The hits just keep coming for the International Space Station (ISS), literally in the case of a resupply mission scheduled for June that is now scrubbed thanks to a heavy equipment incident that damaged the cargo spacecraft. The shipping container for the Cygnus automated cargo ship NG-22 apparently picked up some damage in transit from Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach plant in Los Angeles to Florida. Engineers inspected the Cygnus and found that whatever had damaged the container had also damaged the spacecraft, leading to the June mission’s scrub.

Mission controllers are hopeful that NG-22 can be patched up enough for a future resupply mission, but that doesn’t help the ISS right now, which is said to be running low on consumables. To fix that, the next scheduled resupply mission, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon slated for an April launch, will be modified to include more food and consumables for the ISS crew. That’s great, but it might raise another problem: garbage. Unlike the reusable Cargo Dragons, the Cygnus cargo modules are expendable, which makes them a great way to dispose of the trash produced by the ISS crew since everything just burns up on reentry. The earliest a Cygnus is scheduled to dock at the ISS again is sometime in this autumn, meaning it might be a long, stinky summer for the crew.

By now you’ve probably heard the news that genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. The company spent years hawking their spit-in-a-tube testing kits, which after DNA sequence analysis returned a report revealing all your genetic secrets. This led to a lot of DNA surprises, like finding a whole mess of half-siblings, learning that your kid isn’t really related to you, and even catching an alleged murderer. But now that a bankruptcy judge has given permission for the company to sell that treasure trove of genetic data to the highest bidder, there’s a mad rush of 23andMe customers to delete their data. It’s supposed to be as easy as signing into your account and clicking a few buttons to delete your data permanently, with the option to have any preserved samples destroyed as well. Color us skeptical, though, that the company would willingly allow its single most valuable asset to be drained. Indeed, there were reports of the 23andMe website crashing on Monday, probably simply because of the rush of deletion requests, but then again, maybe not.

It may not have been 121 gigawatts-worth, but the tiny sample of plutonium that a hapless Sydney “science nerd” procured may be enough to earn him some jail time. Emmanuel Lidden, 24, pleaded guilty to violations of Australia’s nuclear proliferation laws after ordering a small sample of the metal from a US supplier, as part of his laudable bid to collect a sample of every element in the periodic table. Shipping plutonium to Australia is apparently a big no-no, but not so much that the border force officials who initially seized the shipment didn’t return some of the material to Lidden. Someone must have realized they made a mistake, judging by the outsized response to re-seize the material, which included shutting down the street where his parents live and a lot of people milling about in hazmat suits. We Googled around very briefly for plutonium samples for sale, which is just another in a long list of searches since joining Hackaday that no doubt lands us on a list, and found this small chunk of trinitite encased in an acrylic cube for $100. We really hope this isn’t what the Australian authorities got so exercised about that Lidden now faces ten years in prison. That would be really embarrassing.

And finally, we couldn’t begin to tote up the many happy hours of our youth spent building plastic models. New model day was always the best day, and although it’s been a while since we’ve indulged, we’d really get a kick out of building models of some of the cars we had an emotional connection to, like the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle that took us on many high school adventures, or our beloved 1986 Toyota 4×4 pickup with the amazing 22R engine. Sadly, those always seemed to be vehicles that wouldn’t appeal to a broad enough market to make it worth a model company’s while to mass-produce. But if you’re lucky, the car of your dreams might just be available as a download thanks to the work of Andrey Bezrodny, who has created quite a collection of 3D models of off-beat and quirky vehicles. Most of the files are pretty reasonably priced considering the work that obviously went into them, and all you have to do is download the files and print them up. It’s not quite the same experience as taking the shrink-wrap off a Revell or Monogram box and freeing the plastic parts from they’re trees to glue them together, but it still looks like a lot of fun.

What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.

Speaking of space, while it’s statistically unlikely that anyone reading this will ever get there, you can still get a little taste of what space travel is like if you’re willing to give up ten days of your life to lie in a waterbed. What’s more, the European Space Agency will pay you 5,000 euros to do it. The experiment is part of the ESA’s Vivaldi III campaign, an exploration of the effects of extended spaceflight on the human body. The “waterbed” thing is a little misleading, though; since the setup is designed to simulate the posture the body takes in microgravity, they use a tank of water (heated, we hope) with a waterproof cover to submerge volunteers up to their torso. This neutral body posture looks pretty comfortable if you’re sleeping in space, but we tend to think it’d get annoying pretty quickly down here. Especially for potty breaks, which aren’t done astronaut-style but rather by being transferred to a trolley which lets you do your business without breaking from the neutral posture. Still, 5,000 euros is 5,000 euros.

Bad news for the meme-making community, as it appears AI might be coming for you, too. A recent study found that LLMs like ChatGPT can meme better than humans, at least under certain conditions. To come to that conclusion, researchers used some pretty dank meme templates and pitted humans against ChatGPT-4o to come up with meme-worthy captions. They also had a different group of humans collaborate with the LLM to come up with meme captions, which for practical purposes probably means the humans let the chatbot do the heavy lifting and just filtered out the real stinkers. When they showed the memes to crowdsourced participants to rate them on humor, creativity, and shareability, they found that the LLM consistently produced memes that scored higher across all three categories. This makes sense when you think about it; the whole job of an LLM is to look at a bunch of words and come up with a consensus on what the next word should be. Happily, the funniest memes were written by humans, and the human-LLM collaborations were judged more creative and shareable. So we’ve got that going for us, which is good.

