Pioneering pilot Wally Funk, who was denied being an astronaut because of her gender, is joining Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on an upcoming space voyage by his rocket startup, Blue Origin. Fortune reports: The nation's first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector, whose formal name is Mary Wallace Funk, will be an "honored guest" for the July 20 launch of the New Shepard rocket, Blue Origin said Thursday. At 82, Funk would be the oldest person to ever reach space, the company said, shattering the current record held by John Glenn, the astronaut-turned-senator who went into orbit at 77. Other New Shepard crew members include Bezos's brother Mark Bezos and a yet-to-be revealed auction winner who is paying $28 million to be an astronaut. Funk, an airline pilot and instructor, was a member of the "Mercury 13," a team of 13 American women who went through formal astronaut training in the early 1960s. Despite the intense preparation, the women were barred from becoming astronauts because of a then-NASA requirement to only accept military fighter pilots, a position held exclusively by men.

A team of researchers from Spain, France and the U.S. has found evidence of a glauconitic-like clay on Mars that suggests the planet once had habitable conditions. Phys.Org reports: In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their study of clay minerals extracted from Gale Crater by Curiosity rover back in 2016 and what they found. Back in 2016, NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface inside of Gale Crater. The rover then extracted samples of the clay minerals and used its instruments to analyze the material. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a close look at the results of the analysis and found that it very closely resembles glauconitic clays here on Earth.

Glauconite is an iron potassium phyllosilicate mineral. It is almost always found as ovoid shapes in sediment beds, carbonates and sandstones -- formation requires stable conditions over a long period. This is what makes the discovery of a similar clay on Mars so exciting -- it suggests that it likely formed under stable conditions for a long time, perhaps millions of years. And that suggests that for at least one part of Mars, conditions were, to some extent, suitable for life over millions of years. [...] The researchers note that their findings are not evidence of life on Mars, but suggest that there was a time during which conditions on the surface were favorable for its presence.

New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds. Phys.Org reports: Earth-sized planets may be much more common than previously realized. Astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center have used the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, to determine that many planet-hosting stars identified by NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission are actually pairs of starsâ"known as binary starsâ"where the planets orbit one of the stars in the pair. After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS's, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star's light when the planet transits.

Using the 'Alopeke and Zorro instruments on the Gemini North and South telescopes in Chile and Hawai'i, respectively, the team observed hundreds of nearby stars that TESS had identified as potential exoplanet hosts. They discovered that 73 of these stars are really binary star systems that had appeared as single points of light until observed at higher resolution with Gemini. "With the Gemini Observatory's 8.1-meter telescopes, we obtained extremely high-resolution images of exoplanet host stars and detected stellar companions at very small separations," said Katie Lester of NASA's Ames Research Center, who led this work. Lester's team also studied an additional 18 binary stars previously found among the TESS exoplanet hosts using the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, also a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.

After identifying the binary stars, the team compared the sizes of the detected planets in the binary star systems to those in single-star systems. They realized that the TESS spacecraft found both large and small exoplanets orbiting single stars, but only large planets in binary systems. These results imply that a population of Earth-sized planets could be lurking in binary systems and going undetected using the transit method employed by TESS and many other planet-hunting telescopes. Some scientists had suspected that transit searches might be missing small planets in binary systems, but the new study provides observational support to back it up and shows which sizes of exoplanets are affected. The researchers report their findings in a paper via arXiv.

NASA has released a new video explaining the complicated, hour-long process required for the Mars rover to take a selfie (which was actually a composite of 62 separate images stitched together).

And meanwhile, CNN reports that its Ingenuity helicopter completed its eighth flight this week, "and even got a software update to fix an annoying issue that impacted some of its previous outings." On its latest outing, Ingenuity flew 525 feet (160 meters) to the south and southeast to a new airfield. This was the copter's third flight of the operations demo phase, in which Ingenuity is proving its usefulness as an aerial scout without interfering with the Perseverance rover's science mission — searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars... Ingenuity continues to do well, and the team is planning for more flights that will push its capabilities. And the helicopter is doing even better now that its troublesome "watchdog" software issue has been fixed. That was deployed before the eighth flight...

