency, and lower cost.

The Apollo Guidance Computer, included on both the command module and lunar lander, represented one of the first uses of silicon microchips. That technology went on to be widely used in all kinds of computers.



Photo:

Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal

One challenge for both processes is that the optics that direct the lasers that accomplish key steps must be nearly perfect. And the bigger those lenses, the harder it is to eliminate imperfections.

Coherent was already making lenses for its own “linebeam” systems—industrial objects as big as school buses that shoot lasers at sheets of silicon deposited on panes of glass, an early step in the manufacture of many displays. But doubling the size of its optics wouldn’t have happened at that point in history without NASA funding Tinsley’s innovations in manufacturing that the space telescope’s unprecedented mirrors required, says Dr. Turk.

Coherent has a strong market position in manufacturing linebeam systems and other specialized lasers and optics, as evidenced by the March 2021 three-way bidding war for the company that eventually led to an agreement to be acquired by competitor

II-VI,

says Wayne Lam of CCS Insight, a technology consulting firm.

“I love that people trying to create highly polished mirrors for Hubble has meant eventually having the tech migrate to mobile phones, enabling the displays we see now,” says Ian Jenks, now head of display-manufacturing startup SmartKem and previously president of the company then known as

JDS Uniphase,

which was for many years a competitor of Coherent.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What space-age technologies do you use on a daily basis? Join the conversation below.

As for where the technology to make big, nearly perfect optics could take humanity next, there are more telescopes on the way—the forthcoming Thirty Meter Telescope, which will be the second-largest telescope on Earth once it’s completed, uses the technology. Other, more commercial applications also are derived from the use of these optics in manufacturing.

One of them, says a spokesman for Coherent, is the superconducting tape required to make future fusion reactors. Each magnet inside such a reactor requires kilometers of the stuff, and making it affordable is one of the many requirements for making energy from fusion economically viable.

The winding path of innovations, from technologies intended to satisfy our curiosity to ones with substantial cultural and economic impact, shows that John F. Kennedy’s famous exhortation—“we choose not to go to the moon because it is easy, but because it is hard”—has meant many advances that otherwise might have arrived much later, if at all.

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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

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Technology

Boeing’s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months

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Boeing Co. ’s Starliner space capsule launch could be delayed several months as the company will likely need to remove it from atop a rocket for repairs, people familiar with the matter said.

Such a delay would be a setback for Boeing’s space program. The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station, without crew on board—after a failed attempt a year and a half ago. Ultimately, the capsule is supposed to ferry astronauts to the space station.

Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks.

Nine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday.

“Over the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,” said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.

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Science

Plans for the Boeing Starliner Launch

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Boeing Co. said a second attempt to launch its Starliner space taxi has been canceled, with launch officials on Tuesday citing inclement weather. The testing of the capsule precedes its planned first flight with astronauts on board later this year.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration previously said it has another launch window on Wednesday.

A botched effort in late 2019 dented the record of a company that has been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration, including the Apollo missions to the moon. The Starliner is the latest of an array of new rockets, capsules and other vehicles aimed at furthering U.S. ambitions in a new space race to the moon, Mars and beyond.

The Starliner would give the U.S. more options to reach low earth orbit and the space station. U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get there following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. NASA opted to outsource a replacement through its Commercial Crew Program and picked Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to provide space taxi services.

The CST-100 Starliner is slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies, and bring back material including oxygen tanks. A mannequin named Rosie the Rocketeer is expected to be on board, equipped with sensors to capture data ahead of a crewed mission.

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Science

NASA’s InSight Lander Gives First Look at Mars Interior, Yielding a Big Surprise

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NASA-funded researchers said Thursday they had mapped the interior of Mars, using seismic data collected by the agency’s Mars InSight lander to reveal a planet with a molten core whose size and composition came as major surprises.

The interior map—the first ever created of another planet—shows that the internal structure of Mars differs dramatically from Earth’s. Mars has a thicker crust and a thinner underlying mantle layer as well as a core that is bigger, less dense and more liquid than the researchers had expected.

The scientists said their findings, which were described in three papers published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that Mars formed millions of years before Earth, when the sun was still condensing from a cloud of glowing gas.

“It gives us our first sample of the inside of another rocky planet like Earth, built out of the same materials but very, very different,” Sanne Cottaar, a seismologist at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge, said of the new research. “It is impressive.”

