Americans want to lead in space but don’t love the price tag — and more space news you may have missed

‘Farting’ space rocks, water on the moon, a rare instance of political unity, bad news for the Rebel Billionaire and an extra-weird roundup of the latest in space.

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Welcome to This Week in Outer Space, where you’ll find a roundup of the best space coverage from Yahoo News and our partners from the past week or so. Last week, we were off, due to a special visitor at our office in New York. This week, we’re back, with a potentially game-changing discovery on the moon, a new theory to explain a giant space rock’s bizarre behavior and an unfortunate update on the fate of Richard Branson’s satellite launch business. But first, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans aren’t quite ready to buy into the hype surrounding future lunar missions.

Poll: Americans aren’t over the moon about paying for space exploration

Lately, it seems like NASA will take any chance to remind you that we're going back to the moon. There has been no shortage of updates on the upcoming Artemis missions, with announcements, announcements of upcoming announcements and even the space exploration equivalent of fashion week. Returning to the moon after more than 50 years is an exciting prospect, and one that could have huge ramifications for how we live here on Earth. But a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans aren't overwhelmingly enthusiastic about NASA's lunar ambitions.

Fifty percent of respondents told us they're excited by the possibility of returning to the moon, while 36% said they aren't. The rest, well, they weren't so sure. And when it comes to the specifics of the upcoming Artemis missions, 58% of Americans said they've never heard of it, with just 8% saying they've heard "a lot." However, a clear 62% majority still considers it important for the U.S. to maintain its status as the world leader in space exploration.

That said, Americans are far more divided on whether "space missions are a good use of taxpayer money" — 40% say yes, 36% say no — and oddly enough, here America's political divide finds a rare moment of unity: People who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election responded almost exactly in the same way as those who voted for Donald Trump, with 48% and 46% saying the cost of space exploration is worth it.

Illustration by Yahoo News
Illustration by Yahoo News

So, why are Americans hesitant about footing the bill for space missions? Tom Zelibor, CEO of the Space Foundation, says it may come down to a lack of "space awareness."

"The awareness side of space that people don't get is that the majority of technologies that we have to develop for being in austere environments in space absolutely benefit us on Earth," Zelibor told Yahoo News.

"The landscape is replete with examples," he added, pointing to everyday objects like football helmets, polarized sunglasses, WD-40 and even modern cosmetics that have connections to space program innovations. Motioning to his smartphone, he chuckled, "Everyone has one of these things in their pocket. Well, you know, 90% of that phone is useless if you don't have space technologies attached to it."

"We have to do a better job on the space awareness side, because people will see dollar signs, but they won't equate it to what it does for us on Earth," he concluded.

Definitely not aliens: Scientists may have solved 'Oumuamua’s final mystery

An artist's impression of the first-known interstellar object to visit the solar system, 'Oumuamua.
An artist's impression of the first-known interstellar object to visit the solar system, 'Oumuamua, which was discovered in October 2017. (European Southern Obervatory/M. Kornmesser/Handout via Reuters)

Back in 2017, the discovery of a large cylindrical object floating through space ignited the imaginations of UFO enthusiasts across the globe. 'Oumuamua, as it’s now known, didn’t behave like any comet or asteroid we’d observed before, accelerating and decelerating at rates that made it appear as if it was navigating the cosmos under its own power. That, combined with its odd, elongated shape, led many to jump to one conclusion: 'Oumuamua was an alien spaceship exploring the heavens.

However, closer examination quickly proved otherwise. 'Oumuamua really is just a bunch of space rocks smushed together — and now team of chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, may have solved the mystery of its odd movements through the void. According to a study published in Nature, analysis of 'Oumuamua’s comical composition points to sporadic reactions that cause the release of hydrogen gas. In other words, to paraphrase Live Science, 'Oumuamua is “farting,” and those forces are causing its trajectory to shift.

So, while one theory of alien activity may be now thoroughly debunked, the phrase “farting space rocks” can live forever.

