Are We Ready To Know What’s Out There?

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day is released today and is being called the third act of the Spielberg Alien trilogy after Close Encounters and ET but this one is about exposing the government's cover-up of extraterrestrial secrets, a well trodden conspiracy theory which began in 1947 when a UFO supposedly crash in Roswell, New Mexico.
After both of the previous films, there was a dramatic increase in reported UFO sightings and we can expect more this time also and in 2021 a US government report was released that showed they had investigated decades of unexplained aerial sightings in US airspace and there were 20 unidentified flying objects that they are unable to explain but did not rule out rule out extraterrestrial activity as a possible explanation.
What i always tell people getting over excited about aliens visiting is that what they are talking about is UFO's with extra emphasis, italics and underlining of the Unidentified part of those three words but Spielberg himself has said that there is now a critical mass of people fascinated with the question of whether we are alone in the Universe, and if someone knows we're not alone, why haven't we been told but i wonder if aliens do exist, should we be told and if we were, how would we react?
In February, former president Barack Obama said aliens were real before hastily clarifying that he hadn’t seen any evidence but then, would he tell us anyway?
In HG Wells’ classic sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, alien arrival prompts societal collapse as people flee from cities and in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, the existence of aliens sends religious groups into mass panic and History is littered with examples of new information about our place in the Cosmos not going down well.
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his theory that every star was a sun and had it's own planets, Galileo Galilei was sentenced to permanent house arrest for saying the Earth was not the center of the Universe and Nicolaus Copernicus only avoided a similar fate by releasing his heliocentric model theory by dying very soon after.
My own view is that Aliens MUST exist because there are just far too many planets in the Universe where life could have started but do i believe they are coming here in Spaceships and a Government has covered it all up?   
No i don't as the sheer distances involved would make it unfeasible but i live in hope that one day something other worldy might turn up and asked to be taken to our leader and that would start the argument how who exactly the leader would be because there are a few at the moment who if they met, would lead to them to decide to go ahead with the Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy solution of demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

What's On The Moon?

Humans first landed on the Moon 50 years ago and have already left 500,000 pounds of our stuff on the Lunar surface so what exactly have we left on the Moon?
Over 70 spacecraft vehicles remain on the Moon for the simple reason that they are heavy and not worth the cost to bring back and some of it is waste from the trip that the astronauts dumped when they got to their destination such as food packaging, wet wipes, 100 packets of human urine and excrement.
Astronauts also dumped tools and television equipment to make room for the 850 pounds of Moon rocks and lunar soil they bought back.
Then there’s also six American flags, a photograph of Charles Duke;'s family he left behind, two golf balls, a  plaque that reads: 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind'.
The Astronauts also left two medals that had been awarded to the late Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov as well as astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker’s ashes so quite a decent haul of Earth stuff hanging around up there and once we get there properly, that will expand exponentially because us humans are messy buggers. 

China On The Dark Side Of The Moon

Space, it seems, is one the few times when we all come together and pool our resources so we have the European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Ageny (CSA) and the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) teaming up on the James Webb Telescope and NASA and the ESA are cosying up for a joint trip to Neptune but China have yet to join the team and are doing their own thing on the dark side of the Moon.   
Their Chang'e-6 lunar probe has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon to collect soil and rock samples and bring them back to Earth for the first time.
'The mission involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty' said the the China National Space Administration, mainly due to the far side of the Moon having the mass of the moon between it and the mission staff on Earth which is why it has only been attempted once before and that was also China in 2019.
Every step is hopefully aiming towards putting people on moon again and China has joined relative newcomers in Japan and India to the space exploration game but China hopes to land a person on the moon before 2030 while America is planning to land its astronauts on the moon again in 2026.
While i understand countries wanting to do things for national pride and all that nonsense, if we could all just get together and pool our understanding and do more joint Space missions then we could broaden our knowledge and get where we want to get much quicker and safer.

