Month: February 2026

Space News for February 2026. 

Quite a few stories of interest this month, mostly dealing with manned spaceflight. So let’s get to it!

In my last space post I talked about how the Crew 11 astronauts were forced to depart from the International Space Station (ISS) early on the 11th of January because of a medical issue with one of its four members. This emergency left the ISS with only a skeleton crew of three cosmonauts until the Crew 12 team could be readied and launched aboard their Space X Dragon capsule.

Launch of the Space X Crew 12 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on 13 February. (Credit: YouTube)

 Working quickly NASA and Space X succeeded in moving up the launch of Crew 12 from its original planned date to February 13th. As usual the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket went off without any problem and about a day later on the 14th the Dragon capsule was docked at the ISS. Thanks to Space X and its reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon manned capsule NASA’s commercial crew program is an unqualified success as manned missions to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) are becoming routine.

Humanity’s first long term habitat in space the ISS has been manned for more than twenty years now and thanks to Space X, crew rotations are becoming quite routine! (Credit: ESA)

In fact manned missions are becoming so routine that they are no longer solely the province of national space agencies. Private companies or even individuals can, for a large amount of money, charter a manned space mission. There have already been four such missions to the ISS and several other missions that did not go to the ISS.

Launch of the first Axiom commercial mission to the ISS. Axiom has completed three other such missions now and has been granted a fifth mission. (Credit: The New York Times)

As a part of this growing commercialization of LOE, NASA and its partners in the ISS have signed contracts for a fifth and sixth private mission to the ISS. The fifth mission, scheduled for no earlier than January of 2027, was awarded to Axiom Space Corporation, the company that charted the first four private missions to the ISS. The sixth mission was awarded to a newcomer, Vast Corporation and is scheduled to launch no earlier than the summer of 2027.

In addition to arranging missions into space, Vast Corporation has plans to construct a private Space Station once the ISS is de-orbited! (Credit: Long Beach Post)

Both of these two missions will spend about 14 days at the ISS and will consist of four crewmembers. Axiom and Vast will purchase mission services from NASA including crew consumables and cargo delivery and storage. Both companies will also have to make flight arrangements with Space X including launch and re-entry missions. In exchange Axiom and Vast will each be allowed to sell four tickets to the ISS, although the private astronauts who are selected must be approved by NASA and will be trained by both NASA and Space X.

The training of a NASA astronaut can take years and even the training of a space tourist takes months! (Credit: YouTube)

NASA’s commercialization of space was not originally intended to become a Space X monopoly. The plan was for Boeing’s Starliner capsule to also transport both NASA and commercial astronauts to the ISS. However, as I have often mentioned in earlier posts, see my posts of 20July2024, and 12April2025, the Starliner capsule has suffered a seemly unending series of problems. Back in 2024 Starliner finally succeeded in getting two astronauts to the ISS but with so many issues that NASA deemed the capsule to be unsafe for the astronauts to return in. So, the Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s stay at the ISS went from being only a week to more than eight months before they could return to Earth aboard a Space X Dragon capsule.

Everyone expected Boeing’s Starliner capsule to reach the ISS before Space X’s Dragon, but things just didn’t work out that way. Starliner has been plagued by problems and has yet to complete a successful mission. (Credit: CNN)

On the 19th of February NASA released its final report on Starliner’s mission and the results were not good for Boeing. Officially Starliner’s mission has been categorized as a ‘Type-A Mishap’, the worst category possible and equivalent to the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters! The report details numerous failings that “revealed critical vulnerabilities in Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model, and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight.” Hither to this report NASA’s Commercial Crew Program had been permitted to investigate itself but now that philosophy is considered to be “inconsistent with NASA safety culture.”

Space is trying to kill you! So anyone who goes into space has to practice a strict safety code if they want to come back alive!!! (Credit: X.com)

Nevertheless NASA still hopes that Starliner can fulfill some part of its original aspirations. The current plan is for Starliner to conduct one more test mission, to be designated Starliner-1, to the ISS. This test flight however will be unmanned; Starliner will only carry cargo to the ISS. This test flight is scheduled to be conducted no earlier than April.

