NASA has revealed its $1 billion plan to crash the International Space Station (ISS) back to Earth.

The space agency is set to decommission the orbiting laboratory in 2031 due to stresses on the structure that have accumulated over time.

NASA will pay any company that creates a ‘space-tug’ design, a craft powerful enough to pull the ISS from its orbit and send it toward our planet.

The agency is calling the space tug a US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), which will nudge the ISS from 175 miles above Earth’s surface to about 75 miles, where it will begin its final descent into the Pacific Ocean. 

Proposals are due no later than November 17, and the ISS retirement plan will begin in 2026 when NASA lets the craft start to decay naturally.

The plan’s first step is to let the ship begin to decay and not re-boost it so it stays in orbit.

During this time, the atmospheric drag will reduce the orbit from around 250 miles above the surface to 200 miles.

However, this will take a few years to happen.

In 2030, the crew on the ISS will make the final descent to Earth and bring any crucial equipment.

The ISS will continue to move closer to Earth, reaching the ‘Point of no return’ at 175 miles above the surface.

And this is where the $1 billion space tug will swoop in and give the ISS a little push from orbit.

The station will begin re-entry between 75 miles and 50 miles above the surface.

The external skin of modules will melt away, and then the exposed hardware will vaporize as the ISS soars 18,000 miles per hour through Earth’s atmosphere.

Any of it that survives re-entry will be targeted to fall in Point Nemo, a region of the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America often used as a spacecraft graveyard – at least 260 craft have been laid to rest there.

‘The decommissioning plan for the space station is the execution of a responsible, controlled, and targeted deorbit into a remote ocean area,’ NASA shared in a statement.

During descent through the Earth’s atmosphere, the space station would burn, break up, and vaporize into fragments of various sizes. 

‘Some fragments would likely survive the thermal stresses of re-entry. Environmental impacts of these fragments within the anticipated impact area are expected to be small. 

‘To best protect people and property on Earth, the most remote areas of the ocean are targeted.’

President Ronald Regan announced the construction of the ISS during his January 25, 1984 State of the Union Address, noting NASA will have it completed in 10 years.

Then, on December 4, 1998, the first US component of the ship launched, and two years later, it officially began operation.

The station has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 countries since the first crew arrived in November 2000. 

NASA originally planned to decommission the ISS after 15 years of operation – but that timeline has since been surpassed.

But the massive orbiting laboratory shows wear and tear, forcing NASA to say farewell to its faithful ship.

The station’s safe deorbit is the shared responsibility of the five space agencies — including NASA, CSA (Canadian Space Agency), (ESA) European Space Agency, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and the State Space Corporation Roscosmos.

Each is responsible for managing and controlling the hardware it provides.

The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from across the partnership.

The US, Japan, Canada, and ESA participating countries have committed to operating the station through 2030 and Russia through at least 2028.

NASA said it examined several options for decommissioning the ISS, including disassembly and return to Earth, boosting it to a higher orbit to stay in space or leaving it in orbit to decay until it randomly falls to Earth.

The other options fail because the structure was not designed to be easily disassembled in space, the craft needs to be re-boosted to stay in orbit and allowing it to decay in orbit could pose risks on Earth.

NASA does not want the ISS’s retirement to be the end of its hold over space and has already launched a replacement plant. 

The American space agency does not want to lose access to these benefits when the station ends, so it has launched a transition plan – asking private companies to develop a space station. 

Multiple companies want to operate a commercial station, including Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Northrup Grumman.

‘The International Space Station is entering its third and most productive decade as a groundbreaking scientific platform in microgravity,’ said Robyn Gatens, director of the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters.

‘This third decade is one of the results, building on our successful global partnership to verify exploration and human research technologies to support deep space exploration, continue to return medical and environmental benefits to humanity, and lay the groundwork for a commercial future in low-Earth orbit.

Britain should follow America’s lead and create its own UFO taskforce to investigate potential extraterrestrial sightings, experts have said.

They accused the UK Government of failing to take the issue seriously enough and warned that it could have serious implications for the country’s defence capabilities.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the British military in the 1990s before the unit was disbanded, said it was ‘outrageous’ that ministers are not taking ‘meaningful action’ to probe unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) — more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

‘The Ministry of Defence (MoD) needs to restart UAP investigations, a task force of some sort needs to be set up, and the Defence Committee needs to start holding the MoD to account on UAP, as the Armed Services Committees are doing in the US Congress, in both the Senate and the House,’ he told MailOnline.

Mr Pope accused defence officials of ‘falling back on a lazy, closed-minded “it can’t be, so it isn’t” mindset’, meaning potential foreign threats to UK shores could be missed.

The MoD closed its UFO desk in 2009 and nothing has ever replaced it.

Prior to this, it carried out what at the time was a highly-secretive and extensive UFO investigation of more than 10,000 possible sightings over several decades — many of which were by military personnel.

Known as the Project Condign report, it concluded that 80 per cent of the sightings were easily explained, 19 per cent were secret military craft and just 1 per cent were mysterious in origin.

However, the MoD accepted that there are always going to be UAP and that those which are unexplained are likely an ‘an unknown kind of plasma’ and not of concern. 

‘The MoD has consistently stated that no UFO/UAP sighting has ever shown a threat to the UK, therefore they are of no defence significance and as a result the MoD is not interested,’ said Philip Mantle, the former director of investigations at the British UFO Research Association.

He told MailOnline that for this reason it would be ‘pointless’ to set up a UFO taskforce.

‘The MoD are not interested and science in general usually gives the subject a wide berth,’ Mr Mantle added.

‘One thing that is clear, however, is that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be, does not recognise any international borders, therefore any such study surely must be international in scope rather than national.’

In the US, NASA last week released its highly-anticipated report into more than 800 potential alien sightings over a period of three decades.

The space agency’s independent panel of experts stressed that there was ‘no reason to conclude’ that any were extraterrestrial in origin, but warned that mysterious flying objects were a ‘self-evident’ threat to American airspace. 

Mr Pope said that if the US was worried about this then Britain, as an NATO ally, should be too.

He added: ‘The UK can make a significant contribution to the wider search for the truth about UAP, by leveraging its world class intelligence community imagery analysis resources and capabilities. 

‘The bottom line is that we need action. 

‘Just as lawmakers in the US – Republicans and Democrats alike – are taking up this issue, UK Parliamentarians should start asking the MoD some hard questions, not accept boilerplate responses, and ensure that meaningful action is taken by setting up a task force modeled on the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.’

A petition has also been set up calling for the UK to set up an investigatory office on UFOs/UAPs but has so far attracted just 1,500 signatures since May.

It requires 10,000 for the Government to respond to it and 100,000 to be considered for debate in Parliament.

The petition states that the office ‘would be primarily to research and investigate reports of UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) over the United Kingdom and also assist and support witnesses.’

Even though they poured cold water on the extraterrestrial hypothesis, NASA’s experts did not deny the possibility of a ‘potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere’. 

Their 33-page report called for NASA to utilise its technological might to continue studying UFOs because many cases remain unsolved — and researchers still have no idea what some of these sightings are.

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced that a new director for UFO research would help implement the panel’s recommendations. 