Put The Camera Phones Down For Now

Whereas usually the only people who see the Northern Lights are the few hardy souls and polar bears of the Arctic Circle, last weekend the Sun spat out a flare so large that even people as down as the
South Coast of England were able to see one of natures most impressive phenomenons.
The usual Solar Flares which are emitted by the Sun and only visible to the lucky few are of the A, B, C and M variety but occasionally the Sun gets it full paddy on and coughs up an extreme X-class flare such as the one last week which was an X2 and had a million camera phones pointing up to the night sky but the Sun is in the peak of its 11 year Solar Cycle and the European Space Agency are saying we could expect some more and no sooner said then done, on Tuesday the Sun spits out what has been measured as an X8.7, four times bigger than the one which so delighted everyone at the weekend.
The not so good news is the direction it came out of the Suns surface at because rather than hit us straight in the face like the last one, this one was emitted as the Sun was rotating away from us so we won't be seeing it lighting up the Sky unfortunately, the ESA putting out a statement that due to its location, this flare will likely NOT have any geomagnetic impacts on Earth.
The good news is that the current cycle, which began in late 2019, is predicted to reach its peak in July 2025 and as we approach it, we can expect more frequent and intense solar events, potentially leading to more opportunities to witness the awe-inspiring northern lights.
The largest ever Solar Flare came in 2003 and was so strong the X-ray detectors failed when they got to X17 but scientists estimate that it reached x28 strength but it only delivered a glancing blow to Earth as it shot down the side of us at a speedy 4,473,873 mph.
The proper name for a solar flare is a Coronal Mass Ejections which sounds like one of those films that should come in brown paper bags and be carried by shifty looking men in raincoats and they are not dangerous to us but  they can play havoc with electrical systems and can disrupt radio transmissions and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission line facilities, resulting in potentially massive and long-lasting power outages.
So if your radio starts crackling or your lights flickering, it could be due to a coronal mass ejection. If you hear heavy breathing coming from that mac wearing neighbour it is probably another type of mass ejection we really shouldn't think too much about.

Put The Kettle On, Be There Soon Europa

Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's Enceladus are the two most likely places where we would find life in our Solar System as both are thought to contain liquid water beneath their ice sheets , have a stable orbit and geothermal activity but we will never know if life exists on either of them unless we  throw a few missions their way, so that's exactly what scientists are doing with Europa the first of the Moons to be the recipient of spacecraft from Earth.
Europa is approximately 90% the size of our Moon and Nasa believe that there could be a liquid saltwater ocean containing twice as much water as Earth’s oceans and in October, Nasa’s Europa Clipper  will be making the 6 year, 484 million mile trip with the tools to not only detect it but see if there is any alien life swimming around in it or at least the ingredients of the building blocks for life.
As Europa launches huge plumes of 'water' off it's surface, the plan is fly Europa Clipper through one of these and analyse its composition, looking for bacterial cell material which would indicate life is, or was, present and lead to some further investigation and one of the greatest scientific discoveries.
Exciting stuff although by the time Europa Clipper gets there in 2030, by then we may have people living in a Moon outpost because after a far too long lull, Space Exploration is getting interesting again.

Not Super But Still A Nova

When Astronomers say something is going to happen soon, they are generally taking about eons such as when they announced that the Star named Betelgeuse was starting to shed its outer layers and will be going Supernova very, very soon by which they meant sometime within the next 100,000 years so when i heard that T Coronae Borealis was going to go kaboom, my first thought was sure, i will make sure to tell my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren to keep an eye out for it.
Turns out this time they meant within the next 6 months because 3,000 light years away T Coronae Borealis is literally on the verge of not only blowing it's top but it's bottom and sides also in an explosion we can see from our Planet without a telescope, just a working pair of eyes.
This Nova isn't going to be Super though, just a common old Nova, and scientists have said that it blows every 80 years and dims for a year before it goes bang and it has been dimming like a maniac for the past twelve months so grab your popcorn and a deckchair and look towards the constellation Corona Borealis
and see the 'new' bright star which should hang around for about a week.
In a Nova, the explosion doesn't destroy the star as it just blows off excess material it has accumulated but a Supernova destroys the star completely which is why when Betelgeuse finally goes full Kaboom, it is going to be very, very impressive and well worth marking on your 102,024 calendar.

