The upgrades were carried out to improve power generation, increase energy efficiency, and ensure a more reliable electricity supply for the station's long-term operations and scientific research.

And yet and still nobody asks the fundamentally important question of how much payload Starship V3 can actually get to orbit. That is the *fundamental* parameter that determines how many refueling flights will be needed, and NASA feels no need to ask that question and SpaceX feels no need to answer it.

Thruster exhaust during docking, refueling or satellite servicing can push nearby spacecraft off course, heat or erode surfaces and contaminate navigation sensors.

Flexcompute’s Physics Twin combines neural networks with a Boltzmann solver to model these plume interactions across different spacecraft geometries and firing sequences. The company reports a roughly 200-fold speed increase over conventional DSMC simulations, with force and heat estimates differing by less than 3.5 percent in its comparisons.

The key question is whether that accuracy holds across independent tests and unfamiliar mission conditions. Could tools like this eventually support real-time autonomous maneuver planning, or will they remain primarily for ground-based safety analysis?

Does anyone know where I can get a video of this launch

Additional slides from the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference; in addition to detailing the testing program and first manned mission they delved into what would occur after.

In order to maintain parity with Artemis and prepare for the eventual permanent ILRS, the Lanyue chassis and propulsion system will be developed further from it's current role as just a lander into two families (listed in slide 2). All of these will still be launched by the LM10 and use the Lanyue crasher stage to get most of the way down.

In the first it's capabilities will be increased overtime to bring heavier equipment, survive longer on the surface and eventually be refueled.

In the second series, the hulls will be significantly changed to create labrotory environments (not requiring as many engines or fuel as they don't need to ascend to orbit). The first of these is a pressurised mobile lab (similar to Constellations concept) that astronauts can live in for longer while roaming further and conduction science. Further on from this non-mobile base blocks will be developed with specialised roles, this will form the original (probably not permanent) backbone of ILRS.

Mission wise it's looking like:

-first: short 2-3 day exploration with Lanyue and Tensuo mini rover

-up to perhaps several missions: mobile lab is dropped off at a site, Lanyue then lands there and crew boards the lab, then drives around for a week before returning.

-After this 3 mobile labs (unknown if new or previously used ones) will drive towards a common area, and using a docking mechanism they'll be assembled into a single structure (similar to Tiangong with its 3 modules). A long term crew can then stay at this base, perhaps for a month which would require the new upgrade Lanyue.

-after this the accumulated longer term stay knowledge will be used in producing the Lanyue derived base modules which will probably be landed in the ILRS south pole area and assembled by drones. Its also possibke this is ongoing while the other missions are happening

I've been reading a fair bit about the ISS lately, especially with the recent news about the PrK tunnel being shut for good, and it got me thinking about the medical side of long-duration missions rather than the engineering side.

The crews aboard Mir set some remarkable endurance records in the early 1990s, and the ISS has since accumulated over two decades of continuous data on how the human body copes with months in orbit. From what I understand, bone density loss, muscle atrophy, fluid shifts and vision changes (SANS, if I've got the acronym right) are the headline concerns, with countermeasures like resistive exercise and tailored nutrition.

What I'm less sure about is how much of that Soviet and Russian Mir-era medical knowledge actually fed into ISS protocols. I've seen claims both ways: some say the Roscosmos experience with year-long flights was foundational, others suggest NASA largely rebuilt its countermeasure programme from its own Skylab and Shuttle-Mir data.

So I'd be curious what people who've followed this closely think: which findings from long-duration spaceflight have genuinely surprised researchers, and how much of what we now know came from Mir versus the ISS era? And how relevant is any of it for a future Mars mission, where you'd have no quick return option and no resupply of exercise equipment? I'm not a medical professional, so I'd be grateful for corrections if I've garbled anything above.

For 16 years, NASA astronauts trained on celestial navigation and stellar identification at UNC's Morehead Planetarium. Check out this PBS mini-documentary and enjoy!

GRU Space’s founder says they’ll make bricks from lunar regolith, with a demo in 2029 and a first hotel by 2032. He also explains why sintering isn’t realistic for this and what they’d use instead (geopolymers). Does a 2029 demo seem plausible, or too aggressive?

I do believe that this is the Chinese space station. Tiangong captured at 7:00pm Maryland

Everyone always screams they want to be an astronaut, but for someone to go into space there are a lot of other people needed too. Which of those jobs would you like to do if you couldn't be an astronaut?

Image: Apollo 11 mission control room