A separate UFO investigation by the Pentagon is also under way, but with the intelligence and military communities.

A NASA contractor is reportedly looking to study ‘alien bodies’ that were presented to Mexico‘s Congress during a controversial UFO hearing.

Jaime Maussan, a veteran broadcast journalist and prolific ufologist who presented the corpses last week, told the DailyMail.com that an unnamed third-party contractor has been in contact with him about carrying out a ‘DNA investigation’ potentially on behalf of the US space agency.

The news comes just one week after NASA’s top UFO investigator Dr David Spergel was pressed about the purported alien corpses – and did not shut them down entirely.

Dr Spergel told reporters: ‘We don’t know the nature of those samples. My recommendation is, if you have something strange, make samples available to the world scientific community, and we’ll see what’s there.’

Maussan had first unveiled the pair of alleged 1,000-year-old bodies, reportedly unearthed in a Peruvian cave, during UFO hearings held by the General Congress of the United Mexican States — unleashing an international firestorm.

While Maussan heralded the bodies’ discovery as one of the most important in human history, his presentation has sparked an outcry from numerous scientists, anthropologists and even some dedicated UFO researchers. 

This week, the temperature of the debate climbed higher, with Peru’s Minister of Culture filing criminal charges accusing Maussan and his collaborators of robbing bodies from ancient graves.

As of 2022, Peru’s Culture Ministry has designated approximately 26,000 protected archaeological sites across the country, but has faced budget constraints in its efforts to secure these valuable artifacts from black market antiquities dealers.

But, as Maussan told the DailyMail.com, ‘I personally went to the Ministry of Culture, to ask them to do the investigation to get involved in this finding.’ 

‘They never did,’ according to Maussan. ‘We tried many, many times. We sent letters.’

‘And let me tell you something else,’ Maussan asked rhetorically, ‘You remember NASA saying that this should be investigated, and so on?’ 

‘A contractor from NASA took the challenge,’ Maussan answered. ‘They are a laboratory dedicated to the reading of DNA.’

Despite several attempts by the DailyMail.com, via phone and email, NASA’s office of public affairs could not yet be reached for comment.

For his part, Maussan expressed concern that too much transparency too early could upset the delicate investigations which, he says, are now underway.

When asked by the DailyMail.com, Mussaun declined to identify the NASA contractor by name. 

‘A contractor from NASA — it’s all I can tell you,’ he said. 

‘I won’t tell you the name. I want to keep this private,’ he said, ‘until they can do their investigation.’

But, the Mexican broadcaster who was once chief investigative reporter and editor of 60 Minutos, the country’s affiliate of the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes, was nevertheless willing to speculate on the NASA contractor’s next steps. 

‘I think they’re going to Peru [then] they’re coming to Mexico,’ Maussan said, ‘to check on the bodies to take samples. They want to do their own DNA investigation.’

‘And we said yes! We are open, my friend.’

Maussan’s efforts to garner professional scientific interest in the potential of ‘ancient alien’ specimens from Latin America has spanned years, with some setbacks and some success, but never before at the present level of international scrutiny.

At a May 5, 2015, event in Mexico City, Maussan and a coalition of US ufologists presented now infamous photographic slides purported to document a recovered alien body from the long-rumored 1947 flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico.

Efforts by a coalition of skeptics and dedicated UFO researchers, however, quickly put forward compelling evidence that the images depicted a child mummy, museum placard included, as displayed at the Mesa Verde Museum in Colorado.

Undaunted, Maussan returned with his first Peruvian ‘alien mummy’ in 2017, for a documentary on Gaia TV, which included analysis by Konstantin Korotkov, a professor of computer science and biophysics at Saint-Petersburg University,

In the ensuing speculation, some scientists have taken a crack at determining the origin of these specimens, including researchers at the Cyprus University of Technology as well as the retired CEO of Western Paleontological Laboratories.  

Debate continues on whether the specimens are truly alien, or were ritually made from human and llama remains by ancient indigenous populations, or were made more recently by the enterprising tomb-raiding huaqueros themselves. 

To complicate matters, the numerous Peruvian mummies brought to the public by Maussan vary in size and several more key characteristics. 

This week, Maussan’s associate, Dr. Jose Zalce Benitez, the director of the Scientific Institute for Health of the Mexican Navy, detailed x-rays, 3-D reconstruction and DNA analysis which he said has been carried out on the remains.

According to Benitez, scans showed that the specimens of the two latest mummies are each ‘a single skeleton’ and ‘complete organic being,’ contrary to suggestions they were made up of ‘different parts as some assumed.’

This analysis has its critics, including Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, a respected Peruvian bio-anthropologist, who cited similar alleged finds that were found to be frauds.

‘What we said before still stands, they are presenting the same rehash as always and if there are people that keep believing that, what can we do?,’ she said.

Ultimately, Maussan maintains his conviction that the bodies merit deeper, professional scrutiny.

‘We know — we’re not stupid — that we need someone bigger than us, a university, or an institution, someone bigger, to investigate them,’ Maussan told the DailyMail.com Thursday.

‘Once that happens, everybody will realize this is the finding of the century or the millennium, or whatever you want to say,’ Maussan said. ‘I put my hands on the fire, to tell you that this is absolutely real.’

‘This is physical evidence, it’s not going to evaporate.’ 

 

NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu — an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt‘s fiery bird-god — from crashing cataclysmically into Earth.

While Bennu’s chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person’s chance of being struck by lightning, NASA’s team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two ‘most hazardous known asteroids.’

In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth with 1,200 megatons of energy: 24 times the power of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated (the Soviet Union’s ‘Tsar Bomba‘).

If it happens, Bennu’s impact would unleash its 1.2 gigaton impact 159 years from this Sunday, on September 24, 2182.

While Bennu is nowhere near the size of the dino-killing, six-mile across space rock that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, astronomers believe that the asteroid ‘could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor.’

When NASA dispatched its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for a rendezvous with the asteroid on September 8, 2016, part of its mission was to trail Bennu for two years from 2018 to 2020 collecting data to better calculate its future path. 

‘We improved our knowledge of Bennu’s trajectory by a factor of 20,’ Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the journal Science.

Provided humanity lasts that long, NASA will conduct its final risk calculations on Bennu’s orbit during its next near-Earth pass in 2135 – about 47 years before its potential impact.  

‘In 2135, we’ll know for sure,’ Farnocchia said.

In the meantime, Bennu, not unlike its namesake god of creation and rebirth, also has something to tell us about the birth of our solar system.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx went to Bennu equipped with the tools to map the ancient asteroid, a sort of time capsule of the early solar system, and collect rare samples of this nearly untouched material.

This Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx will drop a payload of 8.8 ounces (250 grams) from its Bennu mission back down to Earth, as the probe skates past approximately 485 miles above our planet’s surface toward its next asteroid rendezvous mission.  

‘This is pure untainted material revealing early solar system secrets,’ astrophysicist Hakeem Oluyesi of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory told ABC News about the samples.   

‘A longshot discovery would be finding biological molecules or even precursor molecules for life,’ according to Oluyesi.

OSIRIS-REx was not only the US space agency’s first-ever asteroid sample collection run.