Water On the Moon

Next time the Moon is waxing (The Capital D Shape) and you can see the right hand side of it take a look towards the outer edge between 1 and 2 o'clock and just up and to the right of the Mare Crisium you will see a crater called Vestine and after staring at it in wonder send me a cheque because i own that and i charge to view it.
The reason for the post about Moon Craters is that the depressions in the Moons surface is where scientists are now looking for a resource which could change everything about Space Travel, water.
NASA said that it would cost about £1m a litre of water to the surface of the moon from Earth due to the cost of the fuel needed to launch a rocket and break free of the Earth's gravity so if they can find it there then it would significantly reduce costs and they are looking at the Moon's South Pole where they expect to find water molecules in it's shadowy craters which are as cold as -230C.
After deliberately smashing a rocket into one of the craters and confirming that the plume of material thrown off the surface contained the key indicators for water, NASA are launching a rocket this week, IM-1, to the Malapert-A crater which is the furthest South humans have landed a rocket and explore the crater to see if there is water, frozen or otherwise there which as well as being essential to any eventual human inhabitants, the water molecules could be split into oxygen and hydrogen that could be used as rocket fuel.
Other plans include NASA plans to land astronauts at the south pole in 2026 as part of its Artemis missions as well as launching a space station to orbit around the Moon but it could be the start of a busy time for the Lunar south pole as India and Japan have a joint mission planned for 2026 and
China is hoping to land at the pole the same year and build a research station on the surface by 2030.
If water is found on the Moon then it could open an exciting new chapter of space exploration and if they find any water in the Vestine Crater then it's mine so keep your hands off.

Japan Joins Exculsive Moon Club

It is being reported that Japan have joined an exclusive club and become the fifth country in history to reach the moon when one of its spacecrafts successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface early Saturday after the USSR, USA, China and India.
The key word is 'successful' landings because in the list of nations who have reached the surface of the moon it is 3rd after its Hagoromo craft crash landed on the lunar surface in 1990 although that was only because it went haywire during a flyby and they decided to dump it onto the moon instead and claim the bronze medal.
That only 10 nations have managed to land on our nearest celestial neighbour, and only 5 successfully not ending in a cloud of moon dust and a new crater, shows just how difficult it is although this weekends Japanese effort may just turn out to be another bit of Earth litter cluttering up the lunar surface as the craft’s solar panel has failed to work so will only last as long as its battery hold out, measured in hours.
If nothing else the Japanese are calling it a success as it not only landed successfully but exactly where they aimed it rather than within the six mile target area usually used by space probes and would result in a long walk for any Astro, Cosmo, Taiko, Spatio or Vyomanauts to any future lunar base.
The project was the fruit of two decades of work on precision technology by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, at cost of 18 billion yen (£94 million) but the NASA Artemis project has two exciting missions penciled in for September 2025 to send a crewed mission to flyby the moon and September 2026 to actually land humans on the moon so things are going to get exciting and we are taking a long, overdue step to the much discussed lunar base.

Down To Earth With A Bump

After travelling 157.4 million miles and 5,963 orbits around the Earth, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio literally came down to Earth with a bump after after 371 days in the International Space Station becoming the second longest ever a human has stayed in space behind Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov who spent 437 days onboard the Mir Space Station in the mid 1990s.
His time in orbit was extended in March after the spacecraft he and his crewmates had been due to fly home in developed a coolant leak but when he finally did get back down he was greeted by Gravity and a hospital worth of medical services which is why the idea of a Mars mission which would see humans in space for 3 years seems still beyond us .
His extended trip in space will provide valuable insights into how humans can cope with long-duration spaceflight but we already know the effects of spaceflight on the human body from other space travellers and none of them are beneficial.
Muscle and bone mass quickly begins to diminish in space, as much as 2% for every month they spend in space and it can take four years for their bone mass to return to normal after returning to Earth.
The lack of gravity pulling down on their bodies also mean that their spines elongate slightly leading to issues such as back pain while in space and slipped disks once back on Earth and with no gravity, blood can accumulate in the head and pool at the back of the eye and around the optic nerve, leading to changes in the eyes structure.
Most seriously the prolonged journey into space damages an Astronauts DNA strands and a sharp drop in white blood cells which affects immunity so we shouldn't try to run before we can walk until science develops a way to travel faster then we can currently to shorten the trip, develop some form of artificial gravity aboard the rockets or we create a string of fully equipped regular stopping off points.

