As part of camera commissioning, the science team snapped a two-second test exposure using one of the four TESS cameras. The image, centered on the southern constellation Centaurus, reveals more than 200,000 stars. The edge of the Coalsack Nebula is in the right upper corner and the bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left edge. TESS is expected to cover more than 400 times as much sky as shown in this image with its four cameras during its initial two-year search for exoplanets. A science-quality image, also referred to as a "first light" image, is expected to be released in June.

TESS will undergo one final thruster burn on May 30 to enter its science orbit around Earth. This highly elliptical orbit will maximize the amount of sky the spacecraft can image, allowing it to continuously monitor large swaths of the sky. TESS is expected to begin science operations in mid-June after reaching this orbit and completing camera calibrations.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 18, TESS is the next step in NASA's search for planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. The mission will observe nearly the entire sky to monitor nearby, bright stars in search of transits—periodic dips in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of the star. TESS is expected to find thousands of exoplanets. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2020, will provide important follow-up observations of some of the most promising TESS-discovered exoplanets, allowing scientists to study their atmospheres.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Dr. George Ricker of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, based in Dulles, Virginia; NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The TESS science instruments were jointly developed by MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

OneSpace, the Beijing-based company behind the launch, is one of dozens of Chinese rivals jostling for a slice of the global space industry, estimated to be worth about $339 billion by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and currently dominated by SpaceX and Blue Origin in the US.

Its nine-metre (30-foot) "Chongqing Liangjiang Star" rocket took off from an undisclosed test field in China's northwest and reached an altitude of 273 kilometres (170 miles) before falling back to Earth, the company said in a statement.

The launch aimed to demonstrate an early working model of the company's OS-X series of rockets, designed to conduct research linked to suborbital flights.

By the end of the decade OneSpace expects to build 20 of the OS-X rockets, which would be capable of placing a 100-kilo (220-pound) payload into an orbit 800 kilometres from the Earth's surface, said company spokesman Chen Jianglan.

The firm is also developing another type of rocket, the M-series, to compete in the growing microsatellite sector.

These small satellites are typically no larger than a shoebox and are used to monitor crops, weather patterns or disaster sites or used by universities for research purposes, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Microsatellites are cheaper to build and easier to deploy than traditional truck-sized versions and their launch has become increasingly an lucrative market, currently dominated by the Indian space programme.

Chinese aerospace start-ups were eschewing the space travel ambitions of their US rivals to compete for these lucrative microsatellite contracts, said McDowell.

OneSpace's work has attracted the attention of several domestic and foreign clients, Chen told AFP, adding that "a number of satellite companies in Europe and Asia have approached us to establish strategic partnerships".

Once dominated by state research agencies and the military, China allowed private companies to enter the space industry to build and launch satellites in 2014.

Contested claims

Another Chinese start-up, iSpace, launched a suborbital rocket, the Hyperbola-1S, from a test field in the southern island of Hainan last month.

The rocket reached an altitude of 108 kilometres and served as a demonstration for its planned small launcher due to be completed by June 2019, the company's website said.

A spokeswoman for iSpace insisted it had been "the first private Chinese firm to launch a commercial rocket".

But OneSpace maintains its rocket was "designed from scratch" and had "stronger control capabilities" than the Hyperbola-1S.

Experts have cast doubts on claims by both companies.

"Onespace and iSpace have both got their hands on retired Chinese missiles," McDowell said.

"I am not very sure whether there is a major difference between what Onespace has done."

Xin Zhang, a professor of aerospace engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, also sounded a note of caution.

"They may have cut corners," he said, adding it can take up to a decade to develop a fully functional rocket.

OneSpace was founded in 2015 while iSpace was founded two years ago.

The balloon flight itself was nothing new for NASA's Flight Opportunities program flight provider World View Enterprises. The company has been flying scientific payloads on its high-altitude balloons since 2015. This flight, however, was a matchmaking mission of sorts. Onboard: the Low-Cost, Lightweight, Reusable Radiation Nose payload from NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety-High Altitude (ARMAS-Hi) payload from Space Environment Technologies and the University of Southern California both in Los Angeles. Both payloads aim to detect or monitor radiation on space-based missions—similar capabilities identified by Flight Opportunities Campaign Manager Paul De León as being a likely match for a fruitful collaboration.

"I knew that the Ames principal investigator wanted to fly along another radiation sensor in order to validate his data," explained De León. "It made a lot of sense—the more data they can obtain, the more confidence the researchers can have in the sensor's accuracy. But the other sensors the investigator inquired about were either unavailable or were simply too bulky to be installed on the flight."

Enter ARMAS-Hi—a commercial off-the-shelf sensor experiment featuring a very small footprint, low weight, and low power consumption.

The ARMAS-Hi payload was selected by Flight Opportunities to receive a SpaceTech-REDDI grant, enabling their respective principal investigators (PIs) to choose an appropriate commercial flight provider for demonstration. While Flight Opportunities cannot direct flight providers to manifest specific technologies together, De León had a hunch the principal investigators would want to work together.

"When I saw both technologies I said hey, this would be a great match—if they can collaborate, then they can use each other's payloads to validate the results of their flight experiments," said De León.