Ingenuity is also due for a navigation computer software update that will fix the issue that occurred during the chopper's sixth flight. Images captured by the navigation camera, which feed into the helicopter's navigation computer, had timing delays. Those images help Ingenuity to track its location, among other critical factors during flight. When the incorrect times and images were associated, it caused the chopper to wobble in the air. Ingenuity was able to land safely, but the team wants to prevent the issue from happening again so the chopper doesn't spiral out of control. It's also why the helicopter didn't capture any color images during its last two flights.

The storied space telescope that brought you stunning photos of the solar system and enriched our understanding of the cosmos over the past three decades is experiencing a technical glitch. From a report: Scientists at NASA say the Hubble Space Telescope's payload computer, which operates the spacecraft's scientific instruments, went down suddenly on June 13. Without it, the instruments on board meant to snap pictures and collect data are not currently working. Scientists have run a series of tests on the malfunctioning computer system but have yet to figure out what went wrong. "It's just the inefficiency of trying to fix something which is orbiting 400 miles over your head instead of in your laboratory," Paul Hertz, the director of astrophysics for NASA, told NPR. "If this computer were in the lab, we'd be hooking up monitors and testing the inputs and outputs all over the place, and would be really quick to diagnose it," he said. "All we can do is send a command from our limited set of commands and then see what data comes out of the computer and then send that data down and try to analyze it."

At first NASA scientists wondered if a "degrading memory module" on Hubble was to blame. Then on Tuesday the agency said it was investigating whether the computer's Central Processing Module (CPM) or its Standard Interface (STINT) hardware, which helps the CPM communicate with other components, caused the problem. Hertz said the current assumption, though unverified, was that the technical issue was a "random parts failure" somewhere on the computer system, which was built in the 1980s and launched into space in 1990. "They're very primitive computers compared to what's in your cell phone," he said, "but the problem is we can't touch it or see it." Most of Hubble's components have redundant back-ups, so once scientists figure out the specific component that's causing the computer problem, they can remotely switch over to its back-up part.

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. From a report: These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. And with thousands of exoplanets already found orbiting other stars in our universe, could we have already seen life on other planets come and go? Might they have seen us? "The universe is dynamic," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, and lead author of the study. "Stars move, we move. First the Earth moves around the sun, but the sun moves around the center of our galaxy."

About 70% of exoplanets are found using the transit method: when a planet passes between a star and an observer, the star dims enough to confirm the presence of a previously unseen celestial body. Kaltenegger and coauthor Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History compiled a list of stars that either will see or already have seen Earth transit in their lifetimes. Of these, they found seven stars with orbiting exoplanets that could potentially be habitable. Statistically, one out of four stars has a planet that exists in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, and just far away from a star to support life. But how do we determine whether faraway exoplanets meet these criteria? When transiting exoplanets block stellar light, part of that light filters through the atmosphere. Energy and light interact with the molecules and atoms of that planet, and by the time that light reaches an astronomer's telescope, scientists can determine whether it has interacted with chemicals like oxygen or methane. A combination of those two, Kaltenegger says, is the fingerprint for life.

After six months of check-out and calibration in orbit, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will make its first two data streams available to the public on June 22. It launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Nov. 21, 2020, and is a U.S.-European collaboration to measure sea surface height and other key ocean features, such as ocean surface wind speed and wave height. Phys.Org reports: One of the sea surface height data streams that will be released is accurate to 2.3 inches (5.8 centimeters) and will be available within hours of when the instruments aboard Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich collect it. A second stream of data, accurate to 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters), will be released two days after collection. The difference in when the products become available balances accuracy with delivery timeliness for tasks like forecasting the weather and helping to monitor the formation of hurricanes. More datasets, which will be accurate to about 1.2 inches (2.9 centimeters), are slated for distribution later this year and are intended for research activities and climate science including tracking global mean sea level rise.