Not Quite A SpaceCraft

I really hate to be a pedant about it but stuff it, i'm going to be anyway because i can't allow the headlines that Virgin today flew people into Space because he never, he flew them very, very high but not technically into Space.
Richard Branson's space tourism business, Virgin Galactic, made it's virgin flight into the upper reaches of the atmosphere today, an altitude of 49.7 mile which is short of the Kármán line which is the internationally agreed-upon border at 62 miles that marks the border where outer space officially starts.
To Virgin Galactic 02 Spacecraft is therefore not a Spacecraft and according to Virgin itself it is not designed to reach the Kármán line so we can't put it down to a test and it will gradually fly higher and reach 'Space' so to be more accurate it's a very high-altitude aircraft.
Given that commercial flights are between six and eight miles above sea level, reaching a touch off 50 miles is still amazing and the view of the Earth must have been magnificent but i don't want to urinate on Branson's campfire too much as with his other venture, Virgin Orbit, on the rocks having filed for bankruptcy after it's first and only UK launch failed in January, i hope it is a success because the more people we have attempting Space Flight the better but for the more pedantic amongst us, like me, Virgin Galactic 02 Spacecraft really should be renamed the Virgin Galactic 02 AlmostSpaceCraft.

Today Is...Apollo 11 Returns To Earth

We're all familiar with the Apollo 11 Moon landing because we have Neil Armstrong's unforgettable line and the live space footage and the American flags stabbed into the Moon to remember it by but what we're not quite as familiar with is the trip there and back with three men crammed inside the space equivalent of an Ice Cream van.
It may have been the single greatest human achievement in the history of the entire planet but it didn't stop NASA accidentally erasing the original tapes from the first Moon landing because despite a budget of millions, nobody went and got some extra blank video tapes and to cut costs, NASA had resorted to reusing tapes on later missions and at some point, a NASA employee had taped over it.
For conspiracy theorists, it's further proof that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had travelled only as far as a Stanley Kubrik studio where the Government mocked up the whole thing to stick a finger up to the Soviets while the Cold War was in full swing.
The conspiracy theorists spout how the American flag is flapping as if in a breeze, no stars are visible in the pictures taken from the surface of the Moon and the exposure to radiation from the Van Allen Belt would have killed the three of them instantly but that is to overlook the 382kg of moon rock and the tracks made by the astronauts in the moon dust but with the Internet at their fingertips, the early 21st century in is a very good time to be a douche-bag so what do they think happened?
The story goes that in the midst of the Space Race, someone in the American government saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and asked Stanley Kubrick to help them fake the Apollo 11 moon landings in order to gazump the Soviet Union who were ahead of America in the Space Race at the time.
Kubrik agreed but afterwards he realised just what a big deal it was and become worried that he might be silenced by the Government so to protect himself, he filled his film, The Shining, with clues about the conspiracy.
Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper, Room 237 is a reference to the 237,000 miles distance between Earth and the Moon, when Jack types 'All work and no play…', the first word looks like “A11” or Apollo 11. The twins represent NASA’s Gemini space program and the guy in a bear suit represents the Soviet Bear.
If that isn't enough to convince you then how about the final piece of the jigsaw, Jack agreed to look after the Overlook Hotel during the winter just like Kubrick agreed to help America during the Cold War.
I don't know how much more proof anyone would need but it would explain why Kubrik made such a pigs ear of filming the King novel, because he was too busy stuffing it full of fake moon mission hints that he completely forgot how the book finished and just made up his own ending.

Alien's Are Such Bad Parkers

Such is the downgrade of American Intelligence Officers after the Iraq debacle that if one told me it was raining i would stick my hand out the window to check for myself so when an ex-US intelligence Agency Officer supposedly blows the whistle on alien spacecraft landings i am hoping this is one who wasn't dropped on his head as child but meet his claims with a massive dose of skepticism.
David Grusch, 14 years in the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and sat on the US Department of Defense’s unidentified aerial phenomena taskforce has said that the US government are hiding the fact that it has been retrieving alien spacecraft and retrieved craft of non-human origin for decades.
Sounds great until you note that the evidence he put forward to bolster his case amounts to him saying it which as evidence goes, is on the flimsy side.
Michael Garrett, Radio Astronomer at the UK's leading University for all things Space, was not that impressed, explaining that: 'If there were all these alien spacecraft crashing on Earth you’d think that if they could travel between the stars, they could get the last 0.0001% of the journey right too' and he has a point until you realise that due to the difference in Gravity and Atmospheric pressure we struggle to land on Mars properly after traveling 140 million miles to get there so we mess up the final 0.0001% ourselves.
I believe there are life forms elsewhere in the galaxy and some could well have advanced space flight capabilities but why they would want to come here and watch us is another question along with why are most sightings and crash landings in Hicksville, USA and not in Brighton Town Centre or onto the roof of a Tesco Express in Cardiff St Davids Shopping Centre?
We get our answer to that after learning that Grush is looking to expand his sky watching adventure in the sentence 'after donation's to build five more observatories to extend the search to other parts of the US. Oh there is that.
Anyway, if they landed here Suella Braverman would send to them on the next plane to Rwanda.

