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And he will also be the first space tourist to go to the moon in 2023.

Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa is on his way to the International Space Station (ISS), after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-20 crew ship today, December 8, at 2:38 am ET (07:38 GMT).

“Dream come true,” the entrepreneur tweeted before boarding the three-seat Soyuz spacecraft that would launch him up into orbit. He is joined by Russian cosmonaut and pilot Alexander Misurkin and film producer Yozo Hirano, who will document the expedition for Maezawa’s YouTube channel.

A ‘dream’ mission for Yuzaku Maezawa.

NASA has warned that a giant asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower will break into Earth’s orbit in just over a week.

The 1,082-foot space rock is heading our way and should skim past us on December 11.

NASA has its eye on Asteroid 4,660 Nereus because it’s well over 492 feet long and will come within 4.6 million miles of Earth.

The US Space Force installed a high tech new radar system this week that it says will be able to detect objects the size of baseballs in orbit.

The massive monitoring system, dubbed the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), is located at the Clear Space Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, according to The Anchorage Daily News. The radar is slated to support the US missile defense system and provide reconnaissance data in space.

“Today marks an extremely important milestone for US homeland defense,” US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director Jon Hill said in a press release yesterday. “The LRDR has finished construction, and we can now begin the testing phase that will lead to the full operational use of this vital system.”

Breakthrough Starshot’s ultra-lightweight spacecraft will have to travel four light-years to reach Alpha Centauri. To put it another way, our nearest neighboring star system is a mind-shattering 40,208,000,000,000 (40 trillion) km away from Earth.

As a point of reference, our fastest and most reliable technology today for long-range space travel is the ion thruster, which is powering NASA’s DART mission to a nearby asteroid at speeds of 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h). However, according to NASA, with the ion thruster, it would take 18,000 years, or approximately 2,700 human generations, to get to Alpha Centauri.

Impressively, the Breakthrough Starshot team believes its spacecraft, with the help of lasers located on Earth, will be able to reach unprecedented speeds, allowing it to travel the distance to Alpha Centauri in only 20 years. If it does reach its destination, the probe spacecraft will then send back the first-ever images taken from another solar system, allowing a never-before-seen window to distant planets that may or may not resemble Earth.

Ten men and women are ready to begin training so they can journey to the International Space Station, the moon and beyond. The new astronaut class of 2021 was announced by NASA on Monday.

The 10 astronaut candidates, the first new astronaut class in four years, were selected from more than 12,000 applicants. The agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, introduced them live from Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the candidates will spend the majority of the next two years training beginning in January 2022.

“Today we welcome 10 new explorers, 10 members of the Artemis generation, NASA’s 2021 astronaut candidate class,” Nelson said. “Alone, each candidate has ‘the right stuff,’ but together they represent the creed of our country: E pluribus unum — out of many, one.”

This rover has moves that could take over a dance floor. A new video shows a simulator known as the Ground Test Model doing a sort of zombie walk over Martian-like terrain, to test out techniques for a future Mars missions.

“The rover initially has its front two wheels almost completely buried in sand, but easily escapes using its unique wheel-walking mode,” the European Space Agency said in a statement of the testing at Thales Alenia Space facilities in Turin, Italy, noting that the 6-foot drive took about 20 minutes to accomplish.

“The back wheels drag once the front four wheels have gained good traction on firmer terrain. The reason is that the wheel-walking sequence tested here has rather been optimized for climbing steep slopes with loose soils,” ESA added of the sequence.

Liftoff is scheduled for 2:38 a.m. EST (0738 GMT) on Wednesday.


Two space tourists will launch toward the International Space Station on Wednesday (Dec. 8), and you can watch the action live.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, video producer Yozo Hirano and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin is set to launch at 2:38 a.m. EST (0738 GMT or 1:38 p.m. local time) Wednesday from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

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