He went with his instinct and connected the Ames principal investigator (PI) Meyya Meyyappan, and the ARMAS-Hi PI, Kent Tobiska. The researchers discussed the possibilities for leveraging data from a shared flight, leading to the joint manifest.

"It turned out to be a win-win situation for everyone," said De León.

With the World View flight successfully completed, the two organizations now begin the process of analyzing data in preparation for further research.

Through the Flight Opportunities program selects promising technologies from industry, academia and government for testing on commercial launch vehicles. The program is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate and managed at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Ames manages the solicitation and selection of technologies to be tested and demonstrated on commercial flight vehicles.

STMD is responsible for developing the crosscutting, pioneering, new technologies and capabilities needed by the agency to achieve its current and future missions.

More information:
For more information about the Flight Opportunities Program, visit www.nasa.gov/flightopportunities

"At this temperature, atoms lose their energy and start to move very slowly," explains Rob Thompson, CAL Project Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "At room temperature, atoms bounce off each other in all directions at a few hundred meters per second. But in CAL they'll slow down a million-fold and condense into unique states of quantum matter."

CAL is a multiuser facility that supports many investigators studying a broad range of topics.

Eric Cornell, a physicist at the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will be leading one of the first CAL experiments. Cornell and his team will use CAL to investigate particle collisions and how particles interact with one another. Ultra-cold gases produced by the Cold Atom Lab can contain molecules with three atoms each, but which are a thousand times bigger than a typical molecule. This results in a low-density, "fluffy" molecule that quickly falls apart unless it is kept extremely cold. How is particle behavior affected as more particles are introduced? What can be learned about quantum objects when several atoms are interacting at the same time?

Cornell says, "The way atoms behave in this state gets very complex, surprising and counterintuitive, and that's why we're doing this."

Cornell shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics for creating Bose-Einstein condensates – another state of quantum matter that can be studied inside CAL.

Bose-Einstein condensates are essentially blobs of quantum matter that look and behave like waves that exist at these ultra-cold temperatures. In the freefall of space, the condensates can hold their wavelike forms for five to ten seconds – much longer than on Earth – providing researchers a window into the quantum realm.

Thompson says, "We can use CAL to test general relativity and quantum mechanics. One of the biggest questions in physics today is how those two work together."

University of Rochester physicist Nick Bigelow, and University of Berkeley scientist Holger Müller along with their colleagues plan to use CAL to test a cornerstone of Einstein's theory of relativity – the equivalence principle, which holds that gravity and external acceleration cannot be distinguished experimentally. They plan to repeat Galileo's iconic experiment dropping cannon balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but using atoms instead. Dropping atoms inside CAL and letting them fall for several seconds as the station orbits Earth will allow researchers to precisely figure out the differences between how the atoms accelerate. This experiment may reveal how gravity and space-time are woven through the quantum realm.

A researcher at JPL named Jason Williams also plans to use ultracold two-atom molecules to develop tools for the next generation of precision gravity tests with quantum gases.

Many more experiments are planned for this "cool" new laboratory – and no one knows where they will lead. "With CAL," says Thompson, "We're entering the unknown."

More information:
For more from the International Space Station, visit www.nasa.gov/station

The US administration announced in February it wanted to redirect the money it spends on the ISS toward other space exploration projects, like returning to the Moon and eventually sending people to Mars.

But the plan was deemed too simple and shortsighted by experts and, crucially, by lawmakers who control the US purse strings.

"We cannot have it all. Federal funding is not unlimited," said Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, during a hearing Thursday.

Any savings that come from de-funding the orbiting outpost would amount to "not much," Smith added.

"That's not going to get us back to the Moon, that's not going to get us elsewhere," he said.

NASA spends between three and four billion dollars per year on the ISS, including the cost of shipping cargo and paying Russia for transporting astronauts aboard the Soyuz.

The United States has not been able to fly astronauts to space aboard its own spacecraft since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

If the station were privatized, Americans would continue to pay for exploration missions and research, and the savings would amount to no more than one billion per year, according to researcher Bhavya Lal at the Institute for Defense Analysis.

That falls far short of the amount needed to fund a human exploration mission to Mars.

"It is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025," she said.

NASA inspector general Paul Martin has also concluded that it is unlikely that private industries would assume all the operational costs of the ISS in 2024—amounting to $1.2 billion per year.

Space unites

Ultraconservative Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the state where NASA astronauts train at Houston's Johnson Space Center—vowed that as long as he chairs the space subcommittee, the space station will be funded.

"And as long as Article I of the Constitution remains intact, it will be Congress that is the final arbiter of how long the ISS receives federal funding," he said at a hearing on Wednesday.

Cruz and his colleagues want to prolong the life of the space lab until 2028, beyond its current expiration date of 2024.

Saving the space station is a cause that unites both Republicans and Democrats.

"We've got this platform up there (worth) north of $100 billion, and it's there," said Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, ranking member on the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness.

"Abandoning this incredible orbiting laboratory where they are doing research, when we are on the cusp of a new era of space exploration, would be irresponsible at best and probably disastrous."

The ISS—long seen as a global symbol of cooperation between the United States, Russia and more than a dozen other countries—has been in operation since 1998.

It remains to be seen how the United States would pay for both the space station and missions to the Moon and Mars, without a major hike in the NASA budget, which today amounts to around $18.4 billion per year.