WEEKS LATER, NASA STILL CAN’T FIND HOLE IN SPACE STATION

Plugging The Hole

There’s a hole on the International Space Station, allowing air to leak out — and NASA is still having trouble tracking it down.

The situation isn’t nearly as dire as it sounds. In fact, the leak was first spotted almost exactly a year ago, as Business Insider reports. But finding it has dragged on, and on, and on.

No Reason To Worry

A bit of air leaking out the space station is to be expected, NASA says, and requires occasional top ups from nitrogen tanks delivered on cargo resupply missions to the station.

On August 20, NASA released a statement about an ongoing investigation into the small air leak, taking pains to note that the three current crew members weren’t in immediate danger. Yet the three were asked to spend a weekend inside the Russian segment of the station as scientists back on Earth tried to track down the source of the leak.

By August 24, the situation hadn’t changed. The crew had to spend another night in the Russian segment, according to NASA.

Still Investigating

Now, September has rolled around and NASA still hasn’t located the source of the leak.

Data is still being collected about the leak, as NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told Business Insider on Tuesday, adding that teams on the ground should complete their review “in the coming days.”

“The leak rate is still stable and well below the design specifications for the station and presents no concern for crew or vehicle safety,” Huot added.

AIR FORCE ONE’S SUCCESSOR COULD GO 5X THE SPEED OF SOUND

Nyoom!

A coming iteration of Air Force One, the high tech plane reserved for shuttling the President of the United States around the world, may be able to reach nauseatingly-fast speeds up to Mach 5.

The U.S. Air Force just awarded a contract to the aerospace startup Hermeus, Business Insider reports, which calls for the first hypersonic version of Air Force One. The company already has a prototype engine built and tested, and now it’s just a matter of building the rest of the plane.

Drawing Owls

Hermeus has been working on its hypersonic engine for over a year and completed tests in March, Business Insider reports. But now that it has this Air Force contract, it will need to make sure that its Mach 5 plane also meets certain rigorous standards.

Hermeus thinks it can all be done with existing technology.

“We want to do engineering, not science,” COO Skyler Shuford told Ars Technica last year.

Distant Vision

For better or worse, Hermeus’ hypersonic Air Force One is at least ten years down the road, Business Insider reports. Boeing is already set to deliver the next Air Force One in 2021, and Hermeus’ model would serve as that plane’s eventual replacement.

That means that unless American democracy utterly collapses, we’ll never get to see what Mach 5 would do to President Trump’s notoriously unusual hairstyle.