China has discovered water on the moon (a lot of it)

The U.S. isn’t the only country with eyes on the moon, and the Chinese space program says it has just discovered one of the key elements that will help sustain long-term missions: water. Microscopic glass beads uncovered in soil samples collected in 2020 appear to contain the molecular building blocks that, when heated, could provide a steady source of liquid and vapor water.

Even better: The surface of moon is probably covered in the stuff — with an estimated 330 billion tons of water waiting to be harvested. This is great news for future manned missions for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, you know, humans need water to survive, and having to bring water from Earth greatly limits the scale of future lunar outposts. The hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water can also be distilled into rocket fuel, meaning that the moon could become a pit-stop for missions to refuel before setting out for more distant destinations.

Richard Branson proves that maybe not all billionaires are cut out for the space biz

Richard Branson wipes his eye, with a rocket platform in the background.
Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur, wipes some champagne from his eye after flying with a crew in Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane VSS Unity to the edge of space at Spaceport America in New Mexico in July 2021. (Joe Skipper/Reuters)

We’re living in a golden age of private spaceflight: In less than a decade, SpaceX launches have gone from mostly explodey to practically routine, and new entrants are throwing their hat into the ring at a regular clip. But for one of the original pioneers of corporate space travel, Richard Branson, things are starting to go more bad than good.

Now, for some of our younger readers who might not be super familiar with Sir Richard, here’s the quick version: Branson is the self-made “rebel billionaire” who managed to parlay a small magazine business he started in his teens into a giant conglomerate of companies under his “Virgin” brand that has done everything from produce hit records to introduce budget international air travel to the masses. Not everything he touches is a success — like Virgin Cola, a short-lived attempt at competing with Coca-Cola — but by and large, his wins greatly outnumber his losses.

Since 2004, Branson has put a lot of his weight behind space travel, first with Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company, which took longer to get off the ground than he planned but has seen some success. To keep Virgin Galactic’s focus on space tourism, Branson and co. opted to spin off its satellite launch business into a separate company called Virgin Orbit. However, due to a recent spring of setbacks, Virgin Orbit may not be long for this Earth.

See, unlike SpaceX and Blue Origin, which leverage reusable rockets launched from the ground, Virgin Orbit went with a different approach: strapping rockets to a 747 — called the Cosmic Girl — flying up as far as they could, and then launching from there. In theory, it’s not a totally crazy idea. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, NASA used 747s to transport the space shuttle across the country, and Virgin Galactic uses the same basic principle to send its craft into suborbital space. But results have varied for the satellite launch spin-off, and after a highly publicized launch in January ended in failure, confidence in Virgin Orbit took a nosedive and the company found itself with a major cashflow problem.

By the middle of March, Virgin Orbit announced it would be temporarily ceasing all operations and placing staff on unpaid leave. Last week, it appeared that the company had secured a $200 million lifeline to back a portion of its workforce, but that didn’t pan out, and it has since announced it will be cutting 85% of the workforce, with the remaining 15% focusing on winding down the business. Short of a miracle, it now seems that Virgin Orbit will be going the way of Virgin Cola.

Bonus round! Even more space news from our partners

It’s the first of the month, so remember to pay your rent. Otherwise you might end up in a situation like what’s playing out between Russia and Kazakhstan at the Baikonur space base.

CBS has a great story about the discovery of a super bright anomaly in deep space dubbed “the cow.” I don’t know about you, but naming new discoveries in space seems like a fun job.

In the search for possibly habitable planets, there’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The James Webb telescope detected light from an Earth-like planet — but on closer inspection, it doesn’t appear to have an atmosphere.

Jalopnik’s Owen Bellwood writes about a group of scientists who think they may have cracked the secret of using wormholes to travel through space.

And finally, after all the UFO talk earlier in the year, you’d think that a headline like “Alien mothership lurking in our solar system could be watching us with tiny probes, Pentagon official suggests” would be a bigger deal.