It is now poised to also become the largest-ever asteroid-sampling mission, besting Japanese space agency JAXA’s collection of 5.4 grams from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

But OSIRIS-REx’s mission is still days away from successful completion. 

‘It feels very much like the last few miles of a marathon,’ said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. 

‘A confluence of emotions like pride and joy, coexisting with a determined focus to complete the race well.’

After careening across 63,000 miles of our solar system, and now hurtling towards Earth at a breakneck 28,000 mph, OSIRIS-REx will release its capsule of samples at approximately 4:42 AM Mountain Time (10:42 AM UTC) over Utah. 

The capsule, about the size of a mini-fridge and prepared to withstand friction temperatures twice as hot as molten magma, will be slowed in its descent to Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert by parachutes. 

Researchers plan to recover the samples from a pre-planned 36-mile by 8.5-mile area on the Pentagon’s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City. 

Touchdown is expect at a little before 9:00 AM Mountain Time.

All the data collected by the OSIRIS-REx will help in future efforts to deflect Bennu in the event of a worst case scenario. 

But planetary scientist Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office believes such a dire case is unlikely.

‘I don’t think we need to do anything about Bennu,’ as Johnson told Science.

‘This data set [from OSIRIS-REx] will be enormously valuable in assessing deflection technologies,’ according to Johnson who believes that the nearly 50-year window between 2135 and 2182 will be plenty of time to mount an Armageddon-style deflection mission.

Nonetheless, if Bennu were to impact Earth, it would be similar to an explosion of more than 1.1 billion tons of TNT. 

Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement: ‘NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet. 

‘We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them.

‘The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.’

NASA last updated its estimates of the planetary risks posed by Bennu in November 2021, with a paper entitled ‘Ephemeris and hazard assessment for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu based on OSIRIS-REx data,’ published in the journal Icarus.  

While there is a slight chance Bennu will collide with Earth over the next three centuries, the space agency notes there is more than a 99.9 percent probability it will not. 

Back in 2020, NASA unveiled stunning videos and images showing the moment the spacecraft pulled off its six-second touch-and-go (TAG) mission where it bounced off the Bennu’s surface and picked up samples along the way.

Once completed Sunday, the triumphant $1.16 billion mission will be the first American effort to take a sample from an asteroid with the hopes to unlock secrets about the origin of life on Earth.

NASA’s October 2020 images show how the spacecraft descended within three feet of the target landing spot dubbed Nightingale on the asteroid while avoiding boulders the size of buildings. 

Upon contact, the spacecraft’s 11-foot robotic arm can then be seen smashing some porous rock upon initial impact with the surface.

A nitrogen gas bottle then fired on the surface to stir up material and suck it up in a ‘rubble shower’.

The spacecraft spent five seconds of the six seconds on Bennu collecting the material before backing away, with a majority of the sample collected in the first three seconds.

Three years later, fruits of those six seconds, a smaller safer piece of Bennu will finally collide gently with Earth. 

It has been billed as NASA’s ‘asteroid autumn’ and involves a trio of exciting missions that could answer some truly mind-boggling questions.  

From offering clues to how life on Earth began, to unlocking the secrets of the solar system, key milestones for each voyage are due to play out over the next six weeks.

They include one rocket launch, a distant fly-by between Jupiter and Mars, and the recovery of ancient space rocks in the Utah desert that could contain the ingredients for life.

Of the three, the lift-off of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft probably sounds the most mundane — but no so fast.

That is also a fascinating mission, because it is setting off on a 2.5 billion-mile (4 billion-kilometre) journey to find out once and for all if a metal-rich asteroid really could bring down the world’s economy. 

1. Visit to $10,000 QUADRILLION space rock

Psyche is due to lift-off on October 5 on its way to the asteroid 16 Psyche, which scientists think may be packed full of precious metals with a value in excess of $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion).

Others dispute this and say it is just hard rock, but NASA should be able to tell either way when its orbiter gets to the asteroid in July 2029. 

One thing it definitely won’t look like is anything resembling what you might find in a jewellery store, however. 

‘I would love for it to look like a shiny, polished, what’s called a pallasite meteorite — with the shiny silver metal and the beautiful gold and green jewel-like silicate minerals in between,’ said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the mission’s principal investigator.

‘But it’s not going to look like that. Because no one’s been onto Psyche, cut it open and polished it.’

She added: ‘It’s been hanging out in space, getting solar wind hitting it for a really, really long time. So the surfaces are not likely to be shiny.’

If 16 Psyche is in fact loaded with precious metals, it could be worth a huge amount of money, according to Dr Linda Elkins-Tanton, a space scientist at MIT. 

She has calculated that the iron in 16 Psyche alone would be worth $10,000 quadrillion (£8,072 quadrillion). 

Assuming the market for asteroid materials is on Earth, this could cause the value of precious metals to plummet, completely devaluing all holdings including those of governments, and all companies involved in mining, distributing and trading such commodities. 

Ultimately, it could lead to the collapse of the entire economy.

Of course it’s all speculative and hypothetical, because even if the space rock was worth anywhere close to that kind of money, it’s not like it could easily be brought back to Earth.

Engineers in California are currently getting the spacecraft ready to journey to 16 Psyche, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The orbiter is due to piggy-back into space on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket which is scheduled to lift off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than 10:38 ET (15:38 BST) on October 5. 

2. Recover sample from a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid 

A separate team of NASA scientists is also gearing up to recover a capsule containing fragments of the asteroid Bennu.

The 8.8oz (250g) sample of rock and dust will be dropped back to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and is due to land in Utah’s western desert on September 24.

An acronym for ‘Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer’, OSIRIS-REx became the first US mission to collect a sample from an asteroid when it briefly touched down on Bennu in October 2020 and scooped up material with its robotic arm. 

The space rock is about the size of the Empire State Building and around 200 million miles away from us.

It is of great interest to scientists because it is believed to contain microscopic mineral grains that pre-date the solar system.

This carbon-rich material is also thought to hold the preserved building blocks of life and could help experts better understand how the planets were formed and how life originated on Earth.

The sample that OSIRIS-REx recovered is the largest by a NASA mission since the Apollo astronauts returned with moon rocks in the 1960s and 70s.

It will be brought back to Earth and land at the Utah Test and Training Range in just over a week’s time. 

The precious rocks and dust will then be housed at a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is home to hundreds of pounds of lunar material collected by the 12 Apollo moonwalkers.

3. Fly-by on the way to Jupiter’s Trojans

Meanwhile, a spacecraft named Lucy – launched in October 2021 to study eight asteroids that orbit Jupiter – will pass its first space rock called Dinkinesh on November 1.

During its 12-year journey the probe will be the first to tour the so-called Trojan asteroids, which are seen as ‘time capsules from the birth of our solar system’. 

Although Lucy will get its first close-up look at a space rock in six weeks’ time, its maiden Trojan asteroid flyby will not happen for another four years, when the spacecraft gets closer to Jupiter in August 2027.

The vast majority of the asteroid visits will happen in 2027 and 2028, with a final asteroid flyby scheduled to happen in March 2033.

The first will take place in April 2025, when Lucy visits a space rock in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars known as Donaldjohanson. 

This will be followed by a trip to seven Trojan asteroids that are named after characters from Greek mythology.

