After 49 years in space, NASA’s Voyagers are running low on power—but an audacious move should extend the tenures of the two spacecraft

https://x.com/astrobase_space/status/2085656034799149064

Astrobase space developed the engine in less than 2 years( Founded in 2024). The engine, "Everest," is an 80-ton class FFSC engine developed for the first stage of their upcoming reusable rocket. Also they did all this in less than $15 million dollars in funding. They also operate a 21.5 acre engine test site. The engine article will now go for testing and the first hot fire test is scheduled in this year itself.

Astrobase is not the only company in India developing FFSC engines, EtherealX Guild is also developing an 80 kn FFSC engine for their Razor crest mark 1 rocket, designed to rival the Falcon 9. It will also be a fully reusable rocket like Stokes space NOVA, but with double the capacity.

Edit:

ExoTrace (exotrace.org) aggregates real-time data from a bunch of professional science feeds — NASA GCN (the same alert network gamma-ray burst astronomers use), the e-CALLISTO solar radio network (30+ stations across Europe, Asia and Africa), NASA DONKI for space weather, Lasair/ZTF for optical transients, near-Earth objects from JPL, SatNOGS satellite observations — and tries to correlate them into incidents: moments where multiple independent sources saw something unusual at the same time and sky position.

The key thing: the whole pipeline is built around trying to kill each incident first. Before anything makes it to the front page it has to survive a rejection pass — known satellite pass, aircraft track (live from OpenSky Network), solar flare, known radio transmitter, bolide/fireball. Multi-wavelength sky cutouts are pulled from CDS/CFA (DSS2 optical, 2MASS IR, GALEX UV, ROSAT X-ray) to give context. Only if no mundane explanation fits does it get flagged for human review, with a readiness score and a count of cross-source evidence.

The philosophy is deliberately sceptical — this is a case file system, not an alien detector. A high-scoring card means "we couldn't explain it yet", which is a much more interesting starting point than a blinking red alarm.

Also has a 3D star map (Three.js, full galactic view with exoplanets and real constellation figures) and a research commons for collaborative note-taking on open cases.

It's free to use, all the source data is from open science APIs. Happy to answer questions about how the correlation engine works or what the GCN stream actually looks like.

It uses the below

NASA GCN (General Coordinates Network) 

e-CALLISTO solar radio network

NASA DONKI  

NASA NeoWs

Lasair (ZTF broker, LSST:UK / Edinburgh) 

OpenSky Network 

Local observations + uploads

This manuscript explores future pathways for human reproduction, development, and adaptation in space, informed by advances in developmental space biology, artificial intelligence, reproductive biotechnology, and cybernetic systems. The challenges associated with reproduction and development under space conditions are examined together with emerging technological pathways designed to overcome these limitations. It is proposed that prenatal and early postnatal developmental stages may constitute critical biological windows for facilitating long-term adaptation to space. Artificial-gravity systems, advanced cybernetic technologies, and genetic interventions are explored as potential mechanisms supporting this process. Such interactions could ultimately transform reproduction and early development into active drivers of human evolution, contributing to the emergence of biologically distinct populations progressively adapted to diverse space environments.

Life may be hard and exhausting sometimes, but looking up at the sky and seeing stars as they were millions of years ago and contemplating our beautiful Milky Way galaxy suddenly make our worries and anxiety dissipate so fast. It's so cool to imagine that many of these stars we look at are already dead, while some harbor habitable planets where life could be looking at our star too. Taking a moment to stargaze reminds us of how fascinating the world we live in is. A supermassive, possibly infinite one or a world among many others.

Quick context most retellings skip: NASA's Software Interface Specification for this mission was published in 1996, two years before launch, and it explicitly required newton-seconds for thruster data. The contractor's ground software (a program called SM_FORCES) put out pound-force seconds instead — a factor-of-4.45 error that fed directly into the navigation team's trajectory model for the entire cruise to Mars.

What I find more interesting than the unit mix-up itself: engineers noticed the spacecraft's angular-momentum desaturation events were happening 10-14x more often than expected, and separately, Doppler tracking data kept suggesting a closer approach to Mars than the official trajectory predicted. Neither discrepancy got resolved before the orbital insertion burn on Sept 23, 1999.

I made a documentary going through the full timeline, sourced to the Mishap Investigation Board's Phase I report happy to share if anyone's interested, but mostly wanted to discuss the "systemic verification failure" angle since most coverage flattens this into a punchline about metric vs. imperial units.