TV News LIES

Just over a day after blasting off, a SpaceX crew capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, delivering the replacements for NASA’s two stuck astronauts.

The four newcomers — representing the U.S., Japan and Russia — will spend some time learning the station’s ins and outs from Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Then the two will strap into their own SpaceX capsule later this week, one that has been up there since last year, to close out an unexpected extended mission that began last June.

Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week when they launched on Boeing’s first astronaut flight. They hit the nine-month mark earlier this month.

The Starliner saga is one step closer to its end with the launch Friday night of a SpaceX vehicle that will relieve the astronauts who months ago flew to orbit aboard the now-infamous Boeing spacecraft.

A mission known as Crew-10 is on its way to the International Space Station, where for the past 10 months NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have unexpectedly found themselves stationed for an extended stay. Wilmore and Williams, of course, were catapulted into the public eye back in June when the Starliner vehicle they piloted to the space station encountered a series of issues that ended with the spacecraft leaving them behind.

Instead of returning to Earth on the Starliner as planned, Wilmore and Williams joined Expedition 72 at the space station and were folded into the Crew-9 mission that arrived in September with two astronauts instead of four.

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SpaceX launched its huge Starship rocket on the program's eighth test flight Thursday, but a malfunction of some sort triggered multiple upper stage engine shutdowns and the vehicle failed to reach its planned sub-orbital altitude, breaking apart in a spectacular shower of debris.

It was the second failure in a row for a Starship upper stage, a vehicle critical to NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon in the next few years.

"During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," SpaceX said in a statement.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

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A commercial spacecraft carrying NASA experiments successfully touched down on the moon's surface early Sunday morning, ushering in a new phase of private space exploration.

American firm Firefly Aerospace, which livestreamed the descent of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, said the craft arrived on the moon's surface at 3:34 a.m. EST.

"You all stuck the landing. We're on the moon," Blue Ghost chief engineer Will Coogan said on the livestream, eliciting cheers from the mission control room.

Several companies have attempted commercial lunar landings in recent years. A spacecraft sent to the moon by Houston-based Intuitive Machines last year stopped operating after landing on its side, and in 2023 a lander launched by the Japanese company ispace crashed onto the lunar surface.

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