The satellite, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, collects its measurements for about 90% of the world's oceans. It is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission. The second satellite, Sentinel-6B, is slated for launch in 2025. Together, they are the latest in a series of spacecraft starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and continuing with the Jason series of satellites that have been gathering precise ocean height measurements for nearly 30 years. Shortly after launch, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich moved into position, trailing the current reference sea level satellite Jason-3 by 30 seconds. Scientists and engineers then spent time cross-calibrating the data collected by both satellites to ensure the continuity of measurements between the two. Once they have are assured of the data quality, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will then become the primary sea level satellite.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low-earth orbit in 1990 with an even older computer. Over the next 13 years it received upgrades and repairs from astronauts on five different visits from America's Space Shuttle.

But now in 2021, "NASA continues to work on resolving an issue with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope," reports SciTechDaily — though "The telescope itself and science instruments remain in good health." The operations team will be running tests and collecting more information on the system to further isolate the problem. The science instruments will remain in a safe mode state until the issue is resolved...

The computer halted on Sunday, June 13. An attempt to restart the computer failed on Monday, June 14. Initial indications pointed to a degrading computer memory module as the source of the computer halt. When the operations team attempted to switch to a back-up memory module, however, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete. Another attempt was conducted on both modules Thursday evening to obtain more diagnostic information while again trying to bring those memory modules online. However, those attempts were not successful.

The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space.

"A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.

For something that was to have been done and thrown away three years ago, NASA's Juno spacecraft has a busy schedule ahead exploring Jupiter and its big moons. From a report: The spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016, and has survived bombardment from intense radiation at the largest of the solar system's planets. It is now finishing its primary mission, but NASA has granted it a four-year extension and 42 more orbits. Last week, it zipped past Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. "Basically, we designed and built an armored tank," said Scott J. Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who is the mission's principal investigator. "And it's worked." Jupiter is essentially a big ball of mostly hydrogen, but it has turned out to be a pretty complicated ball. The mission's discoveries include lightning higher up than thought possible, rings of stable storms at the north and south poles, and winds extending so deep into the interior that they might push around the planet's magnetic fields.

"I think this has been a revelation," said David J. Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and a co-investigator on the mission. Juno's highly elliptical path, pitched up at almost a 90-degree angle to the orbits of Jupiter's moons, passes over the planet's north and south poles. On each orbit, Juno swoops in, reaching a top speed of 130,000 miles per hour as it passes within a few thousand miles of Jupiter's clouds.

Slashdot reader ytene writes: The BBC are showing the first set of images of NASA's now-assembled "Space Launch System" (SLS) vehicle, noting that NASA intends to use it to launch a human crew back to the moon later this decade. Testing will take place before astronauts are expected to ride the vehicle to space some time in 2023.
It's enormous. From the BBC's report: On Friday, engineers at Florida's Kennedy Space Center finished lowering the 65m (212ft) -tall core stage in-between two smaller booster rockets... Nasa plans to launch the SLS on its maiden flight later this year. During this mission, known as Artemis-1, the SLS will carry Orion — America's next-generation crew vehicle — towards the Moon. However, no astronauts will be aboard...

The SLS consists of the giant core stage, which houses propellant tanks and four powerful engines, flanked by two 54m (177ft) -long solid rocket boosters.
In early 2020 the BBC reported that "Some in the space community believe it would be better to launch deep space missions on commercial rockets. But supporters of the programme say that NASA needs its own heavy-lift launch capability...

"The SLS was designed to re-use technology originally developed for the space shuttle programme, which ran from 1981-2011."

On Monday, NASA's Juno spacecraft will come within 645 miles of the surface of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. "The flyby will be the closest a spacecraft has come to the solar system's largest natural satellite since NASA's Galileo spacecraft made its penultimate close approach back on May 20, 2000," reports Phys.Org. From the report: Along with striking imagery, the solar-powered spacecraft's flyby will yield insights into the moon's composition, ionosphere, magnetosphere, and ice shell. Juno's measurements of the radiation environment near the moon will also benefit future missions to the Jovian system. Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetosphere -- a bubble-shaped region of charged particles surrounding the celestial body.