They are Eurybates, Queta, Polymele, Leucus, Orus, Patroclus and Menoetius.  

All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds.

Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances, dating back to the first days of the solar system.

No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around our sun. Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets. 

NASA has said the $981 million (£715 million) mission will revolutionise our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system, giving insight into planetary evolution. 

It takes its name from the fossilised human ancestor, named ‘Lucy’ by her discovers, whose skeleton provided unique insights into our evolution. 

As well as viewing some of the oldest rocks in the solar system, Lucy’s path will cross the Earth three times, as it uses our planet’s gravity to aid in its positioning.

This move will make it the first ever spacecraft to return to Earth from the outer solar system, as all the others are either still going – in the case of the Viking probes – or burnt up in the atmosphere of a gas giant, as was the case with Cassini and Saturn.

It was one of the pivotal UFO videos captured by the US military that helped thrust the once-fringe topic into the mainstream — the so-called ‘GOFAST’ infrared video filmed by US Navy fighter pilots off the coast of the Atlantic in January 2015.

But NASA claims it has debunked any exotic or extraterrestrial theories for GOFAST, boasting new analysis that ‘reveals a less extraordinary interpretation.’

In a landmark advisory report released Thursday, the US space agency said — among other findings — that the GOFAST UFO was ‘most likely’ nothing more than a conventional object ‘drifting with the wind.’ 

But meteorological records, climate scientists, US Navy witnesses, and even computer simulations developed and tested by diehard UFO skeptics have cast doubt on the likelihood that NASA’s GOFAST explanation will hold fast much longer.

At the heart of the issue: NASA’s experts, by their own admission, failed to check their math on the UFO’s possible ‘wind drift’ against the global climate science community’s public wind-speed data from the likely time of the GOFAST sighting.

To be sure, despite their own skepticism, NASA‘s UFO advisory panel did otherwise leave plenty of room for UFO true believers, noting in their final report that ‘alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere’ was ‘at least plausible.’

The US space agency even appointed a new director of research, Mark McInerney, solely devoted to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the new more technically accurate term for UFOs.

But, while the panel expressed hope that their efforts would help reduce the stigma around the reporting and scientific analysis of UAP, NASA’s experts put forth a theory in their final report apparently intended to bring GOFAST back down to Earth.

In doing so, the space agency ignored voices from the squadron of Navy pilots that filmed GOFAST and the no-less-famous GIMBAL infrared UFO video, recorded that same evening in January 2015.

At the NASA group’s open meeting last May, one of its UAP advisory panel members Josh Semeter — an engineering professor and director of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics — presented his preliminary analysis of the GOFAST video.

Semeter made his case that the GOFAST was likely an object coasting in a strong breeze primarily by working with data present on the infrared video’s display: the same intel a Navy weapons systems officer would use in the backseat of a fighter jet.

‘Fortunately the information needed to determine the altitude and velocity of this object is contained on the display,’ Semeter explained.

Based on his trigonometric calculations of the fighter jet’s flight path as the jet filmed the ‘GOFAST’ UAP, itself a moving target, Semeter estimated that the mystery object was cruising at just about 40 miles per hour (mph).

‘That’s a velocity that is consistent with wind speeds at 13,000 feet,’ Semeter told his fellow NASA-appointed advisors this May. And, in fact, the calculated altitude for the GOFAST UAP, according to Semeter and others, was indeed about 13,000 feet.

Semeter’s calculations emerged largely unchallenged in the NASA panel’s final UFO report published this past Thursday — except for one significant caveat. 

‘Our calculation has neglected wind effects on the aircraft,’ NASA’s UFO report stated, ‘and thus there is uncertainty in this result.’ 

But this dry note of caution might drastically understate the importance of these wind effects, to judge from both Semeter’s critics and his allies.

Crucially, the Navy pilot witnesses heard in the GIMBAL video, which was filmed in the same area within approximately 15 minutes of the GOFAST video, state that the wind at their altitude of about 25,000 feet was then blowing ‘120 knots to the west.’  

One computer simulation, created by noted UFO skeptic Mick West and hosted on his skeptics forum Metabunk, found that the GOFAST object would have been going significantly faster than 40 mph when taking this wind speed into account.  

The skeptic’s simulation would have the GOFAST UFO traveling at 320 knots or 369 mph — hundreds of miles faster than the stated wind speed pushing at its back.

‘This suggests that the object could not be a balloon,’ as one Metabunk poster noted, ‘because it needs intrinsic speed in addition [to] wind speed at 13,000 ft.’

As the US National Weather Service notes, ‘wind speed generally increases with increasing height,’ and the Metabunk simulation estimates that 120 knots of wind at 25,000 feet could correspond in this case to 50-to-80 knots of wind at 13,000 feet.

But even with this 50-to-80 knots of wind helping the GOFAST sail along, the UFO would still be going too fast: faster than the top speed of a Cessna 172 aircraft (188 mph), faster even than a top-of-the-line Ferrari 488 GTB (205 mph).

While Mick West praised Semeter’s work for NASA last May, calling it a rare example of ‘peer review’ in UFO research, the prominent UFO skeptic also felt compelled to note that the wind issue left the GOFAST case still far from identified.

‘There are some open questions (and unknowns) re wind,’ West posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, ‘but I think this basic analysis is correct.’ 

Other observers, however, were less forgiving of the gaps in this NASA analysis. 

One, a former Obama-era appointee to the US Department of Defense named Marik von Rennenkampff, called Semeter’s omission of the reported wind conditions a ‘significant error.’ 

‘The ‘GOFAST’ video shows a small, sphere-like object with no wings, engines or thermal signature demonstrating ‘very interesting apparent maneuvers.” von Rennenkampff wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill.

The one-time DoD staffer likened the UAP to other small, sphere-like objects reported over the Middle East by the Pentagon’s new UFO investigation office, as well as reports from the other Navy pilots with the squadron that spotted GOFAST. 

But accurate wind speed data for the time of the GOFAST sighting need not be investigated solely via computer models and the recorded statements of the pilots present themselves that day.

Wind speed data from the time and place of the GOFAST sighting is already available — via detailed, archival weather data collated from multiple systems by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which is made open to the public via their ERA5 reanalyzed climate dataset.

Meteorologists and climate science researchers use ERA5 to obtain reliable, global, hour-by-hour weather information for academic research, commercial aviation and government policy making purposes.

It was exactly this kind of data that NASA’s UAP advisory panel leader, astrophysicist David Spergel, referenced when introducing the panel’s final report this Thursday.

‘We looked at NASA’s assets,’ Spergel said. ‘While they provide a comprehensive picture of the ocean, the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for studying our evolving planet, they typically do not have the resolution needed for UAP events.’ 

‘However,’ he added, ‘by providing data on environmental conditions, they can complement other data on UAP.’

In this case, such data would have complimented the infrared video data taken by the Navy and the Navy pilots’ witness testimony. 

Although NASA scientists have experience utilizing ERA5 to study everything from atmospheric rivers of water vapor to the reflection of sunlight off of ice at the South Pole, the space agency’s UFO team did not utilize it in their work on GOFAST.

