BEIJING, Oct 29 — A Chinese aerospace company has completed a successful test flight of a prototype for a supersonic commercial transport plane that aims to travel at Mach 4, which is twice as fast as the retired Concorde.

Beijing-based Space Transportation, also known as Lingkong Tianxing Technology, announced on Sunday that its Yunxing prototype had flown successfully the day before.

In a report by South China Morning Post, the company said it plans to conduct an additional assessment of its engine technology in November.

A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.

NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, achieved a key milestone this week for testing a new SLS (Space Launch System) rocket stage to fly on future Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond.

Over a two-week period beginning Oct. 10, crews completed a safe lift and installation of the interstage simulator component needed for future testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the Thad Cochran Test Stand. The component will function like the SLS interstage section that helps protect the upper stage during Artemis launches.

“NASA Stennis is at the front end of the critical path for future space exploration,” said Barry Robinson, project manager for exploration upper stage Green Run testing on the Thad Cochran Test Stand. “Installing the interstage simulator is a significant step in our preparation to ensure the new, more powerful upper stage is ready to safely fly on future Artemis missions.”

They finally came back 💙

Crew-8 astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps all with NASA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida on Friday (Oct. 25) at 3:29 a.m. EDT (0729 GMT). Their landing after 235 days — including a more than two-week wait on board the International Space Station (ISS) for acceptable conditions — set a record for their spacecraft.

“After spending 232 days docked to the space station, [Crew-8 is] the longest mission Dragon has spent on-orbit to date,” SpaceX noted about its Crew Dragon “Endeavour” in a social media post. The previous longest duration of nearly 200 days was also set by Endeavour by the Crew-2 mission in 2021.

Originally targeted for an Oct. 8 homecoming after completing an already-extended seven-month science mission aboard the ISS, Dominick, Barratt, Epps and Grebenkin were waived off from departing the station on almost a daily basis as NASA and SpaceX flight controllers continued to watch the weather systems in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico for their potential to produce adverse sea state conditions near the Dragon’s splashdown zones.