July 24, 2026 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
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- Video of lightning striking the Long March 3B 30 seconds after its liftoff yesterday.
No apparent damage occurred, and the payload was reported to reach orbit by China’s state-run press.
- Globs of oxygen-rich clouds detected flying away from Milky Way’s only helium nova
The nova eruption occurred in 2000, and only now has it cleared enough for astronomers to detect these clouds, moving away at about 20 million miles per hour.
- Film of the July 24, 1975 splashdown of the final Apollo mission, returning to Earth after docking with a Soviet Soyuz capsule
Even as the Soviets continued their aggressive station station program throughout the 1970s, the U.S. would not put humans in space again until 1981.
- The Viking-1 lander on Mars is actually part of the collection of the Air & Space museum
In 1984, NASA transferred the lander to the museum. At present there are no plans to display it in Washington.
- In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope — made up of telescopes across the globe — captured the first radio false-color image of a black hole
The tweet shows a picture of a stack of hard drives used to store the data, now on display at the Air & Space museum.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Starship made a soft landing in the Indian Ocean a few minutes ago and was floating intact on the surface.
On the whole, it was a good flight. Starship successfully deployed 20 of the latest version of the Starlink satellites and, according to one of the commentators, contact with all of them has been established. The only glitch that I noticed was that Super Heavy didn’t light all of its required engines when it came down for its ocean landing.
Jolly good show, SpaceX!