It is not clear from NASA’s UFO report whether or not they even tasked the agency’s military liaison Mark McInerney, now NASA’s first director of UAP research, with requesting more detailed information on the time or place of the GOFAST event.

Such efforts might have assisted the panel in obtaining ERA5 data proximate to the date, region and elevations of the GOFAST UFO episode — like those obtained by the DailyMail.com from a PhD climate researcher who wishes to remain anonymous. 

Two likely dates have emerged as the most probable candidates for the Navy’s GIMBAL and GOFAST UFO events, which occurred in late January 2015.

In a 2019 statement to Freedom of Information Act researcher John Greenewald, an official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, Joseph Gradisher, stated that both sightings occurred on January 21, 2015.

But metadata embedded within the original GIMBAL video, as well as an unclassified Department of Defense email, reviewed for a conference paper presented to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics place both sightings on the evening of January 24th, 2015.

The DailyMail.com can confirm the likelihood of these two dates from previous interviews with retired Navy fighter pilot Lt. Ryan Graves, whose squadron reported the GIMBAL and GOFAST events.  

Data from the ERA5 reanalyzed climate dataset, for both the 21st and 24th of January, show that only the later date had wind speeds approaching 120 knots near the region or cruising elevation of 25,000 feet reported by the Navy pilots.

The ERA5 maps are marked with a red dot off the lower Eastern seaboard near Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville, Florida — in an effort to approximate where the Navy fighter pilots reported witnessing the GIMBAL and GOFAST UAP in January 2015.

These ERA5 maps, alongside the DoD email and the infrared video metadata, help to corroborate the Navy witness heard in the GIMBAL video who describes the wind speed at 25,000 feet as ‘120 knots to the west.’ 

The period for high winds at high altitude persisted from, at least, 4:00 PM ET (21:00 UTC) to 8:00 PM ET (01:00 UTC). 

The prolonged time range means that this ERA5 data also helps confirm pilot testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee which attested that the sightings occurred ‘toward the end of one of the night flights.’

The climate scientist who helped supply the DailyMail.com with the ERA5 wind data described NASA’s explanation of the GOFAST video as ‘low-effort’ and ‘not rigorous.’ 

Semeter and the rest of NASA’s 16-person UAP advisory team, this researchers said, should have tried to ‘get more context from the filming crew [of US Navy aviators].’ 

But this researcher declined to be mentioned by name, citing risk of career repercussions for criticizing the space agency. 

‘As a research scientist I’m writing grants to fund my research, and NASA is one of our funding [agencies],’ this climate researcher said. 

‘I don’t want any problem with them.’

When the agency first announced its UAP advisory panel in June 2022, NASA’s Assistant Deputy Associate Administrator for Research Daniel Evans told CNBC that the budget would be ‘certainly no more than $100,000.’

Evans said that NASA’s budget for the UAP study would be ‘very consistent’ with standard grant review panels. 

It’s unclear how much of the 16-person team’s modest six-figure budget went toward Semeter’s analysis of the GOFAST UAP video. 

Perhaps significantly, Semeter’s trigonometric analysis largely echoed work that had already been previously posted to the skeptics’ forum Metabunk in 2018.

Christophe Spitzer Isbert — a French UFO researcher whose work on a UAP event near Hessdalen in Norway was cited by the French government’s UFO research body Geipan — told the DailyMail.com that he believes NASA should have not rushed its GOFAST opinions into publication  

‘A small set of assumptions replaced hypothesis testing,’ Isbert said. 

‘Assuming the object was lighter than air because it was slow and did not radiate heat does not constitute evidence to support the balloon hypothesis,’ he added.

Isbert expressed his opinion that the US space agency should have attempted to collect a wider set of undisputed evidence on the GOFAST case, perhaps in the form of an official Navy report, before leveraging its stature with these public comments.

As an example, he recommended one possible method to help confirm NASA’s wind-blown hypothesis, a method that also used only data available in the video itself.

‘Tumbling on any axis would be visible as aspect ratio changes (length vs height),’ Isbert noted. ‘This would also be predicted by the balloon hypothesis since the object is not [perfectly] spherical.’

Josh Semeter of NASA’s UAP advisory panel has not yet responded to email and phone requests for comment from the DailyMail.com, but this article will be updated if or when he does. 

The inaugural boss of NASA‘s newly-created UFO research division has been named as a former meteorologist and liaison to the Pentagon.

Mark McInerney will become the US space agency’s director of research into unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

NASA officials initially refused to reveal McInerney’s identity amid fears he would be harassed, before later backtracking on the decision.

Speaking about the new UFO boss following the release of the agency’s highly-anticipated study into more than 800 UAP sightings, NASA’s associate administrator Nicola Fox told reporters: ‘They have been working there a while now, during the study, to help be a point of contact.’

But when directly asked whether she could name the official, Fox replied: ‘We will not give his name out.’

All changed hours later, however, when NASA sent out a press release that included McInerney’s name and revealed he previously worked as the agency’s liaison to the Pentagon.

There has been no explanation as to why McInerney’s identity was revealed when NASA initially declined to do so.

However, it emerged at last night’s briefing that several members of the independent study group had received threats, hate mail and been ridiculed on social media.  

Some were even apparently told to stay away from researching UFOs because it could damage their scientific credibility. 

‘That’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free,’ Dan Evans, the NASA official in charge of the study, originally said.

‘Some of [the incidents] rose to actual threats.’

The newly-formed UFO research division will continue studying UAPs, even though the space agency yesterday ruled out that aliens were to blame for some 800 such sightings over almost three decades.

These are defined as objects ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective’. 

In a landmark report commissioned by NASA last year and published on Thursday, an independent panel of 16 experts stressed that there was ‘no reason to conclude’ that any of the sightings they analysed were extraterrestrial in origin. 

However, the team did warn that mysterious flying objects were a ‘self-evident’ threat to American airspace. 

Even though they poured cold water on the extraterrestrial hypothesis, NASA’s experts did not deny the possibility of a ‘potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere.’ 

Their 33-page report called for NASA to utilise its technological might to continue studying UFOs because many cases remain unsolved — and researchers still have no idea what some of these sightings are.

NASA chief Bill Nelson announced that a new director for UFO research would help implement the panel’s recommendations. 

Following a news briefing setting out the findings, he said: ‘I want to thank the independent study team for providing insight on how NASA can better study and analyse UAP in the future. 

‘NASA’s new Director of UAP Research will develop and oversee the implementation of NASA’s scientific vision for UAP research, including using NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyse UAP and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies. 

‘NASA will do this work transparently for the benefit of humanity.’

McInerney’s new role will see him ‘centralise communications, resources, and data analytical capabilities to establish a robust database for the evaluation of future UAP’, NASA said.

‘He also will leverage NASA’s expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and space-based observation tools to support and enhance the broader government initiative on UAP,’ the space agency added.

Since 1996, McInerney has worked in various positions, spending time at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the National Hurricane Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The NASA advisory panel’s new report analysed hundreds of potential UFO sightings, albeit with a budget of just $100,000 (£80,500) and just nine months to conduct their work.

The panel noted that, to date, most UAPs are recorded with sensors and other equipment intended for nonscientific purposes, under accidental or ‘serendipitous’ circumstances that are far from ideal.

