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Jeff Bezos may have been beaten to space by rival Richard Branson, but the billionaire American businessman is poised to make history next week aboard what would be the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew.

Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, is due to be part of a four-person crew for a planned 11-minute ride to the edge of space on Tuesday inside his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, another milestone in the nascent and potentially lucrative space tourism sector.

He is set to be joined by his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian woman aviator Wally Funk, and an as-yet-unidentified person who paid $28 million (roughly Rs. 210 crores) for a spot aboard the spacecraft, scheduled to launch from a West Texas site.

New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. The crew is set to include only civilians and none of Blue Origin’s employees or staff astronauts, three people familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters.

Blue Origin’s astronauts include NASA space shuttle veteran Nicholas Patrick.

“To see the Earth from space, it changes you, it changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity,” Bezos said in a video last month discussing the flight.

There has never before been a fully autonomous suborbital or orbital flight with an all-civilian crew, Teal Group space industry analyst Marco Caceres said.

Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico on Sunday. The Virgin Galactic flight included two pilots, as well as the company’s chief astronaut instructor and its lead operations engineer.

New Shepard lifts off from a standing position on a launch pad, like traditional rocket launches. With Virgin Galactic, a rocket-powered spaceplane was dropped from a carrier plane in mid-air.

New Shepard, like Virgin Galactic’s flight, will not enter into orbit around Earth, but will take the passengers some 62 miles up (100km) before the capsule returns by parachute. Virgin Galactic’s flight reached 53 miles (86km) above Earth.

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s space transportation company SpaceX is planning an even-more-ambitious mission in September, sending an all-civilian crew for a several-day orbital flight aboard its Crew Dragon capsule.

‘Simple math’

Blue Origin’s flight is two decades in the making. Bezos founded the company in 2000. A pilotless craft was a financial strategy adopted by Blue Origin executives years ago.

“It’s simple math,” said one of the people familiar with the company’s thinking. “If you design a system so that you don’t need a pilot or a co-pilot you can have more paying customers.”

New Shepard can accommodate six people. Blue Origin and industry insiders had previously discussed company employees going up on the first flight.

A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the decision was made for four seats to offer an enhanced customer experience for the first flight.

The decision to skip over Blue Origin’s staff astronauts and technical experts has caused frustration for some company insiders who viewed the first crewed flight as a crucial opportunity to gather data and technical feedback for a program in its infancy, and to evaluate the experience for future paying customers, the sources said.

A seasoned astronaut would provide a calming presence for civilian crew members as New Shepard blasts off at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540km) per hour, the sources added.

The crew members will receive two days of training. Blue Origin has assigned two staff members, on the ground, to help the passengers strap in and to provide point-by-point instructions over headsets during the mission.

“It’s kind of like getting on a ride at an amusement park,” Caceres said. “You just trust that everything has been checked out, is in good working order … and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Some industry sources have expressed concerns that passengers – overwhelmed by the experience or in a state of euphoria – could be rattled by routine noises, miss key instructions, pass out or injure themselves floating around the cabin, potentially dangerous scenarios a trained astronaut could respond to.

Funk, 82, was one of 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA’s 1960s space programme but were denied the chance to become astronauts because of their gender.

Proving the safety of space travel is important to developing what Swiss investment bank UBS estimates will be a $3 billion (roughly Rs. 22,350 crores) annual tourism market a decade from now.

“One of the main goals of the New Shepard mission is to demonstrate that going to suborbital space is perfectly safe for the average person,” Caceres said. “So there is a benefit to having as many average people on these flights as possible.”

© Thomson Reuters 2021

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Hubble finds missing globular cluster in Milky Way’s crowded stellar halo

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July 5, 2025

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Hubble finds missing globular cluster in Milky Way’s crowded stellar halo

A striking new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has shed light on an underexplored gatekeeper of our galactic neighbours’ achievements and tragedies. Adorned with multi-hued stars, the spherical cluster glitters amid the expanse of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. This type of globular cluster is a very dense grouping of stars — about the same mass as 100,000 suns — that orbit all around the centre of their galaxy. Stars in a cluster are typically roughly the same age, as they formed from the same collapsing gas cloud. In this new view, stars show up in temperatures indicated in red and blue colours: red for colder and blue for hotter stars.

Hubble Maps Forgotten Star Cluster ESO 591-12 to Uncover Milky Way’s Ancient Stellar Secrets

As per a report from NASA’s Hubble team, ESO 591-12 was imaged during the Hubble Missing Globular Clusters Survey—an initiative targeting 34 Milky Way globular clusters that had never been observed by the space telescope. The aim is to construct a comprehensive database of the ages, distances, and stellar populations of all the galaxy’s known globular clusters and star formations. However, it has always been tough for telescopes on Earth to pick out individual stars in these densely populated regions, so Hubble’s high resolution has done much to finally be able to track the movements of stars to unlock their histories and formation.

