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But Dituri isn’t just settling for the record and resurfacing: He plans to stay at the lodge until June 9, when he reaches 100 days and completes an underwater mission dubbed Project Neptune 100.

The mission combines medical and ocean research along with educational outreach and was organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation, owner of the habitat.

“The record is a small bump and I really appreciate it,” said Dituri, a University of South Florida educator who holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is a retired U.S. Naval officer. “I’m honored to have it, but we still have more science to do.”

Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world’s first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.

With its increasing emphasis on lunar and deep-space missions, NASA has decided to leave low-Earth orbit to private companies when it comes to human spaceflight. The idea is that when the International Space Station (ISS) is retired in 2030, the space agency will buy time on some of the commercial stations currently on the drawing board.

A new contender in this is Vast, which says it is developing a self-contained habitat module with a large viewing port that can fit in the payload section of a Falcon 9. It’s capable of docking with a SpaceX Dragon and can accommodate up to four people aboard for up to 30 days. Also planned is a much larger module that can fit inside a SpaceX Starship.

This animation was created by using one day’s worth of data from Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) between March 18–19, 2023. Images of the full Earth disc are produced by MTG-I1 every 10 minutes. Credit: EUMETSAT/ESA

The Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Dec. 13, 2022, and is the first of a new generation of satellites set to revolutionize weather forecasting in Europe, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).