The End Of The International Space Station

What goes up must come down and that is true even if the thing going up is as big as a football pitch and weighs 400 tonnes but after circling the Earth every 90 minutes since 1998, plans are being made to bring the International Space Station to as graceful a decent as you can make for something which is travelling at 17,500 mph and heavier than 250 elephants.
Our record with bringing down massive hulks of Space Station isn't great, Skylab overshot the Indian Ocean and Aussies in the Western part of Australia were picking bits of it out of their garden and the Soviet era Salyut 7 unexpectedly found it's new earthly home to be the lot less Ocean-like Argentina   
As getting the calculations even slightly wrong could result in people waking up and saying i'm sure there used to a country between Austria and Romania, they have started the planning stage 8 years before what they hope is the splashdown in the Pacific in 2031 using a Space-Tug which is using another space-craft to gradually nudge it back into the Earth's thicker atmosphere where it will slowed down by atmospheric drag before plopping down in the Pacific between New Zealand and South America.
'It is a significant challenge' says NASA, 'A 400-tonne object falling out of the sky at Orbital Speeds is not great' but they think that after the re-entry forces does it's thing to melt and disintegrate large sections of it, what is left of it will be significantly less and pose no risk to human life although the 'we think' bit isn't a confidence filler.
If you happen to find yourself drifting across a seemingly uninhabited expanse of the Pacific in 2031, keep an eye out for a shower of molten hot debris raining down on Earth from space and if you are in New Zealand, you may want to keep your pets out of the garden that day.

What Are Those Chinese Up To In Space?

While Russia is today's big bogeyman, China also gets it fair share of scare stories thrown at it and the latest is the   mysterious Chinese spacecraft which released an unidentified 'object' into orbit.
According to US Intelligence, the mysterious Chinese spacecraft has landed after nine months in orbit on a secret mission and the Chinese State Media did admit as much saying that the experiment had been a 'complete success'.
Hmmm....with no other details provided is obviously something a bit iffy but the Americans know that it was uncrewed, relatively small and the craft released an 'object' into orbit sometime in October which disappeared from their satellite tracking screens in January.
Obviously the only conclusion is that the sneaky Chinese have progressed from Weather Balloons to hiding space weapons above our heads and are positioning nukes or lasers in space ready to annihilate us in our beds so who could complain about a few more hundred billion being shoved towards the military to
keep us safe in our beds.
Hang on, what's this bit at the bottom of the intelligence report? They believe that the craft made use of a mechanical robot arm and they were practising satellite removal capability to repair damaged satellites or remove orbital debris which would explain the object disappearing, it was released and then grabbed again.
The Chinese developing the technology to repair their satellites isn't going to be scary enough to increase the U.S. Space Force's $30 billion budget so just say Chinese Secret Space Mission over and over until the Government agree to spend more on stopping those pesky Chinese satellite fixers.