We noted the passing of quite a few surplus electronics shops in this space before, and the closing of each of them, understandable as they may, marks the end of an era. But we recently learned about one surplus outfit that’s still going strong. Best Electronics, which specializes in Atari retrocomputing, has been going strong for over 40 years, a neat trick when Atari itself went bankrupt over 30 years ago. While they appear to have a lot of new old stock bits and bobs — they’re said to have acquired “thousands and thousands” of pallets of Atari goods from their Sunnyvale warehouse when the company folded — they also claim to spend a lot of money on engineering development. Their online presence is delightfully Web 1.0, making it pretty hard to sort through, but we think that development is mainly upgraded PCBs for things like joysticks and keyboards. Whatever they’re doing, they should just keep on doing it.

And finally, have you ever seen a knitted breadboard? Now you have, and while it’s of no practical value, we still love it. Alanna Okun made it for the ITP Stupid Hackathon at NYU back in February. There aren’t any instructions or build docs, so it’s not clear how it works, but from the photos we’d guess there’s either conductive yarn or solid copper wire knitted into the pattern to serve as bus bars.

It’s been quite a week for asteroid 2024 YR4, which looked like it was going to live up to its “city killer” moniker only to be demoted to a fraction of a percent risk of hitting us when it swings by our neighborhood in 2032. After being discovered at the end of 2024, the 55-meter space rock first popped up on the (figurative) radar a few weeks back as a potential risk to our home planet, with estimates of a direct strike steadily increasing as more data was gathered by professional and amateur astronomers alike. The James Webb Space Telescope even got in on the action, with four precious hours of “director’s discretionary” observation time dedicated to characterizing the size and shape of the asteroid before it gets too far from Earth. The result of all this stargazing is that 2024 YR4 is now at a Level 1 on the Torino Scale of NEO collision risk, with a likely downgrade to 0 by the time the asteroid next swings through again in 2028. So, if like us you were into the whole “Fiery Space Rock 2032” thing, you’ll just have to find something else to look forward to.

On the other hand, if you’re going to go out in a fiery cataclysm, going out as a trillionaire wouldn’t be a bad way to go. One lucky Citibank customer could have done that if only an asteroid had hit during the several hours it took to correct an $81 trillion credit to their account back in April, a mistake that only seems to be coming to light now. You’d think a mistake 80% the size of the global economy would have caused an overflow error somewhere along the way, or that somebody would see all those digits and think something was hinky, but apparently not since it was only the third person assigned to review the transaction that caught it. The transaction, which falls into the “near-miss” category, was reversed before any countries were purchased or fleets of space yachts were commissioned, which seems a pity but also points out the alarming fact that this happens often enough that banks have a “near-miss” category — kind of like a Broken Arrow.

We all know that near-Earth space is getting crowded, with everyone and his brother launching satellite megaconstellations to monetize our collective dopamine addiction. But it looks like things are even starting to get crowded around the Moon, at least judging by this lunar photobomb. The images were captured by the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the Moon and studying the landscape for the last 16 years but stretched its capabilities a bit to capture images of the South Korean Danuri. The two probes are in parallel orbits but opposite directions and about 8 kilometers apart at the time, meaning the relative velocity between the two was an unreasonably fast 11,500 km/h. The result is a blurred streak against the lunar surface, which isn’t all that much to look at but is still quite an accomplishment. It’s not the first time these two probes have played peek-a-boo with each other; back in 2023, Danuri took a similar picture when LRO was 18 kilometers below it.

We don’t do much air travel, but here’s a tip: if you want to endear yourself to fellow travelers, it might be best to avoid setting up a phone hotspot named “I Have a Bomb.” That happened last week on American Airlines flight 2863 from Austin, Texas to Charlotte, North Carolina, with predictable results. The prank was noticed while the flight was boarding, causing law enforcement officers to board the plane and ask the prankster to own up to it. Nobody volunteered, so everyone had to deplane and go back through screening, resulting in a four-hour delay and everyone missing their connections. We’re all for fun SSIDs, mind you, but there’s a time and a place for everything.

And finally, we wanted to share this fantastic piece from Brian Potter over at Construction Physics on “Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine.” The answer might seem obvious — because it’s a jet engine, duh — but the article is a fascinating look at the entire history of jet propulsion, from their near-simultaneous invention by the principal belligerents at the end of World War II right through to their modern incarnations. The article is an exploration into the engineering of complex systems, and shows how non-obvious the problems were that needed to be solved to make jet engines practical. It’s also a lesson in the difficulties of turning a military solution into a practical commercial product. Enjoy!

Ever been at a party and landed in a heated argument about exactly where the International Space Station (ISS) is passing over at that very instant? Me neither, but it’s probably happened to someone. Assuming you were in that situation, and lacked access to your smartphone or any other form of internet connected device, you might like the pocket-sized Screen Tracker from [mars91].

The concept is simple. It’s a keychain-sized item that combines an ESP32, a Neopixel LED, and a small LCD screen on a compact PCB with a couple of buttons. It’s programmed to communicate over the ESP32’s WiFi connection to query a small custom website running on AWS. That website processes orbit data for the ISS and the positions of the planets, so they can be displayed on the LCD screen above a map of the Earth. We’re not sure what font it uses, but it looks pretty cool—like something out of a 90s sci-fi movie.

It’s a great little curio, and these sort of projects can have great educational value to boot. Creating something like this will teach you about basic orbits, as well as how to work with screens and APIs and getting embedded devices online. It may sound trivial when you’ve done it before, but you can learn all kinds of skills pursuing builds like these.