Evidence from nearly all UFO cases, in other words, was not collected with enough scientific rigour for experts to reach reliable conclusions in the panel’s view.  

‘Coupled with incomplete data archiving and curation,’ the NASA panel wrote, ‘this means that the origin of numerous UAP [UFOs] remain uncertain.’

They concluded that in their scientific view, the bar for proof of extraterrestrial visitors to our planet must be kept high. 

‘In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort,’ the panel wrote, ‘the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.’ 

‘As Sherlock Holmes said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.’ 

Back in May, NASA’s independent study team shared their preliminary observations — that up to 98 per cent of reported UAP sightings can be explained away.

Just 2 to 5 percent are considered ‘possibly really anomalous’, the panel added, but a lack of high-quality data is hampering researchers’ ability to apply ‘rigorous scientific scrutiny’ to the mystery-solving. 

NASA’s study is separate from the Pentagon’s investigation into UAPs, which saw US lawmakers hear first-hand accounts of UFO sightings from former members of the military earlier this year.

That Pentagon study, led by the Defense Department’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and directed by Pentagon physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, has received 350 reports of UFOs in the past two years. 

Almost half, or precisely 171 of those UFO cases, remain unexplained. 

Although their is cross-collaboration, the US space agency’s panel is focused on the civilian, unclassified side of this effort, while AARO leads the charge on examining UAPs in coordination with the intelligence and military communities.

NASA has published its first-ever study into hundreds of UFO sightings in recent decades and concluded there is ‘no reason’ to believe any cases are aliens – yet.

The unprecedented report, which comes as UFO fever reaches a tipping point in the US, analyzed more than 800 cases across three decades — albeit with a budget of just $100,000 and only about nine months to conduct their work.

The panel noted that, to date, most UFO sightings are recorded with sensors and other equipment intended for nonscientific purposes under accidental or ‘serendipitous’ circumstances.

The evidence from nearly all UFO cases, in other words, was not collected with enough scientific rigor to reach reliable conclusions.  

‘Coupled with incomplete data archiving and curation,’ the NASA panel wrote, ‘this means that the origin of numerous UAP [UFOs] remain uncertain.’

But, the panel did explain away one famous case, the US Navy’s ‘GOFAST’ UFO video: ‘We find the object moved about 390 meters during this 22-second interval,’ the new NASA report said, ‘which corresponds to an average speed of 40 mph.’ 

‘This is a typical wind speed at 13,000 feet,’ the NASA panel said, concluding it was probably a terrestrial, balloon-like object ‘most likely drifting with the wind.’

NASA’s panel of experts, however, had been primarily tasked with the goal of recommending new investigative avenues for future UFO research — advising on how the US space agency’s own tools could aid in the search for ET visitation.

NASA announced last year that it would review evidence regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), more commonly known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Their panel defined UAP as sightings ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.’

In their final report issued today, the NASA team elaborated that, in their scientific view, the bar for proof of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth must be kept high.

‘In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort,’ the panel wrote, ‘the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.’ 

‘As Sherlock Holmes said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

During a question and answer session presenting their report, the head of NASA’s UAP advisory panel, astrophysicist David Spergel cautioned that more work will be needed to collect data on UAP, a process which he said has been marred by ‘a limited sample of events’ and ‘limited data.’

‘Stigma has limited reporting by pilots, both civilian and military,’ Spergel noted. ‘So we know there’s missing data.’ 

Back in May, NASA’s independent study team shared their preliminary observations — that up to 98 per cent of reported UAP sightings can be explained away.

Just 2 to 5 per cent are considered ‘possibly really anomalous’, the panel added, but a lack of high-quality data is hampering researchers’ ability to apply ‘rigorous scientific scrutiny’ to the mystery-solving.

These genuinely unexplained UAPs are defined as ‘anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor,’ or ‘something that is doing something weird,’ said team member Nadia Drake earlier this year.

NASA’s panel leader, David Spergel, echoed those comments today, adding ‘even if there are some events that, in the end, turn out to be something novel, most events are going to turn out to be conventional things: balloons, airplanes, and so on.’

While it had always been unlikely that today’s report would provide ground-breaking new information not revealed at the panel’s first public meeting in May, it did usher in the start of a new mission for the US space agency.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced the creation of a dedicated new position at the space agency, director of UAP research.

Nelson said that the newly appointed director will be tasked with developing and leading ‘the implementation of NASA’s vision for UAP research.’

‘We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science,’ Nelson said. 

But the panel was guarded as to actual identity of NASA’s new UAP chief, with Spergel citing ‘nasty and hostile’ elements of the UFO ‘fringe’ who have ‘behaved badly’ and ‘harassed’ panel members on social media.

While NASA’s probes and rovers currently scour the solar system for any signs of alien life, its historic posture has been to ‘debunk’ sightings on our home planet.

But today, NASA’s panel acknowledged that its international suite of sensors and satellites do not collect data from the Earth at the level of detail needed to spot most modestly sized UFOs — as opposed to an apparently massive UAP like the infamous 1997 Phoenix Lights. 

‘We looked at NASA’s assets,’ Spergel said. 

‘While they provide a comprehensive picture of the ocean, the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for studying our evolving planet,’ he pointed out, ‘they typically do not have the resolution needed for UAP events.’

Spergel expressed the hope that these systems could be used to better understand the many ways that normal, terrestrial phenomena could appear unusual, so that the signal of a true ‘out of this world’ anomaly could be pulled out from that noise.

‘If you want to find something strange in a haystack,’ Spergel said, ‘you better know exactly what hay looks like.’ 

‘You need to know what typical, regular things look like, under all conditions.’ 

The mere existence of NASA’s advisory panel on UAP reflects a sea change in how seriously the US government has approached these airborne mysteries in recent years, partly due to concern that some could be related to foreign surveillance.

But the issue of aviation safety, for both commercial and military pilots, has also helped drastically change the conversation on UFOs in recent years. 

The reality of these pilots’ UAP reports, as NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research, Dan Evans, explained today, ‘raises serious concerns about the safety of our skies.’

‘The threat to US airspace safety posed by UAP is self-evident,’ NASA’s panel concluded in their new report.

The panel added that it sees promise in future ‘systematic, evidenced-based’ data collection on UFOs via the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which is already jointly administered by NASA.

‘This confidential and voluntary reporting system for pilots, air traffic controllers, and other professional aviation staff, receives approximately 100,000 reports per year,’ the new NASA report said. 

‘Although not initially designed for UAP collection,’ the panel wrote, ‘better harnessing it for commercial pilot UAP reporting would provide a critical database.’ 

Notably, NASA’s study is separate to the Pentagon’s investigation into UAPs, which saw US lawmakers hear first-hand accounts of UFO sightings from former members of the military earlier this year.

That Pentagon study, led by the Defense Department’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) led by Pentagon physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, has received 350 reports of UFOs in the past two years. 

Almost half, or precisely 171 of those UFO cases, remain unexplained. 

Although their is cross-collaboration, the US space agency’s panel is leading the civilian, unclassified side of this effort, while AARO focuses on examining UAPs in coordination with the intelligence and military communities. 