In addition to sending astronauts to the ISS Space X also has the job of sending unmanned cargo missions to the station. Starliner’s next flight could be a similar such mission. (Credit: Space Connect)

If everything goes well in this latest Starliner attempt then it is possible that the next ISS crew rotation, planned for August, may be carried out with Starliner rather than a Space X Dragon. For that reason the four astronauts assigned to the next ISS mission are training on both Dragon and Starliner capsules. Whether or not this scheduled plan will be altered because of the 19th of February report remains to be seen.

Front cover of the actual report on Starliner’s mission to the ISS. NASA pulled no punches and detailed every problem Starliner had. Assuming there is a next Starliner mission any further problems would surely kill the entire program! (Credit: NASA)

So far all of my news in this post have dealt with space flights to LOE, begging the question of when will we be getting back into deep space, getting back to the Moon and beyond. Well, the Artemis II rocket and Orion capsule are currently sitting on their launch pad undergoing final testing before launching four astronauts out of LOE for a trip around the Moon similar to Apollo eight’s mission back in 1968.

The Artemis II launch vehicle and spacecraft being rolled back to the assembly building. Problems during final testing have provoked this delay. (Credit: NASA)

As a final test before launch NASA conducted a wet dress rehearsal on February 12th, that’s a full fueling of the rocket. Unfortunately during that test a series of hydrogen leaks occurred forcing the test to be terminated early. This same problem occurred during testing of the Artemis I unmanned mission back in November of 2022.

Hydrogen is the lightest and smallest of all elements so it can leak out of any hole no matter how small!!! (Credit: BYJU’s)

A second wet dress rehearsal was carried out from February 17th to the 20th and at first it appeared that the hydrogen leak problem had been resolved, the mission was put on a schedule for a launch on March 11th. However on the very next day the leak problem reappeared in the Artemis II’s second stage and the decision has been made to roll Artemis back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. How long of a delay this will cause to the Artemis II’s launch is just guesswork at the moment.

The Artemis II mission, if it ever happens, will mark to first time in more than 50 years that humans have left LOE. (Credit: YouTube)

 All of the stories above concerned either NASA or American commercial aerospace corporations but there is also news coming from China’s space agency as well. On the 12th of February China successfully tested two components of their future manned Lunar exploration missions simultaneously.

Abort test of China’s Mengzhou capsule. Chinese astronauts going to the Moon will ride in this capsule. (Credit: Facebook)

Like NASA’s Artemis program China is designing a large rocket called the Long March 10 along with a crew capsule called the Mengzhou and a Lunar lander called the Lanyue. The test conducted on the 12th consisted of an abort systems test for the Mengzhou capsule along with a test of the re-usability of a scaled down version of the Long March 10 rocket.

China’s Long March 10 rocket will come in several variants for both LOE and deep space missions. (Credit: China in Space)

The abort test of the Mengzhou capsule is a standard test for manned spacecraft, both the Space X Dragon and Artemis’ Orion capsules underwent such testing. If during a launch anything should go wrong with the first stage rocket, or if there’s a problem with jettisoning the first stage and igniting the second stage, solid fuel rockets on the capsule will fire pulling it away from the launch vehicle and allowing the capsule and crew to safely land. The test of the abort system is usually carried out during the launch at what is called ‘Max Q’ which is the moment when aerodynamic pressure on the entire launch vehicle is greatest.

As I mentioned above both the Dragon and Orion capsules underwent this test and in those tests the launch rocket was simply jettisoned after the capsule was pulled away. The Chinese however wanted to try for more than that. Currently the Chinese are working very hard to develop a re-usable rocket similar to Space X’s Falcon 9. So they decided to conduct a full flight of the Long march 10 rocket, after the Mengzhou capsule was pulled away. Therefore, about five minutes after the Mengzhou capsule had completed its test the Long March 10 rocket re-ignited its engines and was able to make a controlled splashdown in the waters off China’s Hainan Island. Two successful tests for the price of one.

