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NASA's canceled lunar space station tech will help build the Artemis moon base

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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...
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'The X-Files' creator Chris Carter says new director's cut of 'I Want to Believe' is 'the horror movie that we really wanted to make' (interview)

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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...
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This year's 'Masters of the Universe' movie wasn't Hollywood's first attempt at capturing the power of He-Man; they tried back in 1987, and failed then too

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For the generation that grew up in the 1980s, the release of the recent big-budget " Masters of the Universe " movie would undoubtedly have conjured up a sense of déjà-vu. Picture the scene. The year is 1987. You've got the action figures and the Castle Grayskull playset, you've watched every episode of the cartoon again and again, and you can recite He-Man's opening credits voiceover by heart. He has the power! Then someone tells you there's a live-action film adaptation coming out. You persuade your parents to take you to the theater, pick up a great big bucket of popcorn, and get ready to be transported to the familiar surroundings of Eternia. And then… Well, it's fair to say this is not the "Masters of the Universe" you know and love. Sure, leading man Dolph Lundgren is big, but why does he look and dress nothing like He-Man? Who's that Gwildor guy,...
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Total solar eclipse 2026 thrills millions with a stunning cosmic spectacle (photos, video)

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And just like that, it's over. Total solar eclipses are incredible moments in time, but they are fleeting. As the moon passes directly in front of the sun and its shadow sweeps across Earth's surface, the temperature drops and the light takes on an eerie twilight quality. Birds and other animals go quiet. It's a spectacle unlike any other. And for millions today who were lucky enough to be in the path of totality across Greenland, Iceland and Spain, that's exactly what they experienced . "I cannot believe what I just witnessed. I knew what to expect  — I've seen thousands of photos but nothing compares to that feeling you get when you watch the sun transform before your very eyes," Space.com skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic said after watching the eclipse from the deck of the MS Spitsbergen on the HX Expeditions eclipse voyage in Scoresby Sund, Greenland on Aug....
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Radiation-shielding vest aced Artemis I lunar test, could protect astronauts on moon and Mars missions

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A radiation-shielding vest might one day protect astronauts from dangerous, random outbursts from the sun, a new study finds. More than 50 years after the final Apollo mission, NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon . To succeed, this project must protect astronauts from solar radiation, especially the intense and unpredictable radiation from solar storms . Coating an entire spacecraft with a meaningfully thick layer of radiation shielding remains impractical due to weight constraints, but wrapping astronauts in protective garments may potentially be helpful. In the new study, researchers experimented with the AstroRad vest , which was designed by the Israeli startup StemRad with support from the Israel Space Agency and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. The garment was created to protect astronauts from explosions from the sun known as solar particle events. The "phan...
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Scientists create largest 2D map of the universe with 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion cosmic objects

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Astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever created, offering a sweeping new view of nearly 4 billion celestial objects across roughly three-quarters of the sky. The new map, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys team, contains a staggering 5.6 trillion pixels and combines more than 263,000 telescope exposures collected over more than a decade. The observations span visible and near-infrared wavelengths, providing an enormous portrait of stars, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena across the sky, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab. (You can explore the full data here .) "It's part of the fabric of astronomy research now," David Schlegel, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said...
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Scientists find 2 million active black holes, exploding stars and more, nearly doubling our view of the high-energy universe

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Astronomers have nearly doubled the number of known cosmic X-ray sources, offering the most comprehensive public view yet of the universe's hottest and most energetic objects. The second major public data release from the German-led eROSITA X-ray telescope contains a catalog of nearly 2 million X-ray-emitting objects, including supermassive black holes , galaxy clusters, stars and other extreme cosmic phenomena. The unprecedented dataset — called DR2 — will help astronomers investigate how black holes grow, galaxies evolve and the universe's largest structures formed, according to a statement from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "DR2 is the best inventory of the X-ray sky we have to date and opens the door to robust statistical studies of cosmic populations," Miriam E. Ramos-Ceja, Ground Segment Manager of the eROSITA instrument and lead author of the DR2...
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