Dr. Cottaar, who wasn’t involved in the new research, called the findings “a major leap forward in planetary seismology.”

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Business

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals

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Jeff Bezos

’ plans for space go far beyond the short trip he is slated to take there Tuesday.

The

Amazon.com Inc.

AMZN -1.59%

founder has poured billions into his Blue Origin LLC space venture over more than two decades, believing humanity must ultimately establish outposts across the solar system.

More immediately, Mr. Bezos’ company is seeking business in a space market that will triple in size to more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, Morgan Stanley says, assuming rapid technological developments enable routine moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism.

Blue Origin’s crew capsule interior. The company has spent years developing rockets, engines and vehicles.



Photo:

Blue Origin

His own giant leap comes when Blue Origin is scheduled to launch Mr. Bezos and three other people to the edge of space in an 11-minute flight, the first launch with passengers on the company’s New Shepard rocket.

A successful trip could provide traction in an emerging space-tourism market, which includes

Richard Branson’s

Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.

Blue Origin’s broader challenge is winning the kind of large government contracts that provide a steady revenue stream and lend credibility to companies that secure them. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for

Elon Musk’s

SpaceX, has jumped ahead of Blue Origin in winning those deals.

For years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space. He has cited the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission as a foundational moment for him and referenced science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the scientist and author Carl Sagan in speeches.

A New Shepard rocket launch.



Photo:

Blue Origin

“If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,” Mr. Bezos said during a speech two years ago. To that end, Blue Origin can lower the cost of space launches, in part by developing reusable rockets, Mr. Bezos has said.

The talk from the Amazon founder has been paired with major financial commitments. Mr. Bezos has disclosed he has sold $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

After founding Blue Origin in 2000, Mr. Bezos began acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of land in West Texas for the company in the early part of that decade, telling a newspaper in the area in 2005 he wanted to build a rocket launchpad on the property.

Now, in addition to the launch site in Texas, the company has facilities in Florida, California, Alabama and Washington, D.C., as well as headquarters outside of Seattle. It employs more than 3,500 people, including Chief Executive

Bob Smith,

a former executive at

Honeywell International Inc.’s

aerospace unit. The privately owned Blue Origin doesn’t release financial statements.

Mr. Bezos is “doing what he did with Amazon, which is to roll over every nickel he could get into capital equipment and innovation,” said

Howard McCurdy,

a professor at American University who has written about space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn’t far behind. But the two billionaire founders’ spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann

This year, Blue Origin intends to conduct two additional flights with passengers on the New Shepard following Tuesday’s launch, executives said Sunday at a briefing. Mr. Smith didn’t specify how much the company is selling tickets for.

“Willingness to pay continues to be quite high. Our early flights are going for a very good price,” he said.

Outside of the emerging space-tourism market, SpaceX has gained a deeper footing with space-related agencies in Washington. NASA and the Pentagon have spent $2.8 billion tied to 52 prime contracts won by the company led by Mr. Musk over the past 14 federal fiscal years, according to a federal spending database. They have spent $496.5 million in 33 contracts won by Blue Origin over that period.

Blue Origin didn’t respond to questions about competition with SpaceX or its plans for working with government agencies. Mr. Smith has in the past said the company wants to gain work with such customers.

The two companies are sparring over a deal to build a moon lander for a trip planned for 2024. The Apollo 11 moon lander reached the moon in 1969 on July 20, the same date for Mr. Bezos’ scheduled space trip on Tuesday. NASA awarded SpaceX the lander contract in April, but Blue Origin protested that decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a move that could lead to NASA rebidding the contract.

The accountability agency is expected to issue a decision on Blue Origin’s case by Aug. 4. The Dynetics unit of

Leidos Holdings Inc.

also competed for the lander and filed a protest.

SpaceX is now the most prolific launcher, sending up 23 rockets so far this year, according to Federal Aviation Administration data covering licensed launches. Its reusable rockets help cut the cost of reaching space, a strategy also pursued by Blue Origin, which has completed nine such launches since late 2017.

“They need to have a track record,” said

Marco Cáceres,

a space analyst at aerospace consulting firm Teal Group, referring to Blue Origin.

The New Shepard rocket scheduled to go up Tuesday has been designed for tourist trips into suborbital space, with a six-person gumdrop-shaped capsule and windows stretching 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet along its sides. Along with the Amazon founder, the craft’s passengers are Mark Bezos, Mr. Bezos’ brother; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who graduated in the 1960s from a program for female astronauts; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student, the company’s first paying customer.