Space X has revolutionized space travel with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Now everybody else, especially the Chinese, want to have their own reusable rocket! (Credit: Via Satellite)

 The race to get back to the Moon is heating up, as is the effort to commercialize space. The future will belong not to whoever is first but whoever keeps going and finishes the job.

Three Stories from Nature for February 2025. 

We humans like to think that we’re the only truly intelligent species on this planet; the behaviour of other animals is really just instinct. Well in this post I’ll discuss two recent discoveries that highlight just how intelligent other creatures can be along with another story about how selfless one kind of animals can be, sacrificing itself for the good of its whole community.

Over thousands of years Mother Nature has been represented in many, many ways but always as a caring woman protecting her children! (Credit: Fine Art America)

I’ve often spoken about tool use by several different species, see posts of 16March2019 and 24August2024. Now a recent video from British Colombia has given evidence that sometimes an animal can even learn how to make use of a human tool. 

The territory of the Haitzaqv people of Canada’s Pacific coast. (Credit: HIRMD.ca)

In the waters along Canada’s Pacific coastline the European Green Crab is an invasive species that the Canadian government is trying to eliminate or at least control. The indigenous Haitzaqv Nation is taking part in this effort by placing crab traps along the shorelines baited with herring and seal meat in order to catch as many green crabs as possible.

The Green Crab is an invasive species along Canada’s Pacific coast so the Canadian government is trying to control if not eliminate its population. (Credit: The Counter)

Recently the Haitzaqv have found that a number of their traps were being pulled onto the beach and the bait was being removed, and presumably eaten. In order to discover who, or what the thief was they placed motion sensitive trail cameras nearby in order to keep watch on the traps. Since many of the traps were submerged in fairly deep water it was first suspected that otters or seals might be the culprits.

Sea Otters are already known to make use of tools, using small rocks to break open the clams and oysters they feed on. (Credit: National Wildlife Federation)

Instead, what the videos showed was a wolf that waded out to the trap’s buoy, grabbed it with his teeth and then dragged the buoy back to the shore. The wolf then grabbed the rope that attached the buoy to the trap and began dragging it onto the shore until the trap was on the beach. The whole operation took less than three minutes and once the wolf had the trap completely on shore it would break into it and devour the bait.

A wolf pulling a crab trap out of the water so it can eat the bait inside. Whether this is tool use or not is an academic question, but it is certainly clever. (Credit: Cowboy State Daily)

Naturalists are now debating whether this behaviour is truly ‘tool use’ since humans made the traps and all the wolf did was pull it onshore. Still, you have to admit the wolf, or perhaps wolves, are being very clever in figuring out how to get a cheap meal.

More often than tool use, wolves are known to cooperate in the hurt, using numbers to take down bigger prey like deer or even bison. (Credit: Animal: How Stuff Works)

Cooperation between individuals is another good strategy for getting a meal. Now normally such team work is between members of the same species but recently another series of videos has been taken showing how on occasion even species that are sometimes known to be predator and prey may still cooperate, if it improves their chances of getting fed.

Instead of cooperating Orca and Dolphins are normally Predator and Prey. Sometimes however even enemies can work together for a common goal. (Credit: Whale Tales)

Once again the video comes from the Pacific coast of Canada where a pod of nine Orcas, or killer whales were seen teaming up with pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins to attack large schools of Chinook salmon. It was while the researchers were observing the Orcas that they found that on occasion the pod would change course in the presence of the dolphins and follow them to a large school of salmon.

Video of Orca and Dolphins hunting Salmon together. (Credit: The Times)

It appears that what is happening is that the dolphins are using their superior echo-location ability to find the salmon, who are too large for the dolphins to swallow whole. So the dolphins lead the Orcas to the salmon where they attack the school. Meanwhile the dolphins benefit by consuming the scraps that the killer whales don’t swallow. Teamwork indeed!