For its advisory panel, NASA put together an independent team of 16 scientific, aeronautic, and data analytic experts with the aim of analyzing sightings of UAPs from a logical and scientific perspective.

‘We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry,’ the space agency’s Thomas Zurbuchen said last year before the study began.

‘We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.’

The NASA panel’s report, which was published at 9:30 ET (14:30) this morning, was followed by a media briefing at NASA’s headquarters in Washington that began at 10:00 ET (15:00), during which the panel discussed its findings.

The press conference was streamed live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website here. 

‘We recognize that public interest in UAPs is high, and that the demand for answers is strong,’ Dan Evans, the NASA official in charge of the study, said this past May.

‘It is now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with the rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve.’

He added: ‘All of NASA’s data is available to the public – we take that obligation seriously – and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study.’

NASA wants to take commercial passengers from New York to London in less time than it takes to watch the average in-flight movie.

America’s space agency announced this week that it has been exploring ‘the business case for supersonic passenger air travel.’

The craft promises blistering speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 4, or from roughly 1,535 to 3,045 miles per hour (mph) — easily over twice as fast as an F/A-18 fighter jet’s top speed of Mach 1.8 or 1,190 mph.

According to NASA, the next phase of its high-speed air travel research is now underway: two 12-month contracts granted to Boeing, Rolls-Royce and others to help conceptualize the new jet and build a ‘technology roadmap.’

Earlier this summer, NASA completed its X-59 quiet supersonic test aircraft, which is designed to muffle its own sonic booms; the program that will serve as an inspiration for the new jet project. 

The X-59 is scheduled to have its first test flight later this year. 

The world’s current fastest passenger jet, the French- and British-made Concorde made its fasted flight between New York and London on February 7, 1996, crossing the Atlantic in just 2 hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds.

For comparison’s sake, the standard large airliner today flies at a cruising speed of about 600 mph, under Mach 1 at roughly 80 percent of the speed of sound.

These jets can take 5 hours or more to make the 3461-mile trek from New York to London.

The Concorde, by contrast, enjoys a maximum cruising speed of 1,354 mph or Mach 2.04. 

But Concorde jets were retired in 2003 following a downturn in the commercial aviation industry and the widely publicized first-ever and only crash of a Concorde in 2000.

NASA hopes to cut even the zippy Concorde’s flight time nearly in half.

In its press statement, NASA said they hoped to see flights from New York City to London accelerate ‘up to four times faster than what’s currently possible.’

From their business analysis, the agency believes that there are potential passenger markets in as many as 50 established routes connecting various cities, focusing on ocean-crossing flights first to minimize regulatory hurdles.

According to the manager of NASA’s Hypersonic Technology Project, Mary Jo Long-Davis, the development phase for the new hypersonic passenger jet will focus on reducing noise during takeoff and landing at first, leaving any issues with mid-flight sonic booms until later.

Both the United States and many other nations prohibit over-land supersonic flights, citing noise pollution from sonic booms and other issues.

High-altitude emissions and other environmental factors, Long-Davis said, are the critical starting concerns for their new project. 

‘We are also collectively conscious of the need to account for safety, efficiency, economic, and societal considerations,’ Long-Davis said. 

‘It’s important to innovate responsibly so we return benefits to travelers and do no harm to the environment.’

NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program (AAVP) will oversee the two new contracts which will produce tech roadmaps detailing hypersonic air travel options, risks and challenges, as well as the innovations necessary to achieve ‘Mach 2-plus travel.’

‘The design concepts and technology roadmaps are really important to have in our hands when the companies are finished,’ Long-Davis at NASA said. 

Aerospace giant Boeing will lead the first team, managing partners including Exosonic, GE Aerospace, Georgia Tech Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory and Rolls-Royce North American Technologies.

Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems will lead the second contracted team, overseeing partners Blue Ridge Research and Consulting, Boom Supersonic and Rolls-Royce North American Technologies, who is participating on both teams.

Both teams will be tasked with designing concepts for the passenger jet’s airframe, its power system, propulsion methods, heat exhaust and heat friction management, and the lightweight-but-tough composite materials employed. 

These technology roadmaps will also create non-proprietary, meaning public domain, designs for hard-flying concept vehicles.

‘We conducted similar concept studies over a decade ago at Mach 1.6-1.8, and those resulting roadmaps helped guide NASA research efforts since, including those leading to the X-59,’ Lori Ozoroski, the project manager for NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology Project, said in a press statement. 

‘These new studies will both refresh those looks at technology roadmaps and identify additional research needs for a broader high-speed range.’ 

The public-private collaboration will be reminiscent of NASA’s QueSST mission, which led to the sonic boom-reducing X-59 test craft, made in partnership with defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

QueSST and the X-59 have an ongoing mandate to supply experimental data to federal regulators that would help change the rules barring overland supersonic flights, by proving that those flights can be quieter and meet other legal standards.

Once these contracts are concluded, according to NASA, the space agency and its partners in both industry and academia will then assess independently whether or not to continue the research with their own funding.

Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the moon in Greek mythology. 

NASA has chosen her to personify its path back to the moon, which will see astronauts return to the lunar surface by 2025 –  including the first woman and the next man.

Artemis 1, formerly Exploration Mission-1, is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the moon and Mars. 

Artemis 1 will be the first integrated flight test of NASA’s deep space exploration system: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.  

Artemis 1 will be an uncrewed flight that will provide a foundation for human deep space exploration, and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the moon and beyond. 

During this flight, the spacecraft will launch on the most powerful rocket in the world and fly farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.

It will travel 280,000 miles (450,600 km) from Earth, thousands of miles beyond the moon over the course of about a three-week mission. 

Orion will stay in space longer than any ship for astronauts has done without docking to a space station and return home faster and hotter than ever before. 

With this first exploration mission, NASA is leading the next steps of human exploration into deep space where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems near the moon needed for lunar surface missions and exploration to other destinations farther from Earth, including Mars. 

The will take crew on a different trajectory and test Orion’s critical systems with humans aboard. 

Together, Orion, SLS and the ground systems at Kennedy will be able to meet the most challenging crew and cargo mission needs in deep space.

Eventually NASA seeks to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon by 2028 as a result of the Artemis mission.

The space agency hopes this colony will uncover new scientific discoveries, demonstrate new technological advancements and lay the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy. 

Who is Victor Glover? The man set to become NASA’s first black astronaut to orbit the moon

NASA is set to send the first-ever black astronaut to the moon.

Victor Glover, 46, was selected to take part in the space agency’s Artemis II mission — the US’ first lunar mission in a half-century.

The Pomona, California, native will be the first person of color to travel into deep space, hundreds of thousands of miles beyond the low-Earth orbiting International Space Station (ISS).

NASA officials say the diverse crew assignments signify the cultural shifts that have taken place since the original Apollo missions, which ended in 1972, at a time when white men dominated space exploration.

Glover was also the first black man to ever live on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2020 and is among 15 African Americans to be selected as an astronaut.

In his esteemed career since being selected as an astronaut in 2013, Mr Glover has logged over 3,000 flight hours in 40 different aircraft.

Artemis II – which will launch in November 2024 – will see the four-man crew orbit the moon in the Orion spacecraft but not land.

