A public-private partnership aims for a dark landing on the moon. Plus, a look at why Mars is red, and a phenomenon known as a planetary parade. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Day: February 27, 2025
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — Katy Perry and Gayle King are headed to space with Jeff Bezos’ fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, and three other women.
Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, announced the all-female celebrity crew on Thursday. Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and former TV journalist, picked the crew who will join her on a 10-minute spaceflight from west Texas, the company said.
They will blast off sometime this spring aboard a New Shepard rocket. No launch date was given.
Blue Origin has flown tourists on short hops to space since 2021. Some passengers have gotten free rides, while others have paid a hefty sum to experience weightlessness.
It was not immediately known who’s footing the bill for this upcoming flight.
Sanchez invited singer Perry and TV journalist King, as well as former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, research scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.
This will be Blue Origin’s 11th human spaceflight. Bezos climbed aboard with his brother for the inaugural flight.
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The first of two seasons of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude has hit the screen. Netflix is currently working on the second season of this attempt to bring the author’s sprawling masterpiece to the screen. Veronica Villafane has the story.
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Oscar-winning American actor Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead Wednesday at their home in the southwestern U.S. state of New Mexico.
Authorities said they were investigating what caused their deaths but that foul play was not suspected as a factor.
Authorities said they went to the home to do a welfare check and found the 95-year-old Hackman and his wife, 64-year-old pianist Betsy Arakawa, dead along with their dog.
Hackman had a lengthy career on stage and screen, including appearing in Broadway shows, on television and in more than 80 films.
He won an Oscar for best actor for his role in the 1971 film The French Connection and a best supporting Oscar for the 1992 film Unforgiven.
Hackman’s resume featured three other Oscar nominations, including his breakout role in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 as well as I Never Sang for My Father in 1970 and Mississippi Burning in 1988.
His work crossed genres as he appeared in action movies, thrillers and offbeat comedies.
In addition to his award-nominated works, he was also known for roles in films such as The Poseidon Adventure, Young Frankenstein, Superman, Hoosiers, The Birdcage, and The Royal Tenenbaums.
His last film was Welcome to Mooseport in 2004.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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TOKYO — The number of babies born in Japan fell to a record low of 720,988 in 2024 for a ninth consecutive year of decline, the health ministry said on Thursday, underscoring the rapid aging and dwindling of the population.
Births were down 5% on the year, despite measures in 2023 by former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government to boost child-bearing, while a record number of 1.62 million deaths meant that more than two people died for every new baby born.
Although the fertility rate in neighboring South Korea rose in 2024 for the first time in nine years, thanks to measures to spur young people to marry and have children, the trend in Japan has yet to show an upturn.
Behind Japan’s childbirth decline are fewer marriages in recent years, stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, said Takumi Fujinami, an economist at the Japan Research Institute.
Although the number of marriages edged up 2.2% to 499,999 in 2024, that came only after steep declines, such as a plunge of 12.7% in 2020.
“The impact could linger on in 2025 as well,” Fujinami said.
Unlike some Western countries, only a few of every 100 babies in Japan are born out of wedlock, suggesting a stronger correlation between marriages and births.
News this week that South Korea’s fertility rate rose to 0.75 in 2024 from 0.72 in 2023 suggested the neighboring nation’s demographic crisis might have turned a corner.
In Japan, the most recent data shows the corresponding figure for the average number of babies a woman is expected to have during her reproductive life came in at 1.20 in 2023.
While it was too early for any meaningful comparison between the figures in the two countries, Fujinami warned, it was important for both to improve job opportunities and close the gender gap to encourage young people to marry and have children.
Experts believe South Korea’s positive turn resulted from government support in the three areas of work-family balance, childcare and housing, as well as a campaign for businesses to nudge employees towards parenthood.
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WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined steadily for years, but that drop shows signs of slowing, according to a new survey Wednesday from the Pew Research Center.
The Religious Landscape Study finds 62% of U.S. adults call themselves Christians. While a significant dip from 2007, when 78% of Americans identified as Christian, Pew found the Christian share of the population has remained relatively stable since 2019.
The rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated — the so-called “nones” — has also reached at least a temporary plateau, according to Pew. Approximately 29% of U.S. adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, including those who are atheist (5%), agnostic (6%) or “nothing in particular” (19%).
“It’s striking to have observed this recent period of stability in American religion after that long period of decline,” said Pew’s Gregory Smith, one of the study’s co-authors. “One thing we can’t know for sure is whether these short-term signs of stabilization will prove to be a lasting change in the country’s religious trajectory.”
By some measures, the U.S. remains overwhelmingly spiritual. Many Americans have a supernatural outlook, with 83% believing in God or a universal spirit and 86% believing that people have a soul or spirit. About seven in 10 Americans believe in heaven, hell or both.
