CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private lander on Thursday made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years, but managed just a weak signal back until flight controllers scrambled to gain better contact.

Despite the spotty communication, Intuitive Machines, the company that built and managed the craft, confirmed that it had landed upright. But it did not provide additional details, including whether the lander had reached its intended destination near the moon’s south pole. The company ended its live webcast soon after identifying a lone, weak signal from the lander.

“We can confirm, without a doubt, our equipment is on the surface of the moon,” mission director Tim Crain reported as tension built in the company’s Houston control center.

Houston-based company Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander, nicknamed Odysseus, attempts landing on the surface of the moon. A smooth touchdown would put the U.S. back in business on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972. The company, if successful, would become the first private outfit to ace a moon landing. #moonlanding #odysseus #intuitivemachines #nasa #IM1 #space #live #livestream.

Thumbnail image credit: Intuitive Machines.

SpaceX Starship 25 and Super Heavy booster 9 launched to orbit on Nov. 18, 2023 from the Starbase facility in South Texas. Following the launch, the booster had a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly (RUD) shortly after separation.

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known (a bit confusingly) as Starship. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX thinks the vehicle will make the settlement of Mars — a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk — economically feasible in the not-too-distant future.

When fully stacked, Starship stands nearly 400 feet (122 meters) tall. It’s the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Broadcast Courtesy: SpaceX

SpaceX is targeting Saturday for the second flight of Starship. The company has received regulatory approval for the flight. The flight will feature the newly added hot staging ring, allowing the Ship to separate from the Booster while the Booster engines are still firing. The stack features multiple upgrades compared to the first flight, including 63 upgrades SpaceX submitted to the FAA to mitigate issues from the first flight. Ahead of the launch, SpaceX will close the road, evacuate the village and surrounding area, and clear the potential blast radius.

Booster 9 will attempt a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 25 will attempt to fly around the earth before performing a reentry and hard splashdown in the Hawaiian area.

Window Opens: November 18th at 7AM CST (13:00 UTC)
Window Closes: November 18th at 7:20AM CST (13:20 UTC)

Mission: Starship’s second fully integrated test flight.
Vehicles: Booster 9 and Ship 25
Recovery: No recovery. Booster will attempt soft splashdown, Ship will not and instead will impact the ocean.
Stats:
· SpaceX’s 85th launch of the year and the 6th launch of the month.
· SpaceX’s 2nd space launch from Starbase.
· Starship will, once again, become the largest, most massive, and most powerful rocket every created breaking its own record.

Forum link: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=57219.0
SpaceX’s launch page: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-2
NSF Starship merch: https://shop.nasaspaceflight.com/collections/starship-orbital-flight-test.
NSF Launch Article: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/11/ift-2-launch/

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When the discovery of fossilized footprints made in what’s now New Mexico was made public in 2021, it was a bombshell moment for archaeology, seemingly rewriting a chapter of the human story. Now new research is offering further evidence of their significance.

While they look like they could have been made yesterday, the footprints were pressed into mud 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of the seeds of an aquatic plant that were preserved above and below the fossils.

This date dramatically pushed back the timeline of humans’ history in the Americas, the last landmass to be settled by prehistoric people. The 61 dated prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin, near the edge of an ancient lake in White Sands National Park, were made at a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets had sealed off human passage into North America, indicating that humans arrived in the region even earlier.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson reacts to so-called alien bodies brought out in front of Mexico’s Congress.

#CNN #News

Ancient timber preserved in a riverbed suggests humans were building wooden structures 500,000 years ago.

Science educator Bill Nye joins CNN’s Jim Acosta to explain the significance of the detection of phosphorus in salty ice grains on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Highlights from the latest #nvidia keynote at Computex in Taiwan, home of TSMC and is the world’s capital of semiconductor manufacturing and chip fabrication. Topics include @NVIDIA’s insane H100 datacenter GPUs, Grace Hopper superchips, GH200 AI supercomputer, and how these chips will power generative AI technologies like #chatgpt by #openai and reshape computing as we know it.

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Simply Wall Street’s Nvidia (NVDA Stock) Valuation: https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/semiconductors/nasdaq-nvda/nvidia?via=tsyou.

Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM Stock) Valuation: https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/semiconductors/nyse-tsm/taiw…?via=tsyou.

Timestamps for this Nvidia Keynote Supercut:
00:00 Nvidia H100 GPU for AI — Overview.
02:36 Accelerated Computing for AI
05:28 How Nvidia Builds AI Factories.
08:31 Why AI is the Next Era of Computing.
10:54 Nvidia Grace Hopper AI Superchip.
12:28 Nvidia GH-200 AI Supercomputer.
15:34 Nvidia MGX — Next Generation Servers for AI
18:32 Networking for AI — The Devil is in the Details.
21:53 IT’S OVER! GPUs Will Replace CPUs for AI.

I tried Apple’s first ever spatial computing device, a $3500 VR headset. These are my honest thoughts.

Google Project Starline: https://youtu.be/J1oEWiUsKgU

The podcast: https://youtube.com/waveform.

That shirt! http://shop.MKBHD.com.

Tech I’m using right now: https://www.amazon.com/shop/MKBHD?tag=lifeboatfound-20

Intro Track: Jordyn Edmonds http://smarturl.it/jordynedmonds
Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5