Betelgeuse Going Kaboom Very, Very Soon

As with Uranus, there has been a subtle change with the way Betelgeuse is pronounced, when i was younger it was always pronounced as Beetlejuice but seems like to distance it from the film of the same name, astronomy types want to pronounce it as Betelgeist but that may be irrelevant because it may soon become known as a massive black hole 650 light years away because Betelgeuse is predicted to go supernova very, very soon.
A supernova is the extremely bright, super-powerful explosion of a star. In short gravity wants to crush it inwards but the outward pushing burning fuel inside the star keeps it from collapsing but when the fuel runs out...BANG.
It explodes and sheds all it's hots gas and what's left is the dense, gravity crushed core and the last Supernova seen from Earth was in 1604 and was described as bright as the moon during the day which sounds very cool indeed or at least very cool as long as the thing happens further than 100 light years, any closer than that and our ringside seat would not end with a ringside, a seat or any of us to say how lovely it looked.
The first step of a supernova is the Star has to dim as the gravity starts to win the battle against the outward pressure of the fuel and Betelgeuse has become noticeably dimmer since 2019 and as the light from the star takes 650 years to reach us, it meant the destructive process started in 1396 when England and France were only at half-time in their 100 year war.
The Hubble Space Telescope has also captured images of Betelgeuse starting to shed its outer layers and just getting ready to go the full kaboom and make a mess of the shoulder of Orion so get the deckchair, grab the popcorn and something wet...and then put it back again because to our normal people very, very soon means something very different than when an Astrophysicist says it because it will go supernova..sometime within the next 100,000 years, give or take.
It could be tomorrow, it could be the year 102,023 but i wouldn't hold my breath but i do find myself looking towards Orion in the Winter months just to make sure he still has his shoulder.

UK Space Launch, Nice Plane

 
The UK officially enters the Space Age at 22:16 on Monday with the first orbital space launch from Cornwall's Spaceport and my initial excitement at being invited to an actual launch has diminished slightly when the details arrived.
The viewing area is located across the runway from the Spaceport hangar and the literature states that 'Although it will be dark, you'll still be able to witness some aspects of the launch and experience the sounds and smells that come with it'.
The launch, rather than a rocket firing up vertically like imagined, is a rocket carrying satellites being carried under the wing of a Virgin Plane which will be released 40 minutes later once it is over the other side of Ireland and in the Atlantic Ocean so the aspects of the launch being witnessed will be the plane taking off.
There will not be parking on site and umbrellas are not permitted despite every weather app on my phone showing rain for Cornwall on Monday night and a warning that 'there is no guarantee the launch will take place'.   
As i am that end of the country on Monday anyway then i will attend just so i can say i was there unless i come down with something which means i am unable to travel and forced to watch it on the Spaceport's live YouTube channel instead in the dry and warm without an hour walk back to my car in the rain at stupid o' clock.

No Easy Way From The Earth To The Stars

The European Space Agency have announced their Class of 2022, a group of Astronauts who they hope will train for missions which include the construction of a new outpost that will orbit the moon, alongside missions to the lunar surface itself.
The selection process began in February 2021 and part of me thinks i would like to have thrown my hat into the ring although i knew full well that i wouldn't get past the first stage but i would be able to legitimately call myself a Space Cadet forever afterwards but what exactly does it take to be an astronaut?
The initial ESA intake was 23,000 European only applicants with the largest applications coming from Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands and the UK and the first sift was for people of a certain age range and held a couple of science degrees in science and one at Master’s level or above which cut the list of names down to 17,000.
From these it was whittled down to 1,550 who had 'relevant experience in a similar field' and these went on to the next stage which was classroom tests in Maths and Physics and psychometric and aptitude tests which took the number down to 400 who underwent more in-depth psychological evaluations and were observed playing group games as part of the assessment screening.  
The remaining 91 now underwent a medical evaluation designed to make sure the attendants held a very low risk of getting seriously ill on mission or having a major medical event in the next 15 years.
Finally, after 18 months, the five successful candidates for the Class of 22 were a Spanish Aeronautical engineer, a British Astronomer, a Belgian Neuroscientist, a Swiss Anaesthesiologist and another Brit, an Orthopaedic surgeon and there are also 11 'reserve' astronauts.
As i don't think a Cycling Proficiency Badge and a certificate for swimming 50m would have got me through the first sift then i was quite right to withhold my initial application but then the ESA saying is 'non est ad astra mollis e terris via' or there is no easy way from the Earth to the Stars and these guys have
definitely earned it.

