India claims to have spotted the country’s Vikram lunar lander on the surface of the Moon days after the spacecraft presumably crashed during a landing attempt. India still has not made contact with the lander, which went silent moments before its scheduled touchdown, but Indian officials are hopeful that the lander might still function.

“We are trying to establish contact,” Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which oversees the lander, told Asian News International (ANI). “It will be communicated soon.”

The Vikram lander is a key part of India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, which is aimed at studying the Moon’s south pole in greater detail. The lander, which was carrying a rover called Pragyan, was supposed to perform the first soft landing on the Moon for India by touching down in the south pole region. If it had been successful, India would have become the fourth nation in the world to put a vehicle intact on the lunar surface.

But Vikram’s landing did not go as planned last week. On the afternoon of Friday, September 6th, the lander was using its onboard engine to slowly lower itself down to the ground. When the spacecraft was just 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the surface, India suddenly lost communication with the vehicle. A graph of the spacecraft’s trajectory, shown during a live stream of the landing, revealed the lander to be slightly off its planned course just before touchdown.

Now, India at least knows where the Vikram lander is located. The lander traveled to the Moon with another spacecraft, an orbiter that is still circulating above the lunar surface. The orbiter successfully spotted the Vikram lander from above, taking a thermal image of the vehicle, according to ANI’s interview with Sivan.

Sivan did not clarify what state the spacecraft is in, claiming it was “premature to say anything.” In the meantime, there have been very few official updates from ISRO. After the landing, the organization posted a brief message to its website, highlighting the technical complexity of the Chandrayaan-2 mission and noting that the lander worked mostly as expected. “All the systems and sensors of the Lander functioned excellently until this point and proved many new technologies such as variable thrust propulsion technology used in the Lander,” ISRO wrote on its website.

The organization also noted that the lunar orbiter is still operating as planned and may even be operational for up to seven years around the Moon, instead of one year as planned. Overall, ISRO claims that between 90 to 95 percent of the Chandrayaan-2 mission has been accomplished, despite losing communication with Vikram and Pragyan.

What was supposed to be India’s first soft landing on the Moon today appeared to end in failure when the country’s robotic Vikram lander seemingly crashed into the lunar surface during its powered descent to the ground. If it had been successful, India would have become the fourth country to land a spacecraft intact on the Moon. But for now, only the United States, Russia, and China hold that title.

The Vikram lander was a critical part of India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission — a project aimed at learning more about the unexplored and highly intriguing south pole of the Moon. Numerous lunar spacecraft have gathered enough evidence about this region to suggest that significant amounts of water ice might be hiding on the south pole, likely in frigid craters that are in permanent shadow. India’s goal with Chandrayaan-2 was to land vehicles in this region to get a better understanding of the area’s composition and learn just how much water ice might be lurking there.

Vikram was carrying a rover called Pragyan, and together the two vehicles were meant to explore the south pole region in up-close detail using a series of instruments, including a seismometer to measure lunar quakes and X-rays to help figure out the composition of the dirt (and potential water ice). But just a few minutes before Vikram was scheduled to touch down on the Moon, data of the lander from inside India’s mission control center showed the vehicle to be slightly off course. When Vikram was about 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the surface, India lost communication with the lander. India has yet to give official confirmation on whether or not the lander did, indeed, crash.

Image: ISRO

The apparent crash is, in fact, the second time that India has sent a spacecraft hurtling into the Moon’s surface. The first time was deliberate in 2008, during India’s first mission to the Moon called Chandrayaan-1. The project sent an impactor probe on a crash course into the lunar dirt, to learn more about the material that got kicked up. For this follow-up mission, India hoped to keep the lunar lander and rover combo alive on the Moon for an extended period of time. The two bots were supposed to survive for the length of an entire lunar day — about two weeks, when the Moon is bathed in constant sunlight. The duo would have ceased operations when the lunar nighttime began, when the Moon is draped in darkness and surface temperatures plummet, sometimes below -200 degrees Fahrenheit (-130 degrees Celsius).

Even without the lander and rover, the Chandrayaan-2 mission isn’t a complete loss. Vikram and Pragyan launched along with an orbiter on July 22nd, and the trio spent most of August traveling out to the Moon together. They inserted themselves into lunar orbit on August 20th, and Vikram later separated from the orbiter and started spiraling closer to the lunar surface. In the meantime, the orbiter is still in orbit around the Moon, and helped to gather details of the crash when India lost contact with Vikram during its descent. The orbiter is meant to last up to a year in lunar orbit, studying the Moon’s surface with a series of cameras, instruments, and X-rays.

