TV News LIES

The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX rockets, following a failure of one of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters early Wednesday morning.

The grounding comes as a crew of four astronauts waits in quarantine for the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission aboard a Falcon 9. The private flight, funded by internet entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, is set to conduct the world’s first commercial spacewalk. It had already been pushed back several days due to technical issues and weather concerns.

Neither SpaceX nor the Polaris Dawn program immediately responded to NPR's request for comment.

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NASA’s announcement Saturday that it won’t use a troubled Boeing capsule to return two stranded astronauts to Earth is a yet another setback for the struggling company, although the financial damage is likely to be less than the reputational harm.

Once a symbol of American engineering and technological prowess, Boeing has seen its reputation battered since two 737 Max airliners crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. The safety of its products came under renewed scrutiny after a panel blew out of a Max during a flight this January.

Will the crew of the Boeing Starliner soon return to Earth on the spacecraft that brought them into orbit? Or will the astronauts have no choice but to wait until February to hitch a ride on a SpaceX Dragon?

That answer may be coming soon as NASA officials appear poised to finally reveal the Starliner's fate.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is scheduled to appear for a live news conference at 1 p.m. EDT Saturday from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency said Thursday. The news conference, which will be televised and livestreamed, will take place about one hour after Nelson will meet behind closed doors with officials at both NASA and Boeing for a flight readiness review.

A rare process in the middle of a mission, the additional review became necessary for flight engineers to determine whether the beleaguered Starliner is capable of safely returning astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams to Earth – or whether the spacecraft will have to undock with no humans aboard.

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Iowa researchers say they’ve excavated the state’s first well-preserved mastodon, a roughly 13,600-year-old specimen that was found in the southern part of the state.

The University of Iowa’s Office of the State Archaeologist said in a Facebook post that the 12-day excavation involving staff and local community members yielded “several mastodon bones,” primarily from the skull.

Radiocarbon dating indicates that this mastodon is roughly 13,600 years old, archaeologists say, and researchers will now scrutinize the bones to look for “any evidence of human activity, such as cut marks.”

The world's largest iceberg, A23a, is stuck again.

For more than 30 years, the giant frozen block — equivalent to the size of Rhode Island — was grounded on the sea floor in Antarctic coastal waters. It finally freed itself in 2020 and started heading to the open ocean this past winter.

But a few months into A23a's journey, onlookers were stunned at what they saw: the iceberg spinning in circles.

Through satellite imagery, British Antarctic Survey noticed the mega iceberg rotating near the South Orkney Islands, about 375 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula, starting in January. According to the Survey, A32a maintains "a chill 15 degrees rotation per day."

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Venus, the closest planet to Earth, has an atmosphere similar to ours, but much more hot and full of corrosive sulfuric acid.

Researchers in England announced last week that powerful space telescopes revealed new signs of phosphine gas in Venus' atmosphere, a finding that has been fiercely debated in recent years. There's a chance any phosphine gas on Venus could be a sign of life because on Earth, the gas comes from decaying organic material. Scientists are also confident there is no other natural chemical process on Venus that could otherwise produce the gas, said Dave Clements, the lead researcher on the project.

"We are not saying we have found signs of life on Venus," Clements told USA TODAY. "We are on the first step of a staircase at the top of which, if all the steps are passed, something might lead to that."

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