The ESO 591-12 data are part of an ongoing study to improve knowledge of the formation and evolution of globular clusters in the galaxy’s bulge and halo. These star clusters are cosmic fossils that have preserved cosmic conditions from the primordial universe. Their work helps build a fuller narrative of the evolution of the Milky Way and how it has changed over billions of years.

This new image is a further example of how advanced space-based observing facilities are helping astronomers to excavate the contents of the dark and dusty skeleton cloaking the Milky Way and sculpt a better understanding of not only the universe’s evolution but also that of our cosmic home.
Each one tells part of the astronomical story, and Hubble is digging out new chapters to enrich the tale, such as probing data for clusters as much as ESO 591-12, which have been mostly neglected until now. This finding adds to our knowledge of the early universe by shining a spotlight on something that was in plain sight.

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Very Massive Stars Blow Away Outer Layers in Powerful Winds Before Black Hole Collapse

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Massive stars shed extreme mass before collapsing into black holes

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July 5, 2025

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Massive stars shed extreme mass before collapsing into black holes

New research indicates that the most monstrously huge stars — those more than 100 times as massive as the sun — shed at least 20 times more matter before they collapse than previously thought to do so as they cool off to become black holes. These stars blow off a significant portion of their outer layers in quite powerful stellar winds over the brief but intense course of their lives, leaving behind low masses at the end. One benefit of this extreme mass loss is that it can account for observed strangeness in stars such as those in the Tarantula Nebula, providing new information on stellar evolution, black hole formation, and sources of gravitational waves.

Hurricane-like Stellar Winds Explain Extreme Mass Loss in Universe’s Most Massive Stars

As per a report from Space.com, researchers used sophisticated models and observations to learn that very massive stars give off winds so powerful they act more like hurricanes than gentle solar breezes. Their results agree very well with observations of WNh-type Wolf-Rayet stars in the Tarantula Nebula, which are hotter and more compact than would be expected by standard models. The improved models explain the very high temperatures at the surface and the stability of hydrogen, which address previous challenges.

One key subject in this study is R136a1 — the most massive known star — with a mass up to 230 times that of the sun. The researchers suggested that it either formed as a single star of around 200 solar masses or as a binary star system where the two stars had a combined mass of about 200 solar masses. In both such cases, the star must have lost a huge amount of mass early in its life, so the findings would call into question how it is that massive stars can live long enough to leave such a wreckage in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The implications extend to black hole formation as well. More massive stellar winds erode more mass, resulting in the production of smaller black holes and decreasing the chances of creating elusive intermediate-mass black holes. This revision also enhances the matches of the model with the observed gravitational wave signal of a coalescing black hole binary.

Although the models are restricted to stars in the Tarantula Nebula, the researchers stress that in order for their findings to be considered universal, it is important to understand stars in different chemical environments as well. The results not only reshape predictions of black hole populations but may also adjust our understanding of how the most massive stars in the universe live — and die.

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New Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Speeds Through Solar System

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Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Dead Star That Exploded Twice in Rare Supernova Event

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July 5, 2025

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Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Dead Star That Exploded Twice in Rare Supernova Event

For the first time, a team of astronomers has captured a clear image of a white dwarf star that exploded not just once, but twice, as a Type Ia supernova — a “double-detonation” that scientists hadn’t thought possible until now. The extraordinary observation could revise our long-held notions of how stars die, suggesting that some stars can explode as supernovas without ever crossing the Chandrasekhar limit, the minimum mass normally thought necessary for such an explosion. The astronomers employed the Very Large Telescope’s MUSE instrument to zoom in on the four-century-old supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5, which sits 60,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado, revealing evidence of two separate blasting catastrophes in its construction.

First Visual Proof Shows White Dwarfs Can Explode Twice Without Reaching Chandrasekhar Limit

As the researchers report on July 2 in Nature Astronomy, the team found a distinctive “fingerprint” in the debris of SNR 0509-67.5 in the Large Magellanic Cloud that the models predicted. White dwarfs—which are the dead stage of sun-like stars—usually blow up into Type Ia supernovas after they hit the Chandrasekhar limit by stealing matter from a neighbouring star.

However, this finding shows that the detonation can be launched at an earlier time. The explosion is likely to have a two-step origin, the team argues, with the initial blast being generated when an unstable layer of helium that the star had acquired exploded on its surface; the resulting shock wave then drove a second and main detonation.

“This physical proof of a double-detonation not only helps solve a long-standing mystery of what causes these explosions, but it represents the most visually compelling evidence for this origin.” Priyam Das, University of New South Wales, team leader and author.

Something is happening to Type Ia supernovas, the “standard candles” used to measure cosmic distances, because their brightness doesn’t fluctuate. But they have long mystified scientists with how they explode. Until this discovery, an explosion white dwarf that didn’t surpass the Chandrasekhar limit was only considered in theory.

This fresh visual evidence for the double detonation model further informs our knowledge of stellar evolution and also informs how we should interpret light from distant supernovas. More than its scientific implications, its discovery adds a colourful new page to the story of dying stars — stars that, as it now appears, will not go gently into that night but will light up the sky twice over in fantastic fireworks before vanishing from the cosmos.

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