Though numerous lunar landings have happened since the 1960s, touching down on the Moon is still relatively difficult. It requires the precise firing of a vehicle’s rocket engine to lower it down to the very small world, which doesn’t have an atmosphere. An Israeli nonprofit demonstrated just how challenging this feat is in April, when it attempted to land a privately funded lunar lander on the Moon’s surface. A glitch caused the lander’s engine to shut down too early, and the spacecraft accidentally slammed into the surface.

Many other organizations and entities around the world are also hoping to reach the Moon. Various private companies in the US are all striving to land robotic vehicles on the Moon in the next couple of years, while NASA has vowed to return people to the lunar surface by 2024 with the agency’s Artemis mission. (NASA has its sights set on the lunar south pole for that landing.) Vikram and Pragyan could have helped with all of these efforts, especially if they revealed easily accessible water ice in the south pole region. Or they could have shown that the region is much more barren than scientists hoped.

For now, the questions about the Moon’s water ice remain unanswered, and they might for some time — until the next landing attempt on the south pole.

This afternoon, September 6th, India will attempt a significant first for the nation: landing a vehicle intact on the surface of the Moon. If successful, India will become the fourth country to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface, joining the United States, Russia, and China.

The landing is part of India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission. Launched in late July, the mission sent multiple robotic spacecraft to the Moon: an orbiter that will study the lunar surface from above and a lander that will carry a rover to the ground to characterize the Moon’s geography. The lander and rover are headed to a particularly tantalizing place: the Moon’s south pole. The goal is to learn more about the materials that might be lurking in this relatively unexplored region of the Moon, such as potential water ice.

All three spacecraft traveled together to the Moon and inserted themselves into lunar orbit on August 20th. A couple of weeks later, the lander and orbiter separated, and the lander has been getting closer to the lunar surface ever since. Sometime between 3:30PM and 4:30PM ET this afternoon, the lander will ignite its engine and begin its powered descent to the surface. Once that firing begins, the landing should occur about 30 minutes later. The rover will make its way out of the lander about four hours later, sometime between 8PM and 9PM ET.

A successful touchdown will be a huge technological achievement for India. The country has only sent one mission to the Moon before, Chandrayaan-1. That endeavor also sent a vehicle to the lunar south pole, though that spacecraft was meant to crash into the ground rather than land intact. The impactor kicked up a bunch of materials on the Moon to analyze in the moments after impact — an event that ultimately led to the discovery of water ice in the south pole. But the vehicle was never meant to survive the crash.

Now, India is hoping to keep multiple spacecraft alive on the lunar surface after they touch down on the ground, and these vehicles will build on what the Chandrayaan-1 probe learned. By landing in the south pole, India hopes to characterize the water ice that was discovered there and figure out just how abundant this material is. If there is plenty of ice in this region, it could be mined and harnessed for a number of applications, such as the creation of rocket fuel or for sustaining a human settlement on the Moon.

First, India’s spacecraft must survive their descent, and the country’s space agency plans to live stream the touchdown. Live coverage is set for 3:40PM ET, so check back then to see if India joins an elite group of nations with intact spacecraft on the Moon’s surface.

After a short stay aboard the International Space Station, Russia’s humanoid robot, Skybot F850, is on its way home, stuffed inside a Soyuz spacecraft with no crew. Skybot, originally known as FEDOR, was put through a litany of tests by the Russian cosmonaut crew during its two-week stay on the station, to see if it could help free up time for the people aboard the orbiting lab.

Skybot’s trip to the space station was also a kind of test. The robot launched alone in a passenger version of the Soyuz spacecraft atop a new kind of rocket. Soon, Russia will use this rocket to launch human crews to space, and it wanted to make sure the capsule and booster worked well together first, without people on board.

The launch itself was a success, but once in space, the Soyuz capsule carrying Skybot had a hard time attaching to the ISS. It attempted to dock by itself to the station, but ultimately had to abort its first attempt due to a problem with one of the ports on the outside of the ISS. The crew on board the station had to move another visiting spacecraft to free up a port for the Soyuz. That ultimately worked, and Skybot arrived — four days after launch instead of the planned two.

