Copernical Team
Richard Branson announces trip to space, ahead of Jeff Bezos
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![Richard Branson announces trip to space, ahead of Jeff Bezos](https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2021/richard-branson-announ.jpg "In this undated image from video provided by Blue Origin on Thursday, July 1, 2021, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk, right, meets with Jeff Bezos. On Thursday, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company's July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Credit: Blue Origin via AP")
Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.
Seasoned US pilot Wally Funk to fulfill space dream 60 years on
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Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see her dream come true at age 82.
On Thursday, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on his spaceflight company Blue Origin's July 20 launch.
The flight will not just make her the oldest person ever to travel in space, but also a walking, breathing symbol of the rewards of audacity and perseverance.
"I like to do things that nobody's ever done," she said in a video posted on Instagram by Bezos.
Mercury 13
Funk grew up in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico. As a child she was passionate about aviation and took her first flying lesson at age nine. In high school, she was barred from taking mechanics, a subject reserved for boys.
Such rules did not prevent her from obtaining a pilot's license and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known for its aviation program. By now she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time.
At the very beginning of the 1960s she joined a privately-funded, innovative flight program called Mercury 13—which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.
From atoms to planets, the longest-running Space Station experiment
New approach could change how we track extreme air pollution events
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When extreme and dangerous air pollution events strike and blanket the air with hazardous levels of pollution, it causes a major threat to public health and safety. It's also exceedingly challenging to monitor. The pollutants move quickly through the atmosphere, and can undergo chemical transformations from one form to another, leaving it difficult to predict the level of human exposure.
I China begins construction of new survey telescope to detect space debris
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The construction of a survey telescope array, which will be mainly used to detect space debris in medium and high orbits, has begun in northwest China's Qinghai Province, taking advantage of the plateau region's clear night skies.
The multi-application survey telescope array, MASTA, developed by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is under construction in th Closing the gap on the missing lithium
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There is a significant discrepancy between theoretical and observed amounts of lithium in our universe. This is known as the cosmological lithium problem, and it has plagued cosmologists for decades. Now, researchers have reduced this discrepancy by around 10%, thanks to a new experiment on the nuclear processes responsible for the creation of lithium. This research could point the way to a more 'Lonely cloud' bigger than Milky Way found in a galaxy 'no-man's land' by UAH physics team
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A scientifically mysterious, isolated cloud bigger than the Milky Way has been found by a research team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in a "no-man's land" for galaxies.
The so-called orphan or lonely cloud is full of hot gas with temperatures of 10,000-10,000,000 degrees Kelvin (K) and a total mass 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That makes it larger than the mass Physicists observationally confirm Hawking's black hole theorem for the first time
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There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons - the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape - should never shrink. This law is Hawking's area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971.
Fifty years later, physicists at MIT and elsew Trailblazing woman pilot, 82, to fly into space with Bezos
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Barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, 82, will join Jeff Bezos this month on the first crewed spaceflight for the billionaire's company Blue Origin, the firm announced Thursday.
The trip is 60 years overdue for Funk, who was one of the Mercury 13 - the first women trained to fly to space from 1960-1961, but excluded because of their gender.
On July 20, she will become the oldest pe Rogue Space and Orbital Assembly want to lease 2 Laura Orbot spacecraft
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Rogue Space Systems Corporation announced the signing of a Letter of Intent by Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the world's first large scale space construction company, to lease two Laura Orbital Robot (Orbots) spacecrafts for Orbital Assembly's P-STAR Mission to launch construction technologies for the first low gravity space hotel.
As part of the agreement, Rogue Space and Orbital As