It's time for Australia to develop its own guided missiles
Step by step, Australia is inching its way towards more autonomy in defence.
On Wednesday, Defence Minister Peter Dutton was reported to have signalled greater access to US missile technology will be a key test of the US-Australia alliance at a closed meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia.
In March Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the defence department woul France to boost cyber warfare force
The French defence ministry on Wednesday announced plans to significantly boost the country's four-year-old cyber warfare force, citing the "growing number and gravity" of hacking attacks on the country.
The government had already planned to add an additional 1,100 recruits to a unit created in response to the growing number of cyber attacks on the West, mostly blamed on Russia and China. Potential component defect to delay next Virgin Galactic flight
Virgin Galactic is further delaying its next SpaceShipTwo suborbital flight in order to check a potential issue the company says is unrelated to an ongoing FAA investigation.
SpaceX to launch private, all-civilian crew into Earth orbit
SpaceX is set to launch four people into space Wednesday on a three-day mission that is the first to orbit the Earth with exclusively private citizens on board, as Elon Musk's company enters the space tourism fray.
The "Inspiration4" mission caps a summer that saw billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos cross the final frontier, on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin spaceships respectively Space tourism: What's on offer
A few minutes of weightlessness, or a few days. A short hop above the Earth's atmosphere, or a journey to the Moon and back... the era of space tourism is upon us, and - for those who can pay - it comes with many options.
This year has been an important one for the up-and-coming sector, with a slew of new missions announced. Here is the state of play.
- SpaceX -
1/ INSPIRATION4 A billionaire, a cancer survivor... Who will be on the next SpaceX mission?
For the first time on Wednesday, SpaceX is due to send into orbit a crew made up entirely of complete novices, without a professional astronaut on board.
The four passengers are supposed to embody the opening-up of space to everyone, giving the mission its name: Inspiration4.
A billionaire, Jared Isaacman, is behind the project. It was he who chartered the mission, at his own expense, Perseverance collects first Mars samples
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has collected and stored the first samples of Martian rock for later return to Earth, but exactly when those samples will arrive on Earth remains uncertain.
SpaceX Inspiration4 mission will send four people with minimal training into orbit
On Sept. 15, 2021, the next batch of space tourists are set to lift off aboard a SpaceX rocket. Organized and funded by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, the Inspiration4 mission touts itself as "the first all-civilian mission to orbit" and represents a new type of space tourism.
The four crew members will not be the first space tourists this year. In the past few months, the world witnessed billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launching themselves and a lucky few others into space on brief suborbital trips.
Now officially a public company, BlackSky moving to expand sales and marketing
Satellite imagery and geospatial data provider BlackSky began trading on the NYSE Sept. 10, a day after closing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
Toward better space health: Understanding the effects of microgravity on P-glycoprotein
Deep space is most likely going to be humanity's final frontier, and space travel will undoubtedly become much more common in the future. However, space is a very hostile environment not only because of the technical difficulties that entail going there, but also because of the detrimental effects that constant microgravity has on the human body. Some examples of these are bone loss, muscle atrophy, and liver and kidney problems, as well as space motion sickness.
It should come as no surprise that astronauts resort to various drugs to ameliorate the symptoms caused by microgravity. Unfortunately for them, microgravity has been noted to have a significant impact on the pharmacokinetics of certain drugs, which could lead to altered efficacy and unexpected outcomes. In particular, delivering an accurate amount of a drug to the brain has become a key problem in space health.
In a recent effort to shed some light onto this issue, a team of scientists from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, studied the effects that microgravity has on P-glycoprotein (P-gp), an important efflux transporter. Their results are detailed in their paper published in Space: Science and Technology, on 17 Jun 2021.