A large Chinook Salmon is a bit too much for a Dolphin to swallow but after an Orca has chopped it in half the Orca can at least feast on the scraps! (Credit: Independent Hostels)

Both Orcas and dolphins are well known to possess a variety of hunting techniques and both are known to be very intelligent species. This is however the first time they have ever been seen to work together. In fact in other parts of the world killer whales have been known to sometimes attack dolphins.

Orcas use a wide variety of hunting techniques. Here a group of Orca are creating a wave to knock a seal off of an iceberg so they can catch it and eat it! (Credit: Petapixel)

My final story comes from the insect world and is a lesson in self-sacrifice, of putting the good of the many above one’s own personal interest. As you might guess the story concerns one of the social insects, the ants.

An ant colony can be as large and complex as any human city, just better organized! (Credit: Innovative Pest Control Singapore)

If you think about it species that live together in large numbers are much more subject to communicable diseases than those that live more solitary lives. A disease like the flu has little chance of spreading amongst mountain lions, who rarely come into contact with each other, than say a flock of geese, which is why we’re all concerned about bird flu! Ants, who can live in colonies numbering many thousands are well know to be affected by a number of infectious diseases.

An ant infected with the famous ‘Zombie’ fungus. Living in large colonies ants are subject to many infectious diseases. (Credit: Reddit)

It has been know for many years that when an adult worker ant feels itself getting sick they will leave the nest and die alone in order to protect the rest of the colony from disease. Recently researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria have investigated whether infected young ants called pupae also try to protect the colony in some way. You see pupae cannot move and are confined to their cocoon so they cannot simply walk away. Do they also try to protect the colony from getting their illness?

The stages of an ants life from egg to adult. Obviously only the adult is mobile, so what do the larvae and Pupa do to sacrifice themselves if they get infected? (Credit: Antastic Ants)

What the researchers found was that an infected pupae begins to emit a chemical smell that signals to the nearby adults that ‘I’m infected, come and kill me’ which the adults quickly do by injecting the pupae with a poison that kills both the pupae as well as the disease. One interesting exception to this behavior that the scientists discovered is young queen ants that get infected do not emit this chemical, perhaps because queen ants are known to have a better immune system enabling them to better able to fight off an infection.

Ants use chemicals as their language. Here a group of ants are following a chemical trail to a source of food a scouting ant has discovered. (Credit: Pest HQ)

Many creatures in nature will selfishly do whatever they can to survive, even if it risks others of their species. Some animals however will sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children. So far only among the insects can we find creatures who will sacrifice themselves in order to protect their community. 

Astronomy News for December 2025: We all know that Telescopes are the main Instruments Astronomers use to Study the Universe. Here are stories about three of them. 

Ever since Galileo first pointed his tiny little telescope upward into the night’s sky astronomers have been designing and building first bigger telescopes, then telescopes that can see at wavelengths of light that are invisible to our eyes and then finally putting telescopes into space in order to see the heavens without the distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere. In this post I’d like to talk about three telescopes, one that has finished it’s designed program, another that is celebrating thirty years of discoveries and a third that may be launched into orbit a year from now to begin its work of exploring the Universe.

As you might guess, Galileo’s Telescopes are among the most revered of scientific artifacts! (Credit: Grand Voyage Italy)

The Atacama Desert in the high mountains of Chile is often considered to be the driest place on Earth. With the lack of water vapour and at an altitude of 5,190 Meters the desert is the best place to put a telescope that looks at the sky in far infrared light so that is where the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) was built and where it began operation in 2007. ACT was purposefully designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the ‘fossil’ remnant of the Big Bang itself. Before ACT the CMB was always studied from space with satellites like the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) or the Planck satellite. However, the cost of getting into space limited the size of those space telescopes and therefore their resolution. ACT was designed as a big infrared telescope put in the best place on Earth for such an instrument.