Back on Earth, Skybot has a wide range of skills, including driving cars and even shooting guns. Those activities weren’t on the schedule for the robot’s time on the ISS, though. Instead, the android tried its hand at cosmonaut chores, such as working with tools and connecting hardware. Some of the tests even seemed relatively successful in the microgravity environment.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Skybot also maintained a Twitter account of its exploits, which range from informative to weirdly existential. Here are some highlights, with the help of Google Translate:

Here the bot poses with Russian cosmonaut’s Aleksander Skvortsov and Alexey Ovchinin soon after arrival. Skybot mentioned that his gears were in good shape upon arrival.

Skybot attempted to connect some electrical adapters — very slowly.

Here, Skybot attempts to use a power drill, which gets uncomfortably close to Ovchinin’s head. At the end of the video, Skybot seemingly dabs its forehead with a towel. Power drilling is strenuous work!

Even robots get homesick after a while. Skybot noted that during its free time, it liked to admire our Earth from one of the port holes. “It is beautiful,” the bot expressed in one tweet.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying Skybot departed the ISS around 2:15PM ET, and will spend the next few hours making its way back down to its landing site in Kazakhstan. Russia plans to recover the capsule to analyze it, as well as retrieve the country’s now space-hardened robot.

A nonprofit with grand ambitions of setting up a library on the Moon is planning to send the entire English archive of Wikipedia to the lunar surface sometime within the next couple of years.

Don’t worry: there won’t be reams of Wikipedia printouts sitting in the lunar soil. Instead, the organization says it will send up millions of Wikipedia articles in the form of miniaturized prints, etched into tiny sheets of metal that are thinner than the average human hair. The nonprofit claims that with this method, it can send up millions of pages of text in a package that’s about the size of a CD.

The unusual mission is the brainchild of the Arch Foundation (pronounced “arc,” short for archive.) Formed in 2015, the nonprofit’s goal is to set up archives of humanity’s culture in different places throughout our cosmic neighborhood, as a way to inspire people about space. “We thought of this project to archive human civilization around the Solar System — to create a permanent off-site backup of all our cultural achievements,” Arch co-founder Nova Spivack tells The Verge. “So, our knowledge, our art, our languages, our history — all the stuff the human mind has produced.” The idea is that these archives could last for millions to billions of years in space, where they might be found and read by future humans.

Images: Arch Foundation

To get started on such an ambitious task, the Arch Foundation is teaming up with a space startup called Astrobotic, a company that wants to become the first delivery service for the Moon. Based in Pennsylvania, Astrotobic is developing a suite of robots to take payloads to the lunar surface, as well as rovers that can cross the Moon’s landscape. Pending government approval, the company’s first mission will entail launching a lander, called the Peregrine, to the Moon via an Atlas V rocket in mid-2020. That’s when the tiny Wikipedia prints will hitch a ride inside a special cylinder container. They’ll remain on the lander indefinitely once the spacecraft touches down on the surface.

“It’s humbling to think our mission to the Moon will deliver something that could be read millions of years from now,” John Thornton, Astrobotic’s CEO, said in a statement. “Arch’s Lunar Library will be a monument not only to human knowledge and culture, but also the first commercial mission to the Moon.”

Image: Astrobotic

Spivack says the library will include top Wikipedia articles in other languages, too, as well as the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project — a digital library of more than 1,500 human languages. Arch plans to include even more content, which the organization will announce over the next year. And there will be ways for members of the public to get involved and help decide what’s chosen, Spivack says.

The Arch Foundation already has experience with sending archived text into space. Earlier this year, the nonprofit created tiny digital storage devices — called Archs — containing the entirety of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which then rode into space inside the Tesla roadster launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The nonprofit got the gig after Spivack tweeted at SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, asking to include the books on the flight. He says the Foundation books serve as a big inspiration for Arch, since they revolve around a group of people trying to preserve an encyclopedia for the future of the galaxy to prevent an impending dark age.

Storing data in the vacuum of space is much more difficult than it is here on Earth, though. Space is a cruel environment, filled with high-energy cosmic rays and extreme temperatures that can corrode and damage sensitive materials. The storage devices we use on Earth just won’t work. So for the Falcon Heavy flight, Arch turned to the mineral quartz. Using a special laser technology, the nonprofit encoded the books’ data into small quartz discs, a concept known as 5D optical storage.

