technical updates

Cards Against Humanity isn't done with its scorched-Earth campaign against SpaceX and Elon Musk. The Chicago-based company behind the popular fill-in-the-blank adult card game is inviting the public to join its design committee to erect an " Elon Musk is a Sad Little B----- with No Friends" monument on a stretch of land it owns near SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas. Cards Against Humanity (CAH) brought a $15 million lawsuit against SpaceX in 2024 for illegally dumping construction materials and other equipment on land owned by CAH. SpaceX decided to settle with the company in 2025 and removed its "gravel, tractors, and space garbage" from the property prior to the area's annexation for the city of Starbase's incorporation, according to CAH . But the company, and its apparent distaste for "racist billionaires," as it...

An 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) Falcon 9 rocket stage hit the moon last Wednesday (Aug. 5), stirring lunar regolith in a massive plume of dust observable all the way from Earth. The rocket joined some 3,000 manmade objects scattered on the surface of our planet's companion. Some experts think it's about time we start treating the pristine lunar environment with a bit more respect . Around 200 tons of Earth stuff have been either deliberately left on or crashed into the moon since the beginning of the space age. Some of this material has a prominent place in history books: The descent modules from all six Apollo landing missions, Soviet Lunakhod rovers from the 1970s and China's 2010s Yutu 1 and 2 robots still sit where they had been left or ran out of power. But there is also a lot of stuff on the moon that wasn't really meant to end up there. Astronomer and space historian Jo...

Prolific NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has announced his retirement from the U.S. space agency after 30 years of public service. NASA announced Fincke's decision on Wednesday (Aug. 12), celebrating his contributions to spaceflight and long career of accomplishments. “Few people have had the opportunity to shape as many chapters of NASA’s history as Mike Fincke,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that day in a statement . Fincke departs as NASA's fourth-most flown astronaut, racking up a cumulative 549 days in space over four separate spaceflights. During those, he performed nine spacewalks and served twice as commander of the International Space Station (ISS). Most recently, he launched as pilot on SpaceX's Crew-11 mission to the ISS, stepping into the role of commander for ISS Expedition 74 from August 2025 to January 2026. Before his acceptance into NASA's 16th astronaut c...

Supermassive black holes are best known for their immense gravity, pulling in everything that strays too close, even light. But new research suggests these cosmic giants can also hurl enormous amounts of energy outward, driving powerful disturbances that ripple hundreds of thousands of light-years through space. A study led by Satoshi Yamada of Tohoku University in Japan found that winds generated by an actively feeding supermassive black hole are about 100 times more powerful than astronomers previously estimated. These outflows, scientists say, inject an amount of energy comparable to several billion supernova explosions, driving turbulence through hot gas across distances of roughly 300,000 light-years —far beyond the boundaries of the host galaxy itself. "Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds," Yamada said in a ...

Not every canceled NASA program earns a halo after its demise, but one scrapped project is finding new life by contributing its parts to help the space agency achieve its moon base goals faster. Northrop Grumman is repurposing hardware and technology from the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) space station module for use on a new series of Lunar Infrastructure Demo (LID) missions. HALO was originally designed as the habitation module for NASA's since-cancelled moon-orbiting Gateway space station but found itself on the chopping block when the agency restructured the Artemis program architecture earlier this year. Rather than scrap the unfinished module outright, Northrop Grumman will adapt HALO's electrical and mechanical components to support the development of technologies for a moon base that can survive the cold, weeks-long night at the lunar south pole while sustaining the l...

Eighteen years later, it still gives me a jump scare, even though I know it's coming. Agent Mulder, hot on the trail of a group of murderers who are harvesting their victims' organs, breaks into a makeshift laboratory in an attempt to save an abducted woman. He finds a gruesome scene of bodies on ice and surgeons, scalpels in hand, preparing to transplant the villain's head onto the abducted woman's body. Mulder turns and  — there it is! The villain's severed head on ice! And it opens its eyes . It sounds less like a scene out of a science fiction mystery series and one more suited to a horror film. And that's precisely why Chris Carter, creator of " The X-Files ", is revisiting the 2008 film "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" in a new R-rated director's cut coming to Hulu on Aug. 14. Space.com got the chance to speak with Carter about the upcoming di...