18 Hours of Stargazing Pulls the Elephant's Trunk Nebula Out of the Dark

Three Days Late, CRS-34 Finally Lifts Off — Carrying a Wooden Bone Scaffold and Six Flights Worth of Battle-Tested Dragon

After weather scrubbed the launch on Tuesday and Wednesday, a Falcon 9 finally cleared the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Friday, May 15, pushing the Cargo Dragon capsule — on its sixth flight — toward the International Space Station. It's the 34th cargo run SpaceX has flown for NASA under the Commercial Resupply Services program, and the spacecraft is scheduled to dock autonomously on Sunday, May 17.

The roughly 6,500 pounds of cargo includes more than crew supplies. Among the science payloads: an investigation into how accurately Earth-based microgravity simulators replicate actual space conditions, a bone scaffold built from wood being tested as a potential treatment path for osteoporosis, and equipment designed to study how red blood cells and the spleen respond to spaceflight — data that will matter enormously for crews headed to the Moon and beyond.

Gobble's Take: The next osteoporosis treatment may be prototyped in orbit, on a spacecraft that's flown six times — which is either deeply reassuring or deeply wild, depending on your comfort level.

Source: Google News

18 Hours of Stargazing Pulls the Elephant's Trunk Nebula Out of the Dark

In the constellation Cepheus, roughly 2,400 light-years from Earth, a cloud of gas and dust larger than 100 light-years across is quietly manufacturing new stars. An astrophotographer recently spent 18 hours and 6 minutes collecting its light — 362 individual three-minute exposures spread across nights in September and October 2024 — to produce a broadband image of IC 1396 and the structure jutting from its rim known as IC 1396A, the Elephant's Trunk Nebula.

The image also captures Mu Cephei — the Garnet Star — a red supergiant sitting to the right of the frame and one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye. The "trunk" shape itself is the product of radiation and stellar winds carving into the nebula's dense gas, eroding it from the outside while compressing pockets within, triggering new star formation in the process. The whole thing was shot from a Bortle 4 site — dark enough that the Milky Way is plainly visible — using an unmodified Canon 6D and a Sky-Watcher Quattro 200P telescope.

Gobble's Take: Someone spent 18 hours pointing a camera at a stellar nursery 2,400 light-years away and the result looks like nature besting every CGI team in Hollywood.

Source: r/astronomy

Rocket Lab's CFO Says a SpaceX IPO Would Sort Space Stocks into "Haves and Have-Nots" — and He Knows Which Side He's On

Speculation around a SpaceX initial public offering — a stock market debut that some analysts suggest could value the company between $1.5 trillion and $1.75 trillion — is already moving investor sentiment across the commercial space sector. Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice called the prospect a "defining moment" for publicly traded space companies, but not a uniformly good one.

Spice's argument: a SpaceX IPO would force investors to distinguish between companies with real infrastructure and recurring contracts versus those coasting on the space label. His term for the losers in that sorting: companies pushed "into obscurity." Rocket Lab, which has been expanding vertically into Space Systems to position itself as a broad space infrastructure provider, is betting it lands on the right side of that divide. Whether or not SpaceX ever actually files, the speculation alone is already doing the market's work of separating the serious players from the promotional ones.

Gobble's Take: The most consequential IPO in history hasn't happened — and it's already culling the space investment herd.

Source: 富途牛牛 via Google News

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The Fungus That Survived NASA's Cleanroom Is Probably Already on Mars
• Rocket Lab's Stock Had Its Best Single Day in Company History After One Earnings Report