Their goal is to test new technology, including heat shields that protects Orion as it travels 24,500 mph in 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its way back.

If successful, NASA plans to launch an expedition to land on the moon titled Artemis III. Another success would spell out a trip to Mars for NASA. 

‘I wanna thank God for this Amazing opportunity,’ Mr Glover said during a new conference Monday.

‘This is a big day. We have a lot to celebrate. It’s so much more than the four names that have been announced. We need to celebrate this moment in human history.

‘Artermis II is more than a mission to the Moon and back. It’s more than a mission that has to happen before we send people to the surface of the moon. It is the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars.

‘This crew will never forget that.’

Mr Glover was born in 1976 in Pomona, around 30 miles east of Los Angeles.

The city is far from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, known for its high poverty rate and relatively high crime. 

He said his parents and teachers served as mentors as him growing up.

‘Early on in life it had to be my parents; they encouraged me and challenged me and held me to high standards. Outside of home, I had teachers that did the same,’ he told USA Today in 2017.

‘They all challenged me, and they encouraged me.’

Mr Glover continued that his teachers and parents urged him to go the engineering school and eventually become a test pilot — leading to him becoming an astronaut. 

He graduated from Southern California’s Ontario High School in 1994, and went on to attend California Polytechnic State University, before completing his graduate education at Air University and the US Naval Academy.

‘I’m the first person in my family to graduate from college, and being at graduation with my mom and my dad and my stepdad and my little brothers and my grandparents,’ he said to USA Today.

‘That was unreal, that was cool and it was special for me.’

In 1999 he was commissioned as part of the US Navy. After completing flight training in Corpus Christy, Texas, he was ‘given his wings’ and awarded the title of pilot in 2001.

He then moved to San Diego to learn to fly the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, known as one of the Navy’s more versatile aircraft.

After spending the next two years training in Florida and Virginia, he was deployed to Iraq in 2004 for six months.

Mr Glover was working in the office of the late Sen John McCain as a legislative fellow when he was selected by NASA to become an astronaut in 2013.

NASA only selects a handful of the thousands of people that apply to be a member of the nation’s astronaut corps each year. Only 15 black astronauts have ever been selected out of 348.

A vast majority of the 41 current astronauts have a military background, like Mr Glover.

He completed his astronaut training in 2015. Three years later, he was selected to be a part of the first ever operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, a reusable aircraft designed by the firm Elon Musk found in 2002.

As part of that mission, he would live on the ISS from November 17, 2020 to May 2, 2021.

The nearly six-month-long stay on the station makes him the first black astronaut to inhabit it.

Jeanette Epps, 52, who was selected to be an astronaut in 2009 is set to become the second African American, and first black woman, to live on the ISS after the launch of Boeing Starliner-1 in 2024 or later.

In 2020, Mr Glover said it was an honor to be the first black person selected to the ISS.

‘It is something to be celebrated once we accomplish it, and I am honored to be in this position and to be a part of this great and experienced crew,’ he said during a news conference. 

‘I look forward to getting up there and doing my best to make sure, you know, we are worthy of all the work that’s been put into setting us up for this mission.’

In an interview with The Christian Chronicle later that year, he said there were qualified black astronauts that should have earned the honor before him.

‘I’ve had some amazing colleagues before me that really could have done it, and there are some amazing folks that will go behind me,’ he said. 

‘I wish it would have already been done, but I try not to draw too much attention to it.’ 

Who is Christina Koch? The first female NASA astronaut set to orbit the moon

Christina Koch is set to become the first woman to go around the moon when NASA‘s Artemis II mission takes off next year.

The Grand Rapids, Michigan native, 44, is already the record-holder for the longest amount of time a woman has spent in space, 328 days, and for taking part in the first all-female spacewalk in 2019.

Selected to become an astronaut in 2013, Ms Koch said she has not followed a ‘checklist’ in order to become an astronaut — but instead chased her passions whether this be rock climbing, sailing or even learning to surf in her 40s.

She said in 2020: ‘I really don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an astronaut. 

‘For me, I learned that if I was going to be an astronaut, it was because my passions had turned me into someone that could contribute the most as someone contributing to human space flight.’

While she’s exploring space, her husband Robert will be left taking care of housework and the couple’s puppy, LBD. It is not believed that they have children.

‘Am I excited? Absolutely!’ she said at a news conference at the crew’s announcement Monday.

‘The one thing I’m most excited about is that we will carry your excitement,your aspirations, your dreams, on this mission.’

She also said: ‘We are going to launch from Kennedy space center, we are going to here the words “go for launch” on top of the most powerful rocket NASA’s ever made.’

NASA has sent a total of 355 people to space so far, of which some 55 have been women — or 15 percent. It has also sent 24 people to orbit the moon and 12 to walk on the lunar surface who were all men.

Russian Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to ever leave the earth’s atmosphere — setting off in 1937. American women did not get sent to space until 1983.

Ms Koch, however, will make history on the Artemis II mission when she completes her long-awaited trip around the moon.

She revealed her love of space in a video when she was announced as a member of the Artemis I team in 2020.

The astronaut said: ‘I am someone who has loved exploration on the frontier since I was little. 

‘I used to be inspired by the night sky and throughout my career,  it’s been this balance between engineering for space science missions and doing science in really remote places all over the world.

‘I loved things that made me feel small, things that made me ponder the size of the universe, my place in it and everything that was out there to explore.’

She added: ‘I didn’t necessarily live my life following check boxes of how you could become an astronaut.

‘But I followed those passions and one day I looked at what I had become and the skills I had gathered and I asked “could I sit across from a table and present myself as someone who could do this well?”. And I thought, I’m going to give this a shot.’ 

She went to North Carolina State University in Raleigh to get a bachelor’s and a master’s in Electrical Engineering.

She then became an Electrical Engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, before becoming a research associate for the United States Antarctic Program — living an entire year in the Arctic.

Ms Koch was one of eight selected as part of NASA’s 21st class of astronauts in 2013. After two years of training, she became a full-fledged astronaut.

Her first space flight came in 2019 when she was sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to work as a flight engineer.

She stayed up there for 328 days, taking the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman. The previous record holder, Peggy Whitson, was in space for 288 days.

While in space she also took the record for the first all-women space walk — when an astronaut gets out of a vehicle while in space — with Jessica Meir.

The pair spent seven hours and 17 minutes on the side of the ISS as they worked to replace a power controller. The walk also included a brief call with President Trump.

Upon her return to Earth in 2020, Ms Koch said she felt ‘like a baby’ who was two weeks old and working hard to hold up its head.

Back on Earth, she lives in Galveston, Texas, just outside of the Houston area.

Among her interests are backpacking, running, yoga, photography and travel.

Now she will be a part of a groundbreaking mission in NASA’s goal towards putting a man on Mars. 

The Artemis II mission marks NASA’s first trip to the moon in half a century. It says it will be performed to help test kit in preparation for getting humans onto Mars.

The agency sent an empty Orion capsule around the moon last year before it returned to Earth in a long-awaited dress rehearsal.

If this latest mission goes well, then another flight to land people on the moon will be sent in 2025 — as part of tests ahead of getting people onto Mars.