Image: Arch Foundation

For the Lunar Library project, instead of printing on quartz discs, the foundation will be using thin squares of nickel. “Nickel is an element that doesn’t corrode, lasts basically forever in space, and cosmic rays won’t hurt it,” says Spivack. Lasers will etch miniaturized Wikipedia pages into square nickel sheets that are smaller than a postage stamp, each one measuring about half an inch (1.7 centimeter) wide and just 20 microns thick. Though they are small, one nickel sheet can hold up 16,000 pages of content. And unlike the quartz discs, which stored data digitally, the nickel sheets can be read using a standard optical microscope, magnified up to 1,000 times.

The plan is to stack all these sheets inside a CD-sized container, which will allow Arch to send up between 25 million to 50 million pages of text and images. The organization says it can print out such a colossal amount of content thanks to a partnership with Stamper Technology, which has patented this specialized laser printing technology. And Spivack says it’s fast, too; the millions of pages can be done in just a week’s time. “The time to write it is quite reasonable, which means we can send a pretty current copy close to the launch date.”

Ultimately, the Arch Foundation plans to send up more and more archives to the Moon over time, so the library will always be growing. The nonprofit is also developing a Mars Library, and after that, it wants to spread storage devices to various different places in the Solar System. “We’re partner agnostic, so we’ll fly with anybody who gives us space,” says Spivack. “We want many copies in many places, so it increases the likelihood these archives will survive and be found in the distant future.”

Scientists have uncovered the biggest evidence yet that water may be spewing from the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa — a revelation that was buried deep within the archives of a long-dead NASA spacecraft. In 1997, the Jupiter probe Galileo flew near a geyser when it passed close by Europa, collecting data that went overlooked at the time. But now, the rendezvous has been unearthed 20 years later, and it provides scientists with their first up-close measurement of one of Europa’s water plumes.

Up until now, scientists have strongly suspected that water is pouring out from Europa, but the matter hasn’t been fully settled. The only evidence we have for these geysers comes from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which captured images of water escaping from the distant moon in 2012 and 2016. But Hubble’s pictures were taken from afar and are pretty fuzzy; they haven’t been considered definitive proof. This discovery from Galileo, detailed today in Nature Astronomy, “is the strongest evidence we have so far in terms of seeing signatures of a plume at Europa,” Xianzhe Jia, a planetary scientist at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study, tells The Verge.

Europa’s plumes are thought to stem from a global saltwater ocean lurking underneath the moon’s crust. It’s a feature that’s made this icy world a prime candidate in the search for life elsewhere in our Solar System. Water is vital for life here on Earth, so many have wondered if organisms might be able to survive in Europa’s waters as well. And plumes offer a great opportunity for studying what’s inside this ocean. Scientists don’t need to send a spacecraft to land on the moon and drill into its icy surface; they can simply send a vehicle to fly by the moon and sample its plumes — a much easier type of mission to pull off.

Image: NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center

That’s exactly the kind of mission NASA plans to do in the early 2020s. The space agency has been working on a robotic spacecraft called Europa Clipper, which will fly by Europa’s surface upwards of 40 times to get a taste of these plumes. Before today’s findings, it was still somewhat unclear if Europa Clipper would actually see any plumes while it was out there. Now, scientists are much more sure. “It really suggests that Clipper has a good opportunity to directly fly through a plume and tell us a lot more about its properties,” says Jia.

Galileo’s secret

Jia says that the Hubble images are what inspired his team to revisit Galileo. Launched in 1989, the robotic probe explored Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003, before it plunged into the gas giant and broke apart. But while it was out there, it flew by Europa 11 times to gather data of the world with its various instruments. At the time, there wasn’t any evidence of water stemming from Europa, so the spacecraft wasn’t specifically looking for plumes on the moon. However, it did take measurements of Europa’s magnetic field and how particles behaved around the icy world. “We were thinking maybe we had a chance of seeing something in that data,” Jia says.

Image: NASA

After going through all 11 flybys, the researchers narrowed in on one that occurred on December 16th, 1997. They noticed that the data from this trip looked strange: Galileo measured a sharp drop in the strength of the magnetic field. And the field seemed to bend and rotate, too. At the same time, the spacecraft also noticed that the space near Europa had a higher amount of charged particles than usual. “This one certainly stood out as very special,” says Jia. “We don’t see anything like that on all the other flybys.”