The company also has been developing the New Glenn rocket, a vehicle that will stand 321 feet tall and is designed to use seven main engines to lift large payloads to orbit. In February, Blue Origin said it had made progress on several hardware components for the rocket and that it was targeting a maiden flight for New Glenn toward the end of next year.

Blue Origin has struck deals to push its technology into the space market. The company is developing a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies. The engine, which will replace the Russian-made motors now used, is behind schedule. Last week, NASA said Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies, a Seattle company, would join with Blue Origin,

General Electric Co.

and other firms to design concepts for nuclear-propulsion systems that could power vehicles into deep space.

Blue Origin’s “aspirations are to become a company like SpaceX, like

Boeing,

like

Lockheed Martin,

” said

John Logsdon,

the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com

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Science

Hubble Space Telescope Is Back in Action After NASA Fixes Odd Glitch

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After a month of frantic tinkering, NASA said Friday that its aging Hubble Space Telescope was on the mend, recovering from a computer problem that crippled what many astronomers call the most productive scientific instrument ever built.

As the bus-size observatory circled Earth, space agency engineers worked by remote control to switch Hubble from its vintage electronics to backup hardware. In the final step, they powered up a payload computer that restored control of its six cameras and sensors, which peer through visible, infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths of light to the edge of space and the dawn of time.

“We are absolutely delighted that the observatory is up and running again,” said Kenneth Sembach, director of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which handles the Hubble science operations. “All indications are that it’s doing well and we will get back to doing science again this weekend.”

In more than a million mind-expanding images of the universe snapped over the past 31 years, the solar-powered telescope has presented to astronomers and amateur stargazers alike a psychedelic tapestry of infant stars, dying supernovae, colliding galaxies, towering billows of stellar dust, dark matter and black holes feasting on spiral nebulae.

Hubble data has been used in more than 18,000 scientific papers that have documented the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and studies of planets beyond our solar system, NASA officials said.

“I think there’s a very credible case that the Hubble Space Telescope is the most scientifically productive instrument ever made,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division. “The output of peer-reviewed published papers from Hubble certainly exceeds any of its competitors in any field of science.”

But then on June 13, Hubble was hobbled—and not for the first time. Technical problems that threatened to end the mission have plagued the telescope since the moment it reached its orbital perch some 340 miles above our planet’s surface on April 25, 1990.

Since its launch in 1990, five space shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope.



Photo:

/Associated Press

Since its launch—with flawed optics causing its photos to be so blurry that the $4.7 billion observatory was initially deemed an embarrassing failure—five space shuttle missions repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope. All five of its main instruments were fixed, and a $50 million set of corrective lenses was installed to address its manufacturing flaws.

Last repaired by space shuttle astronauts in 2009, Hubble has lasted twice as long as originally expected, space agency officials said.

The latest trouble began when a voltage overload in an onboard payload computer built in the 1980s tripped a circuit breaker and shut down the telescope. It was the most serious technical failure that NASA project engineers had encountered in the 11 years since the last shuttle repair.

“We did a lot of debugging,” said James Jeletic, deputy project manager for the Hubble Space Telescope Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. After three weeks of painstaking analysis, they decided to switch the telescope to its remaining backup systems.

“Every single thing worked as planned,” Mr. Jeletic said. “The computer came back up. All the backup hardware works fine. I don’t think we’re biting our fingernails anymore.”

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

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Business

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Space Trip Delayed Slightly by Weather

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TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M.—Richard Branson is scheduled to travel to the edge of space Sunday in a flight aimed at spurring a new, multibillion-dollar space-tourism industry.

The flight, originally scheduled for 9 a.m. ET, was delayed 90 minutes on Sunday because of weather overnight at the launch facility in New Mexico. The launch is now scheduled for 10:30 a.m. ET.

At that time, a highflying Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. airplane is expected to take off from the Spaceport America facility near Truth or Consequences. The plane, called the VMS Eve, will carry the spacecraft VSS Unity, which will include Mr. Branson and five others.

The plane will take the spacecraft about 8.5 miles above Earth before releasing Unity about an hour after takeoff. The spacecraft will then rocket to an altitude of more than 50 miles.

The spacecraft is expected to land back in New Mexico, gliding down for a runway landing.

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