Space, in brief

Blue Origin, the US rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has confirmed it is building a spacecraft to carry people into orbit. [1]

Its chief executive, Dave Limp, wrote on 7 October that the company had made significant investments in human spaceflight technologies over the past couple of years. [1]

He was answering Eric Berger of Ars Technica, a technology news site, who reported a Blue Origin 'Space Vehicle' and said tests with real hardware are close. [1]

NASASpaceflight, a news site that follows launches closely, calls it the first public confirmation of a Blue Origin crew craft for orbit in many years. [1]

Blue Origin started a crew capsule under NASA's early crew programme in 2012. It tested the shape in wind tunnels, then left the programme. [1]

NASA says it would welcome another crew ship, but it does not plan to pay for a new programme to bring one in. [1]

Blue Origin will not pay for that step itself. It is waiting for NASA to offer one, the trade magazine Aviation Week reported from a yearly space industry congress. [1]

NASA's crews fly to the space station in SpaceX's Dragon capsule about every six months. Boeing's Starliner, the other US crew capsule, has been delayed again and again. [1]

SpaceX has said it plans to retire Dragon in favour of Starship, its giant new rocket. [1]

Separately, Blue Origin is rebuilding LC-36, its launch pad in Florida, after a New Glenn rocket exploded on it in May. The blast toppled one tower and bent the other. [1]

It also wrecked the big vehicle that stood the rocket up and fed it fuel. Instead of replacing it, Blue Origin will stack New Glenn upright on the pad, as SpaceX does with Starship. [1]

The first two repaired sections of the tower went back up in the past few days. Bezos told Fox News the next New Glenn should fly in December, carrying a spacecraft called Blue Ring. [1]

Why it matters. Watch for the fuel arms and worker platforms to appear on the LC-36 tower, and for any picture of the crew craft: neither has been shown yet. [1]

The Webb and Hubble space telescopes, run by NASA and the European Space Agency, released four new pictures, NASASpaceflight reports. [3] Webb looked into NGC 7129, a cloud of gas and dust 3,300 light-years away, and saw hundreds of young stars. [3] Hubble counted about 500,000 stars in N44, a bubble of gas in a small galaxy that circles ours, and nearly 30,000 have not yet started burning hydrogen. [3] A light-year is how far light travels in a year.

Why it matters. Dust hides the youngest stars from ordinary cameras, but Webb sees in infrared light, which passes through it. [3] Counting the stars in N44 lets astronomers time how long a collapsing cloud takes to start burning hydrogen. [3]

Webb also photographed MACS J0454.1-0300, a cluster of galaxies whose light left them when the universe was about eight billion years old. [3] The cluster's gravity bends light from galaxies far behind it, so they appear stretched and magnified. [3] Some bright knots in those far galaxies are as small as 5 light-years across and are magnified about 300 times. [3] Webb's readings suggest the far galaxies are merging and making stars fast. [3]

Why it matters. This bending is called gravitational lensing, and it lets astronomers study galaxies too far away to see clearly any other way. [3] Some of the light shows galaxies as they were 800 million years after the Big Bang. [3]

Cornelis van Zuilen, an amateur astronomer in the Netherlands, has photographed all 110 galaxies, star clusters and gas clouds in the Messier catalogue, Space.com reports. [4] The catalogue is a list made by Charles Messier in the 1700s of fuzzy objects that could be mistaken for comets. [4] Van Zuilen spent 352 hours and 13 minutes taking pictures with two small telescopes. [4] He worked from his balcony in Heiloo and from a darker field nearby, often sleeping in his car. [4]

Why it matters. Every object on the list can be seen with a modest backyard telescope under a dark sky, which is why amateurs use it as a checklist. [4]

Dermot Gethings, an astronomer from Preston in England, was 16 when the US embassy and NASA chose him to watch Apollo 17 launch in December 1972, the BBC reports. [5] Apollo 17 was the last mission to land people on the Moon. [5] He watched from about 5 km away, sitting near Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon. [5] A 30-minute film about him is shown at the University of Lancashire's Preston campus on 14 October. [5]

Why it matters. The crew collected a Moon rock for the visiting students, and it was split into 80 pieces, one each. [5] Gethings became keeper of Britain's piece and handed it to Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1973. [5]