Firefly Aerospace plans to land their Blue Ghost lunar lander near Mare Crisium on March 2 at 3:34 a.m. EST. The mission carries NASA science payloads as part of the CLPS initiative and Artemis campaign for lunar exploration. Live coverage will begin at 2:20 a.m. EST on NASA+.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% budget cuts across all operations despite being at peak performance and high demand. The $317 million budget reduction would impact scientific operations starting October, affecting proposal reviews, data analysis, and observatory efficiency. The cuts come while JWST is only halfway through its primary mission and could operate for 20+ years.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has called for the International Space Station to be deorbited within two years, significantly earlier than NASA's planned 2030 timeline. Despite SpaceX's $843 million contract to assist with the station's eventual deorbit, Musk argues there is little incremental utility in continuing operations.
NASA's workforce has decreased by approximately 10% in the past four weeks, with around 750 employees accepting deferred resignations and over 1,000 probationary employees being terminated. Field center directors have been instructed to prepare for potential additional significant workforce reductions, pending budget negotiations between the White House and Congress.
A critical analysis of NASA's 10 coding rules for embedded software programming discusses potential issues with their restrictions, especially around recursion, memory allocation, and function pointers. The analysis emphasizes how these rules, while potentially beneficial for spacecraft software, may lead to less maintainable code and argues against limitations that prevent common programming patterns.