Juno's science instruments will begin collecting data about three hours before the spacecraft's closest approach. Along with the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) and Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instruments, Juno's Microwave Radiometer's (MWR) will peer into Ganymede's water-ice crust, obtaining data on its composition and temperature. Signals from Juno's X-band and Ka-band radio wavelengths will be used to perform a radio occultation experiment to probe the moon's tenuous ionosphere (the outer layer of an atmosphere where gases are excited by solar radiation to form ions, which have an electrical charge).

NASA is sending water bears and bobtail squid to the International Space Station, "as NASA researchers attempt to learn more about how the conditions of spaceflight can affect biological organisms and, by extension, future astronauts," writes Joe Hernandez via NPR. From the report: Tardigrades are microscopic organisms better known as "water bears" because of their shape and the fact that they commonly live in the water. (They have also been called, endearingly, "moss piglets.") Water bears can survive in conditions that would prove fatal for most other animals, such as exposure to extreme temperatures, pressure, and radiation. The fact that they are basically indestructible, according to NASA, makes them the perfect test subjects for an experiment about the effects of spaceflight on biological survival.

Thousands of microbes live inside the human body and work to keep us healthy. But scientists don't have a clear picture of how microgravity -- which allows the kind of floating weightlessness experienced by astronauts when they travel into space -- affects those microbes. That is the subject of an ongoing NASA research program called the Understanding of Microgravity on Animal-Microbe Interactions, or UMAMI. Scientists will study whether microgravity has an impact on the relationship between newly hatched bobtail squid, or Euprymna scolopes, and their symbiotic bacterium, Vibrio fischeri. The goal is to use what they learn about the relationship between squid and the microbes to help better prepare astronauts for lengthy space missions and preserve their health while they're out there.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Venus can no longer wait. NASA will send two new robotic missions to Earth's hothouse twin, the agency's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced this afternoon at his "State of NASA" speech here at the agency's headquarters. The missions, together costing up to $1 billion, mark NASA's first visit to the planet since the early 1990s, whereas nearby Mars has seen a host of robotic visitors. They're expected to launch by the decade's end.

The scientific case for exploring Venus has long been strong. No planet has more to say about how Earth came to be. Mars is tiny and frozen, its heat and atmosphere largely lost to space long ago. Venus could host active volcanoes, and it may have once featured oceans and continents, which are critical to the evolution of life. Plate tectonics roughly like Earth's might have held sway there, or might be starting today, hidden under the clouds. Venus also proves by example that orbiting within a star's "habitable zone" doesn't guarantee a planet is suitable for life. Understanding how Venus's atmosphere went bad and turned into a runaway greenhouse, boiling away any oceans and baking the surface, could help astronomers studying other solar systems distinguish truly Earth-like exoplanets from our evil twins.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest science observatory to ever be placed into space, won't launch as scheduled on Halloween this year due to a "combination of different factors." The new launch date is expected to be pushed into November or possibly early December. Ars Technica reports: During a press briefing with reporters on Tuesday, the telescope's director for launch services, Beatriz Romero, said that there are a "combination of different factors" to consider when setting a new launch date. These factors include shipment of the telescope, the readiness of the Ariane 5 rocket, and the readiness of the spaceport in South America as well. Romero said she did not expect to identify a new launch date until later this summer or early fall.

NASA plans to ship the telescope to the launch site by boat late this summer. (NASA is keeping precise plans vague due to concerns about piracy at sea. Seriously.) The space agency's chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Tuesday that "we don't have a lot of reserve" left in the schedule to prepare for shipment. However, he added that NASA and Webb's primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, are close to folding up the telescope and putting it into a shipping container. He said that this should happen toward the "end of August." The launch campaign, which begins when the telescope arrives in French Guiana, requires 55 days. Asked whether this means that Webb will not launch until mid-November at the earliest, Zurbuchen said this assessment was correct.

The rocket is also not ready. The Ariane 5 booster, a venerable rocket in service for more than 25 years, has been grounded since August 2020 due to a payload fairing issue. However, officials with Arianespace, which manages launch for the Ariane 5, said the fairing issue's cause has been diagnosed and addressed with a redesign. Two Ariane 5 launches are scheduled before Webb's launch to ensure that the fairing issue has been fixed. (Those launches are scheduled for July and August, but delays are possible.) Finally, there are concerns about the spaceport itself, where operations have been limited by COVID-19. Vaccines are not yet widely available in French Guiana, and officials have said that if virus activity worsens, it could further slow operations.