Since the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) sees the Universe in the infrared rather than visible light its appearance and function are a good bit different from more familiar telescopes! (Credit: Stony Brook University News)

ACT has just recently completed its long-term program and in a series of three papers the full set of data collected has been released. The big headline from this data dump was a conformation of the Planck satellite’s measurement of Hubble’s constant, the speed at which the Universe was expanding, back 13.5 billion years ago, ~67 km/sec/Mpc.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as see by the ACT. The difference between the hot (red) areas and the cool (blue) areas is less than one part in a thousand but those variations were enough to become the seeds out of which all the galaxies in the Universe grew! (Credit: Stony Brook University News)

You see the problem is that the measured value of Hubble’s constant using Type I supernova over the last two or so billion years comes out to be ~73 km/sec/Mpc, different by an amount that can no longer be considered to be ‘measurement error’. This discrepancy is called the ‘Hubble tension’ and in order to explain it a number of theories, extensions of the standard model of the universe have been proposed. With it’s greater resolution however ACT has also eliminated many of those theories leaving cosmologists with a big problem on their hands. Of course, a big problem, that’s also a big opportunity to discover new physics!

The Hubble tension has only become noticeable in the last fifteen years or so. The difference between the speed the Universe is expanding as measured over the last billion years or so (top) is much difference from what it was in the early Universe (bottom). Does this imply that Dark Energy is losing strength? (Credit: Mapping Ignorance)

Another telescope making news is the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a satellite that was designed and built by a combination of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and launched on the 2nd of December in 1995. In it’s thirty years in space SOHO has revolutionized our knowledge of how the Sun behaves on a day-to-day basis. Armed with an array of instruments specially designed to observe the Sun SOHO has over the course of nearly three complete Solar cycles witnessed over 40,000 coronal mass ejections (CMEs). This enormous amount of data has given solar scientists new insights into how the Sun produces such enormous explosions while at the same time giving us warning about any CMEs that are aimed at our planet.

Right now the Sun is at solar maximum so there are a lot of sunspots on its surface ready to emit solar flares and CMEs. Sunspot AR 4366 shown here is only a week or so old and it’s already fired off six X-class flares! (Credit: Spaceweather.com)

One completely unplanned benefit that SOHO provided was its ability to observe comets whose orbits bring them close to the Sun. To date citizen scientists have used the freely available data from SOHO to discover more than 5,000 of them.

Image from the SOHO satellite showing a comet on the right nearing the SUN, which is covered by the circle so that its brilliance doesn’t overwhelm NASA)everything else in the picture. (Credit:

Although there are plans to send other satellites into space to study the Sun currently there are currently no plans to terminate SOHO’s mission. So we can look forward to more discoveries to come.

If you don’t happen to live in LA there is sure to be a museum or science center in your town where you too can experience the thrill of discovery! (Credit: Museum of Illusions)

Finally I’d like to mention NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which has just completed its final assembly at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is now scheduled to undergo an extensive series of environmental tests to be certain that it can survive the rigors of space. Once these tests are completed, which is expected to be this summer, the telescope will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center where it is currently scheduled to be launched to space aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket in early 2027.

Artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in orbit observing the Universe. (Credit: EarthSky)

Roman is equipped with two instruments that will give as an unprecedented view of the Universe. The Wide Field Instrument (WFI) is an infrared camera designed to study billions of galaxies, once again in order to better understand the evolution of our Universe. The other instrument is a coronagraph similar to the one that SOHO uses to block the Sun so that it can observe solar flares except that Roman’s will have much greater resolution.

The Nancy Garce Roman Space Telescope will be launched into orbit sometime in 2027 by the Space X Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Roman will use its coronagraph to block out the light from nearby stars to that it can better see and study any exo-planets orbiting those stars. It is also expected that Roman will be able to discover isolated black holes by observing the micro-lensing effects the black holes gravity has on the light from distant stars. Over the last several decades our knowledge of the heavens has advanced greatly thanks to telescopes like the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Solar Heliospheric Observer and we can expect to learn even more once the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has begun its career.