Nothing But Space, Man

If you happen to find yourself in the Pacific Ocean about 5.40pm this afternoon, that thing you see coming at you at 25,000 mph would be the Artemis 1's Orion Capsule which is due to splash down at the end of its 4 week jaunt around the Moon.
If all goes according to plan, the heat shield will shrug off the 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit heat on its re-entry and bob around in the Ocean until a US Navy ship comes to pick it up and hand it over to scientists to decide whether the equipment stood up well enough to send people up in it next time, currently penciled in for May 2024.
While Artemis 1 was a test, Artemis 2 plans to send astronauts around the moon in 2024 and if that all goes well its full steam ahead for Artemis 3 in 2025 and actually landing humans on the Lunar surface, the first steps towards building a lunar research base and springboard for other missions including Mars.
All very exciting for us Space geeks and something which us humans should have done a long time ago, that we haven't been back leaving footprints in the Moon dust since 1972 is a terrible indictment on us humans, but the thing i am most excited about is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM.
This involves somehow either grabbing or deflecting an asteroid (the details are fuzzy) and placing it in orbit around the Moon. Phase one was the recent Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) where scientists rammed a satellite into the Dimorphos Asteroid to see if they could alter its orbit, which it did, so now they are deciding on which of the four candidate Asteroids it is currently eyeing up has the most favourable velocity, orbit, size and spin to safely deflect our way because if you are going to fling a massive space boulder our way you need to be sure it doesn't go wrong and you find yourself saying sorry into the smoking hole where Switzerland used to be.  
The date for becoming the owners of a new pet Asteroid is also 2025 so as long as we haven't blown our stupid selves up with a nuclear war by then, 2025 could be a very exciting time for Space fans.

That's A Big Mass Ejection

A Coronal Mass Ejections sounds like something you would see on a film of the Adult variety but it is a thing and one has been been spent spinning our way courtesy of our Star.
The Sun has been getting a bit frisky this week and has been sending Moderate-Class solar flares our way which resulted in an impressive aurora display and blacked out radio waves in parts of Europe and Africa but Sunspot AR3089 isn't finished with us just yet and has ejected more charged particles our way which are expected to strike our planet on Monday.
The solar flares range from A-class which are the weakest, then B-, C-, and M-class with X-class the strongest and it was an X3 Class which is threatening a direct hit and knocking out power lines, satellites and radio signals.
The Sun began its current cycle of solar activity in 2019, and is expected to reach the peak around 2025 but it is yet to top the biggest flare ever observed which was an X28 in 2003 which dealt the Earth a glancing blow but still had satellite engineers scurrying to redirect their satellites and airliners rerouted and polar routes restricted.
Although annoying to radio station owners, the solar flares are not dangerous in themselves due to our thick atmosphere stopping all of the harmful radiation before it reaches us on the ground but if one did get through and killed us all with radiation, at least we will go out with a beautiful solar light show.

A Post On Asteroids, Banana Daiquiri's & David Boreanaz

Space is sexy, not in a David Boreanaz serving me Banana Daiquiri's on a desert island dressed in skimpy speedo's type way but in a looking on in amazement and awe type way, think Boris Johnson making cocoa in your kitchen wearing his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas and you get the jist of where i am heading with this.
On the whole space exploration is lots of little very important, but very ho hum, missions like travelling a couple of million miles to have a look at a Planet's Atmosphere or collecting data on watercress being grown on the International Space Station but then the space boffins will do something spectacular and one which was announced in 2013 was to redirect an Asteroid into orbit around the moon.
Over the past nine years NASA have whittled down the list from 1,000 potential moon circling Asteroids to just four and are currently looking at which of these have the best velocity, orbit, size and spin to safely deflect our way because if you are going to fling a massive space boulder our way you need to be sure it doesn't go wrong and you find yourself apologising to the massive crater where Norway used to be.  
With the date for the pencilled in for 2025, NASA are doing a small scale practise by attempting to deflect an Asteroid out of it's orbit which has the double mission of being handy for redirecting the path of an Asteroid or Comet which is dangerously heading our way.  
Called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the target is the 170 metre Dimorphos Asteroid about 7 million miles away which will soon find a spacecraft ramming into it at 15,000 mph to try and change its orbit and provide vital information on how to best to apply it to future planetary defense scenarios which is crucial because an Asteroid over 140 meters landing on Earth would be catastrophic for life on Earth and each year a dozen or so over that size cause some sweating at NASA headquarters.
So yes, while preventing human's being wiped out is very important, it is a large step towards us having an freaking pet Asteroid circling the Moon and to return to my initial line, that's sexy in a David Boreanaz serving Banana Daiquiri's on a desert island while apologising that he had forgotten his speedo's and packed only a dozen bottle's of baby oil type way.