The bottom line is that there is no relevant federal definition of an astronaut. Duffy's own agency certainly doesn't claim responsibility for making that designation.

Regardless, it's not really his call. You may not like Perry's music or her association with Dr. Luke. But if she wants to call herself an astronaut, there's no one who can tell her she's not. Personally, I'm happy to call her one, along with the many other amazing women who have only reached space in the last few years because of the suborbital space tourism vehicles developed by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. The more the merrier.

I find it much better to live in a world where space tourism is actually happening, rather than one in which it is not.

• When Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will fly again?
• Phantom Space delays Daytona launch, again.
• It appears the Minotaur IV rocket still exists.
• French launch firm gets some funding runway.
• RFA gets a new CEO.
• Blue Origin launches all-female mission.
• Bahamas to SpaceX: Let's press pause.
• NASA will fly on Soyuz for a while longer
• Falcon 9 sets reuse record.
• The real story behind the Space Shuttle legislation.

During a public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) April 17, members expressed concerns about growing risks as the station nears its projected end in 2030.

“The ISS has entered the riskiest period of its existence,” said Rich Williams, a member of the panel, arguing there were “increasing risks” to the station.

Some of those risks are problems the station has been facing for years, such as leaks in a vestibule of the station’s Zvezda module called PrK. Russian and American experts have been investigating small cracks seen in PrK for several years, with no resolution on their cause or how to best address them.

Williams said officials from NASA and Roscosmos are scheduled to meet later this month in Moscow to update efforts to mitigate risks on the cracking. In the meantime, he said ISS managers have implemented procedures such as limiting repressurization of the vestibule, which links a docking port to the rest of the station. “The panel has considere

Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, wrote on X that questions about what is holding up the next Atlas V launch are best directed toward the Space Force. A spokesperson for ULA told Ars the company is still working with the range to determine the next launch date. "The rocket and payload are healthy," she said. "We will announce the new launch date once confirmed."

One possibility is a test of one or more submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, which commonly occur in the waters off the east coast of Florida. But those launches are usually accompanied by airspace and maritime warning notices to ensure pilots and sailors steer clear of the test. Nothing of the sort has been publicly released in the last couple of weeks.

Maybe something is broken at the Florida launch base. When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case

While the B-2's motion caused it to appear a little smeared in the Google Earth image a few years ago, the satellite's velocity created a different artifact. The satellite appears five times in different colors, which tells us something about how the image was made. Airbus' Pleiades satellites take pictures in multiple spectral bands: blue, green, red, panchromatic, and near-infrared.

At lower left, the black outline of the satellite is the near-infrared capture. Moving up, you can see the satellite in red, blue, and green, followed by the panchromatic, or black-and-white, snapshot with the sharpest resolution. Typically, the Pleiades satellites record these images a split-second apart and combine the colors to generate an accurate representation of what the human eye might see. But this doesn't work so well for a target moving at nearly 5 miles per second.

Welcome everyone! Been a while since we've had one of these!

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I recently participated in a debate with Shannon Stirone, a distinguished science writer, on this topic. The debate was sponsored by Open to Debate, and professionally moderated by Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan.

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• 3rd New Shepard launch of 2025, 31st overall
• 4th Blue Origin launch of 2025, 32nd overall

https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/7814

New Shepard's eleventh crewed flight. The 6-person crew consists of Aisha Bowe,