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The Navy intends to deploy its conventional prompt strike hypersonic weapon on Virginia-class attack submarines, after previous discussions of putting the weapon on the larger Ohio-class guided-missile submarine (SSGN), according to budget request documents.

In its Fiscal Year 2021 budget overview, the Navy outlines a research and development portfolio with 5 percent more funding than this current year – for a total of $21.5 billion – that is aimed at “providing innovative capabilities in shipbuilding (Columbia class), aviation (F-35), weapons (Maritime Strike Tomahawk), hypersonics (Conventional Prompt Strike), unmanned, family of lasers, digital warfare, applied [artificial intelligence], and [U.S. Marine Corps] expeditionary equipment. These technologies are crucial to maintaining DON’s competitive advantage.”

On the Conventional Prompt Strike, the Navy wants to invest $1 billion for research and development.

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A US think tank says North Korea appears to be building facilities that can be used to assemble ballistic missiles near the capital, Pyongyang.

On Tuesday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published the results of an analysis on a construction site near Pyongyang International Airport. The site was captured in satellite images.

Pictures show three new buildings. The largest one is about 120 meters wide and 40 meters in depth. They all have bay doors, wide enough for large vehicles. The center says one of the buildings may be able to accommodate an intercontinental ballistic missile.

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Professor Sara Seager from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believes astronomers should broaden their horizons as they scan the cosmos for life.

She said: ‘Microbes can survive and grow in a 100 percent hydrogen atmosphere. We should expand the types of planets we consider worth searching.’

The award winning astrophysicist, 48, led research published today in Nature Astronomy which found E.coli and yeast survived and grew in pure hydrogen.

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The closest black hole to the Earth has been discovered just 1,000 light years away — near enough to see its companion stars with the naked eye on a clear night.

Located in the constellation of Telescopium, the hole forms part of a so-called ‘triple system — one named ‘HR 6819’ — with its two accompanying stars.

The presence of a hidden black hole in HR 6819 was discovered by researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

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A truck-sized asteroid has careened past Earth in one of the closest flybys ever recorded – but none of satellites scanning the skies to protect our planet saw the space rock coming.

The previously unseen asteroid, 2020 JJ, whizzed past at a distance of around 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) this week. In astronomical terms, that’s an incredibly close shave, and it makes it one of the closest passes of our planet ever recorded.

In a development that might worry those tasked with protecting Earth from being smashed by space objects, the asteroid was only discovered by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona at almost exactly the time it reached its closest point to Earth.

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Virgin Galactic reported first-quarter earnings and the stock is surging in premarket trading. People, it seems, can’t wait to leave Earth. That’s a good thing for the fledgling space-tourism company.

Virgin (ticker: SPCE) reported $238,000 in first-quarter sales. But sales and earnings don’t matter yet. Virgin is “presales” at this stage of its life. The company is working with aviation authorities to approve its spacecraft and its plans for ferrying customers to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. It completed two test flights from its New Mexico spaceport in the first quarter.

But sales are coming. During the quarter, the company launched an initiative for tourist-astronauts to reserve a place in Galactic’s flight queue, attracting commitments for up to $100 million in sales.

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“Putting matters of taste aside, X Æ A-12 is a wildly impractical name,” Wattenberg went on. “It’s not only hard to spell and remember and virtually unpronounceable; it’s not even easily typable and no forms or databases will accept it. It’s simply nonfunctional. If—and it’s a big if—this is their real name choice, it’s in a whole different class than other celebrity baby names that people object to on the basis of style. It fails at the basic job of being a contemporary American name.”

“Fails at the basic job of being a contemporary American name” would sound, to a lot of us, like failure. I doubt it would to Musk and Grimes. Perhaps the only answer for them was going to be a name that fails at being a name, and therefore deconstructs the concept of people having names in general. In that case, mission accomplished. Though, of course, there’s someone else who did it first.

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“Magufuli, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, said the testers had randomly obtained several non-human samples on animals and fruits which included a sheep, a goat and a pawpaw and the results came out positive. The samples were given human names and ages and were submitted to the country’s National Referral Laboratory to test for coronavirus without the lab technicians knowing the true identity of the samples.”

Tanzania president John Magufuli is under mounting pressure from concerns around coronavirus.

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