To make sense of all these measurements, the research team created a computer model of Europa’s plumes, based on the images taken from Hubble. They wanted to see how a simulated plume might affect the environment around the moon. And sure enough, the model had the same effects on the space environment that Galileo saw. Given how long it took Galileo to make these measurements, the researchers estimate the plume was about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) thick.

The team thinks that all those weird changes in the magnetic field occur because some of the particles within Europa’s plumes are charged, and are clashing with other charged particles already circulating around the moon. The space around Europa is filled with particles streaming in from another moon of Jupiter — the volcanically active Io that’s constantly burping up gas and plasma. So when a plume erupts from Europa, the particles slam into the ones from Io, causing an electrically charged traffic jam that creates twists and turns in the moon’s magnetic field.

Backing up the data

There’s even more evidence that Galileo mingled with a plume during the December 1997 flyby. For one, the event occurred pretty close to where Hubble spotted water spewing from the moon in 2016. And this region of Europa is special: it’s a hotspot, where the temperature is higher than the rest of the moon. It’s possible this heating is linked with the geyser activity in some way. Perhaps heated water is flowing upward inside Europa, warming the surface and causing cracks in the ice that allow water to burst through. Or maybe the plumes themselves are to blame for the heating. The ejected water could be falling back onto Europa, changing the structure of the ice so that it can hold heat longer than the rest of the surface.

The December 1997 flyby was also the closest Galileo ever got to Europa’s surface, coming within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the moon. So it makes sense that this was the only flyby to pick up any activity. Europa’s plumes don’t seem to extend very far into space. In order to really see the effects of the plume, the spacecraft had to be very close to the surface, says Jia.

Image: NASA

That means that any follow-up probes will need to get as close as possible to the moon. The good news is that’s exactly what Europa Clipper is designed to do. During its 40-plus flybys, it will get much closer to Europa than Galileo ever got, at one point coming within 16 miles (25 kilometers) of the moon’s surface. Clipper will have much more sensitive instruments, too, aimed at piecing together what’s inside the water. “I think it bodes well for Clipper that the few flybys that Galileo had, with poorer conditions for observing this phenomenon, turned up a pretty solid plume detection,” Carol Raymond, a NASA scientist and principal investigator of the magnetic field instrument on the Europa Clipper mission, tells The Verge.

Looking ahead to Europa

The Galileo study is so supportive of the Europa Clipper design that one enthusiastic lawmaker is using this research to clinch further funding for the mission. During a House subcommittee meeting last week, a group of lawmakers approved a new House funding bill for NASA, one that would give $545 million to the Europa Clipper mission in fiscal year 2019, Space News reports. At the meeting Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for NASA and a big Europa buff, cited today’s Nature Astronomy study (under embargo at the time) as a big reason why funding the Europa Clipper mission is so vital.

“So, the ocean of Europa is venting into outer space,” Culberson said, according to Space News. “The science community has wanted to go there for years... and this bill makes that happen.”

Culberson is also pushing NASA to make a lander that will go to Europa, and the House bill secures $195 million for that purpose, too. However, drilling through Europa’s ice is going to be tough: the icy crust may reach as deep as 12 miles (20 kilometers) before it turns into liquid. Plus, the lander isn’t supposed to launch until 2024, whereas Europa Clipper is slated to launch in 2022. Clipper can get a feel for Europa’s oceans much sooner and much more easily before NASA attempts the difficult task of digging into the moon’s ice. “It’s just a great demonstration of how powerful the Clipper data sets are going to be,” says Raymond. “It’s making it all seem a little bit more realistic that we’re going to capture some plume activity in process.”

When NASA launches its next rover to Mars, the vehicle will have a small helicopter along for the ride. NASA announced today that it will be sending a small autonomous flying chopper — aptly named the Mars Helicopter — with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover. The helicopter will attempt to fly through the Martian air to see if vehicles can even levitate on Mars, where the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than that of Earth.

The design for the Mars Helicopter has been in the works for the last four years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but the space agency had yet to decide if it was actually going to send the vehicle to Mars. NASA needed to determine if this technology was actually feasible and if the agency had enough money in its budget to include the copter, according to Spaceflight Now. Now it seems that the agency has decided that this copter idea could actually work.

