Unidentified sonar-like sound heard through Starliner's speakers

Photo: NASA

As Starliner is prepping to undock from the International Space Station and return to Earth uncrewed in a matter of days, a new mystery surfaces and leaves the crew baffled. On Saturday, astronaut Butch Wilmore alerted NASA's Mission Control about an unexplained "strange noise" heard from a speaker in the spacecraft.

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Elon Musk removes Facebook pages for Tesla and SpaceX after being challenged on Twitter

If Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has a social media manager (which we’re pretty confident he has one) for both companies, he/she/they have one less account to handle. Musk took down the Facebook pages for the aforementioned companies after being goaded on Twitter to delete the SpaceX page if he was “the man.” This started off after he responded to a tweet by Signal’s Brian Acton, the co-founder of now Facebook-owned WhatsApp, that contained the hashtag #deletefacebook. Musk replies, “What’s Facebook?” And thus, the challenge from some followers began. Musk claims he didn’t know the SpaceX page existed and that he will delete it. When asked about deleting the Tesla page, he responded “Definitely. Looks lame anyway.” On top of this, even Tesla-owned Solar City has lost its Facebook account. However, the Instagram pages for SpaceX and Tesla are still around. We don’t know yet if Musk plans to delete the accounts from this Facebook-owned company, too.

These provocations come after it was revealed over the weekend that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on President Donald Trump’s election campaign, had improperly acquired the data of 50 million Facebook users. The backlash over the news has its users calling out the social network’s disregard for its user’s privacy and US government officials asking for an explanation. 

Source: The Verge

SpaceX plans to reach Mars by 2018

Elon Musk’s SpaceX isn’t dilly-dallying on its space exploration plans. Its founder has previously said he wanted to bring humans to Mars in 10 years. And it seems the first step is being taken. Musk announced on Twitter that he plans to send Dragon, the vehicle designed to fly people and cargo to Mars, by 2018. “Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come,” the tweet said.

There isn’t much information on it yet but another tweet from Musk says, “Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system. Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight.” However, no plans of sending a human to Mars just yet. “But wouldn’t recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region. Wouldn’t be fun for longer journeys. Internal volume ~size of SUV.” According to SpaceX, the Dragon’s first manned test flight is about two or three years away.

Source: CNET