Obipale shares a report from ScienceAlert: The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station -- namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It's a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit's space junk problem is a ticking time bomb. Canadarm2 -- formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency -- has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It's a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance.

It's unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage. "Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected," the CSA wrote in a blog post. "The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations." Robotics operations on the ISS using the Canadarm2 will continue as planned for the near future, the CSA said. But both space agencies will continue to gather data in order to perform an analysis of the event, both to understand how it occurred, and to assess future risk.

The South China Morning Post reports that China "has reached another milestone in its quest for a fusion reactor, with one of its 'artificial suns' sustaining extreme temperatures for several times longer that its previous benchmark, according to state media." State news agency Xinhua reported that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in a facility in the eastern city of Hefei registered a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds on Friday. It also maintained a temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, the report said...

The facilities are part of China's quest for fusion reactors, which hold out hope of unlimited clean energy. But there are many challenges to overcome in what has already been a decades-long quest for the world's scientists. Similar endeavours are under way in the United States, Europe, Russia, South Korea. China is also among 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) megaproject in France...

Despite the progress made, fusion reactors are still a long way from reality. Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the latest results were a major achievement for physics and engineering in China. "The experiment's success lays the foundation for China to build its own nuclear fusion energy station," Song was quoted as saying.
NASA notes that the core of the Sun is only about 15 million degrees Celsius.

So for many seconds China's fusion reactor was more than 10 times hotter than the sun.

A navigation timing error sent Nasa's Mars helicopter on a lurching ride, its first major problem since it took to the Martian skies last month. The Associated Press reports: The experimental helicopter, named Ingenuity, managed to land safely after the problem occurred, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Thursday. The trouble cropped up about a minute into the helicopter's sixth test flight on Saturday at an altitude of 10 meters (33ft). One of the numerous pictures taken by an onboard navigation camera did not register in the system, confusing the craft about its location. Ingenuity began tilting back and forth by as much as 20 degrees and suffered power consumption spikes, according to Havard Grip, the helicopter's chief pilot.

A built-in system to provide extra margin for stability "came to the rescue," he wrote in an online status update. The helicopter landed within five meters (16ft) of its intended touchdown site. Grip wrote: "Ingenuity muscled through the situation, and while the flight uncovered a timing vulnerability that will now have to be addressed, it also confirmed the robustness of the system in multiple ways. While we did not intentionally plan such a stressful flight, Nasa now has flight data probing the outer reaches of the helicopter's performance envelope."

Who wants to be an astronaut? If the answer is you, there's a reality TV show, appropriately titled "Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?", that you ought to apply for. From a report: The Discovery Channel is seeking to cast about 10 would-be astronauts to compete during the series' eight-episode run next year for a seat on a real-life trip to the International Space Station, followed by live coverage of the launch of the winner on a SpaceX rocket. "We'd like a diverse group of people that each have their own story, why they want to go to space, why they're worthy of going to space, what their back story is," said Jay Peterson, president of Boat Rocker Studios, Unscripted, one of the companies producing the show for Discovery. That person will not be the only amateur astronaut destined for the space station next year. So many tourism and entertainment efforts are preparing trips there that it could begin to look more like a soundstage for television shows and a hotel for the wealthy than an orbiting research laboratory.

Many who work in the business of space believe that is a good thing, even if trips to orbit will remain out of reach of all but the wealthiest passengers in the near term. "This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight," Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, said during a news conference this month announcing that the agency had signed an agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, to fly the first mission of private astronauts to the space station. "I'm very bullish on the tourism market and the tourism activity," Mr. McAlister said. "I think more people that are going to fly, they're going to want to do more things in space." Although the International Space Station may stay up in orbit at least until 2028, in the future it will not be only space station. Russian space authorities last month declared their intention to leave the I.S.S. in the coming years and build a station of their own. A Chinese orbital outpost is expected to come online in the next year or two.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state.

Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.