But even if the helicopter fails to fly, it won’t affect the overall mission of the Mars 2020 rover — the successor to NASA’s Curiosity rover which is already on the Red Planet’s surface. But if the Mars Helicopter does indeed fly, it’ll be able to capture a rare bird’s-eye-view of Mars with its two cameras, something that’s never been done before. And that may mean it’s possible to send future flying vehicles to Mars to scout out locations that are hard to access.

Engineers at JPL have been working to get the weight and shape of the helicopter just right, so that it can fly through the thin Mars air. The highest any helicopter has flown on Earth is 40,000 feet high. But the Mars Helicopter will be flying in an atmosphere that’s as thin as altitudes of 100,000 feet on Earth, according to NASA. So the robot has to be tiny and light: it weighs in at just four pounds (1.8 kilograms) on Earth and is about the size of a softball. The copter also sports twin blades that rotate 10 times faster than helicopter’s here on our planet.

The plan is for the Mars Helicopter to fly attached to the underside of the Mars 2020 rover. Once the rover lands on the planet’s surface, it will then find a good place to set down the copter, deploy it, and then roll away. Eventually, the helicopter will try to take off, and it’ll have to do the flight completely on its own, too. Since Earth is so far away from Mars, it will take several minutes to send the helicopter commands. Ultimately, the vehicle will try to do five autonomous flights over a 30-day period; the trips could last up to 90 seconds.

“NASA has a proud history of firsts,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement on Friday afternoon, in the middle of SpaceX’s Block 5 launch. “The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling. The Mars Helicopter holds much promise for our future science, discovery, and exploration missions to Mars.”

The Mars 2020 rover is slated to launch on top of an Atlas V rocket, made by the United Launch Alliance, from Cape Canaveral, Florida in July 2020. The spacecraft will then land on Mars in February of 2021.

This afternoon, SpaceX landed the most powerful version yet of its Falcon 9 rocket, after launching the vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The so-named Block 5 upgrade took off from the company’s launchpad at Kennedy Space Center, sending a communications satellite into orbit for Bangladesh and then touched down on one of the company’s drone ships in the Atlantic. It was the 25th successful rocket landing for SpaceX, and the 14th on one of the company’s drone ships.

It also marks the first launch of the Block 5, the vehicle that will carry humans to space for NASA. The Block 5 is meant to be SpaceX’s most reusable rocket yet, with many upgrades put in place that negate the need for extensive refurbishment between flights. In fact, the first Block 5 rockets will eventually be able to fly up to 10 times without the need for any maintenance after landings, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a pre-launch press conference. Ideally, once one of these rocket lands, SpaceX will turn it horizontal, attach a new upper stage and nose cone on top, turn it vertical on the launchpad, fill it with propellant, and then launch it again. Musk noted that the vehicles would need some kind of moderate maintenance after the 10-flight mark, but it’s possible that each rocket could fly up to 100 times in total.

It’ll be a while before SpaceX is that efficient, though. Since this is the first launch and landing of the Block 5, the company will still deconstruct the vehicle and do inspections to see if it can indeed fly again without refurbishment. “Ironically, we need to take it apart to confirm that it does not need to be taken apart,” Musk said. He noted that this particular rocket probably won’t fly again for a couple months.

But the goal is to ultimately close the gap on the Falcon 9’s turnaround time between flights. Musk says that to show the true power of the Block 5, SpaceX plans to launch the same rocket twice within a 24-hour period sometime next year. So far, the smallest gap between SpaceX launches has been two days — though the missions were on opposite coasts of the US and the company used different rockets for each flight. It’s usually taken a few months for the same Falcon 9 rocket to fly again.

Image: Elon Musk/SpaceX

Not only is the Block 5 more equipped for reuse, but it’s also got much more power than its predecessors. The main Merlin engines at the bottom of the rocket have 8 percent more thrust than before, and Musk thinks there’s more room for improvement. “The thrust we’re getting is truly incredible at this point,” he said. Meanwhile, the Merlin engine in the upper stage of the rocket — the one that operates in the vacuum of space — has 5 percent more thrust than before.

The Block 5 is also the rocket that SpaceX will use to send astronauts to the International Space Station, as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. In order to make the vehicle certified for carrying humans, SpaceX had to make a huge number of improvements to the rocket’s design. “There are thousands and thousands and thousands of requirements,” Musk said. For one, the rocket has to be able to handle more loads during launch and it has to have a much higher tolerance for small failures. In other words, if a few things go wrong during flight, the rocket will be okay. Musk noted that a few engines could go out on this vehicle and the Falcon 9 would still be able to make it to orbit. But just to be safe, NASA is requiring that SpaceX fly the Block 5 at least seven times, without making any major changes to the rocket, before people can ride on it.

