Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts into orbit, Saturday, aboard the company's Falcon 9 rocket.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
"This is the culmination of a dream," Musk told CBS News. "This is a dream come true. In fact, it feels surreal. If you asked me when starting SpaceX if this would happen, I’d be like, one percent — 0.1 percent chance."
The 19-hour trip to the International Space Station is the first voyage to space launched in the United States since 2011. The crew left the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:23 PM, making them the first to ride a commercially owned spacecraft into orbit.
“This is everything America has to offer in its purest form," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. "And times are tough right now. There is no doubt. We’ve got the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve got other challenges as a country.
"But I hope this moment in time is an opportunity for everybody to reflect on humanity and what we can do when we work together, when we strive and when we achieve," he added.
President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were in attendance. "I think this is such a great inspiration for our country," Trump told reporters after the launch.
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B.o.B Explains Why He Is A Flat-Earther
B.o.B tried to provoke thought when he initially suggested the Earth was flat after watching a NASA conspiracy theory video.
B.o.B received a ton of press when he suggested that the Earth was flat several years ago. Despite decades of science proving otherwise, the rapper is convinced that the world is not actually round, attempting to prove that theory in 2015. The topic remains at large as conspiracy theorists worldwide argue why things are not as we believe. The Atlanta rapper brought the theory back to life on a recent episode of his podcast, titled The BoBCast, where he discussed what initially led him to make the claims, defending himself anew.
"I come across a fucking flat Earth video called Nasa's Hidden Secrets. So I clicked on the video, it's a video of Eric Dubay doing an interview and I was listening to it, like man, let me turn this shit off. I was finna turn this shit off I swear and then I was like, hold on let me see what he is talking about. And so I started listening to the video and I was like, Oh my god, let me do some research," said Bobby Ray on his podcast, speaking about why he even went down that rabbit hole.
His post about the curvature of the Earth came in early 2016 when he posted a photo of two cities that are several miles apart, asking where the curve is in the land.
Listen to his comments below at the 21-minute mark.
17-Year-Old NASA Intern Discovers First World With Two Stars
NASA better offer this kid a job after his internship is over.
During his third day on the job, seventeen-year-old NASA intern Wolf Cukier was going over the variations in star brightness recorded by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, when he discovered a new planet, as noted by CNN.
“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other, and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier told NASA. “About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”
“These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and Goddard. “The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems.”
TOI 1338 b, the planet found by Cukier, is 1,300 light-years away in the Pictor constellation and orbits two stars. “I discovered a planet. It has two stars which it orbits around,” Cukier said. “So, if you think to Luke’s homeworld, Tatooine, from Star Wars, it’s like that. Every sunset, there’s gonna be two stars setting.”
