and another thing: they’re not stranded. please don’t put in the newspaper that they’re stranded.

Well, three months in to an eight day mission, the Boeing Starliner made it back to earth, leaving its former crew hanging around at the orbital truckstop until February. What a bizarre episode in the history of human spaceflight, although my favorite part was when the spaceship started making strange noises .

It’s surprisingly hard to find a number for the actual amount of money NASA has handed Boeing so far for this rickety-ass “space” “ship”, but it seems to be somewhere in the $3–4 billion range?

And I know, in the annals of US tax dollars being misspent that number is very small, but while all this is going on the Chandra X-ray Observatory is basically holding a bake sale to stay in operation? Imagine what that money could have been spent on! That’s basically two full space telescopes, or one telescope with enough money left over to staff it forever. That’s two or three deep space probes. That’s a whole lot of fun science we could have done, instead of paying for an empty capsule cooling in the middle of the desert.

Zoozve

This is great. Radiolab cohost Latif Nasser notices that the solar system poster in his kid’s room has a moon for Venus—which doesn’t have a moon—and starts digging. It’s an extremely NPR (complimentary) slow burn solving of the simple mystery of what this thing on the poster was, with a surprisingly fun ending! Plus: “Quasi-moons!”

Space.com has a recap of the whole thing with links: Zoozve — the strange 'moon' of Venus that earned its name by accident. (See also: 524522 Zoozve - Wikipedia.)

One of the major recurring themes on Icecano are STEM people who need to take more humanties classes, but this is a case where the opposite is true?

A Long, Slow U-turn

Last week Halley’s comet was at its furthest point from the sun and started heading back in.

Halley’s comet was the biggest thing ever when I was in elementary school. The actual event turned out to be something of a damp squib; we never actually manged to see it, and not for lack of truing. To faint, to close to the horizon.

It’ll be back in 2061; I hope I get to take a second swing at it.