Before the launch, Musk indicated that testing out all of these new changes made him particularly nervous. “The reason that it’s so hard to make an orbital rocket work is that your passing grade is 100 percent,” he said. “And you can’t fully and properly test an orbital rocket until it launches, because you cannot recreate those conditions on Earth… Man, anyway, I’m stressed.”

Image: SpaceX

SpaceX doesn’t intend to make any major revisions to the Block 5, though, save for small changes to improve flight reliability and reusability. The company will likely have between 30 to 50 Block 5 rockets in rotation at some point, according to Musk. The number depends on which customers insist on flying satellites on a new vehicle, though he’s hoping the mentality on used rockets will change in the coming years. “The general sentiment will change from... feeling like, ‘A flown rocket is scary,’ to ‘An unflown rocket is scary,’” Musk said.

Customers that do want to fly on a used rocket will get a bit of a discount. The starting cost of a flown Falcon 9 is about $50 million, while new vehicles start around $60 million. And if the Block 5 really doesn’t need any refurbishment between flights, SpaceX could see even more cost savings and choose to lower its prices even further. It all depends on how the next few flights of the Block 5 play out.

But if all goes well, Musk predicted that the Falcon 9 will do 300 more flights before it’s retired. Then, the bulk of SpaceX’s missions will be done on the company’s next big rocket, the BFR.

The United Launch Alliance announced today that it had picked one of the engines it plans to use to power the company’s next generation rocket, called the Vulcan. ULA has decided to go with the RL10, an engine manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, to propel the Vulcan’s upper stage, the top portion of the vehicle that deploys satellites into their final orbits during launch. It’s a big hardware decision for ULA, but the company has yet to make a much more anticipated choice for the Vulcan: which will be the main engine?

The question over the Vulcan’s main engine has loomed over the company ever since it announced plans to develop the rocket in 2014. The move to create a brand new vehicle was borne out of tense geo-political relations with Russia at the time. ULA is the primary launch provider for the US government, but it relies on Russian-made rocket engines to power its main rocket, the Atlas V. And when Russia invaded Ukraine, the company faced mounting pressure to replace the engines with American-made hardware. So it decided to create a new rocket using all new engines.

But instead of picking an engine right away, ULA decided to partner with two engine manufacturers to develop potential hardware for the Vulcan. Aerojet Rocketdyne — a company with a long history of building rocket engines — has been developing the AR-1 engine for the job, while Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — a relative newcomer in the space industry — has been working on its own engine, the BE-4. ULA has consistently said that Blue Origin is the front-runner in the competition. The BE-4 is further along in its development, as Blue Origin has done a full-scale hot-fire test on the engine. Still, there’s no final decision on who will get the gig.

Image: ULA

In a press release regarding today’s engine selection, ULA said it plans to announce its final choice about the Vulcan’s main engine “soon.” (The Verge sent a followup email asking when that announcement would happen and just received the reply: “Soon.”) It’ll be a big deal for whoever wins. ULA is responsible for launching the majority of the US’s national security satellites, so providing the engine for the vehicle will mean having a relatively steady contract.

Meanwhile, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s hardware will at least fly in one part of the rocket thanks to today’s decision. And the pick makes sense, too. The RL10 is the engine that the company currently uses to power the upper stages on its two main rockets — the Atlas V and the Delta IV. Aerojet will be developing an upgraded version of the engine called the RL10C-X, what ULA is calling “the next generation of the RL10 family.” And it looks like Aerojet beat out at least one other competitor for this gig, though ULA won’t say the other companies that competed. It seems that Blue Origin’s smaller BE-3U engine might have been considered, according to GeekWire.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, said that the decision to choose the RL10 for the upper stage came down to price and delivery schedule. “ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne have a long and successful history together that began with the first flight of our Atlas and Delta rockets in the 1960s,” Bruno said in a statement. “We could not be more pleased to have selected the proven and reliable RL10 to power our Vulcan Centaur upper stage.”

ULA plans to fly the Vulcan for the first time in mid-2020. So a verdict on the main engine should, indeed, come “soon.”