Young adults are less religious than their elders
Despite this widespread spirituality, there are harbingers of future religious decline. Most notably, Pew found a huge age gap, with 46% of the youngest American adults identifying as Christian, compared to 80% of the oldest adults. The youngest adults are also three times more likely than the oldest group to be religiously unaffiliated.
“These kinds of generational differences are a big part of what’s driven the long-term declines in American religion,” Smith said. “As older cohorts of highly religious, older people have passed away, they have been replaced by new cohorts of young adults who are less religious than their parents and grandparents.”
Michele Margolis, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist not affiliated with the Pew survey, has studied how religious involvement changes over a lifetime.
Young adults frequently move away from religion. “Then when you get married and have kids, this is a time where scholars have noted that religion is more likely to become important,” Margolis said.
Margolis said one question going forward is whether the youngest American adults firmly reject organized religion, or if some of them will return to the religious fold as they age.
Between 2007 and 2024, Pew religious landscape studies haven’t indicated that Americans are growing more religious as they get older.
Smith at Pew said “something would need to change” to stop the long-term decline of American religion, whether that’s adults becoming more religious with age or new generations becoming more religious than their parents.
How partisan politics intertwines with religious identity
The long-term decline of U.S. Christianity and rise of the “nones” has occurred across traditions, gender, race, ethnicity, education and region. But it is much more evident among political liberals, according to Pew. The survey shows 51% of liberals claim no religion, up 24 points from 2007. Only 37% of U.S. liberals identify as Christian, down from 62% in 2007.
Penny Edgell, a University of Minnesota sociologist and expert adviser for the Pew study, said this religious and political sorting aligns with whether people “support traditional, patriarchal gender and family arrangements.”
Edgell also notes that Black Americans defy the assumption that all Democrats are less religious than Republicans.
“More Black Americans percentagewise are Democrats, but their rates of religious involvement are still really high,” Edgell said. “That has something to do with the way that religious institutions and politics have been intertwined in historically unique ways for different groups.”
Roughly seven in 10 Black Protestants told Pew that religion is very important to them — about the same rate as evangelicals and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But Black Protestants are likely to identify as Democrats (72%), whereas evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are likely to identify as Republican (70% and 73%, respectively).
The Pew survey tracks many religious traditions
It’s been nearly 10 years since the last Religious Landscape Study, which tracks religious data that the U.S. census does not.
The new survey found that a majority of immigrants to the U.S. are Christian (58%), but they also follow the upward trend of the religiously unaffiliated, with a quarter of foreign-born U.S. adults claiming no religion.
The number of Americans who belong to religions besides Christianity has been increasing, though it’s still a small portion of the population (7%). That includes the 2% who are Jewish, and the 1% each who are Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu.
Of U.S. Christian adults, 40% are Protestant and 19% are Catholic. The remaining 3% in Pew’s survey include Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and smaller Christian groups.
The two largest Protestant denominations in the Pew survey remain the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church – though both have lost many members since the first Religious Landscape Study in 2007.
The Pew Religious Landscape Study was conducted in English and Spanish between July 2023 and March 2024, among a nationally representative sample of 36,908 respondents in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey’s margin of error for results based on the full sample is plus or minus 0.8 percentage points.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon’s south pole this time with a drone that will hop into a black crater where the sun never shines.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It’s taking a fast track to the moon, with a landing on March 6. The company hopes to avoid the fate of Athena’s predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown.
Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon’s surface all at once. Last month, U.S. and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward the moon. The lander from the U.S. company, Firefly Aerospace of Texas, should get there first this weekend.
The two U.S. landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars’ worth of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s an amazing time. There’s so much energy,” NASA science mission chief Nicky Fox told The Associated Press a few hours ahead of the launch.
Last year, Texas-based Intuitive Machines made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. But an instrument that gauges distance did not work, and the lander came down too hard and broke a leg, tipping onto its side.
Intuitive Machines said it has fixed that issue and dozens of others. A sideways landing like last time would prevent a drone and a pair of rovers from moving out. A NASA drill that’s aboard also needs an upright landing to be able to pierce the lunar surface and gather soil samples for analysis.
“Certainly, we will be better this time than we were last time. But you never know what could happen,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems.
It’s an extraordinarily elite club. Only five countries have pulled off a lunar landing over the decades: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. The moon is littered with wreckage from many past failures.
The 4.7-meter (15-foot) Athena will target a landing 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the lunar south pole. Just 400 meters (a quarter mile) away is a permanently shadowed crater — the ultimate destination for the drone named Grace.
Named after the late computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, the 1-meter (3-foot) drone will make three increasingly higher and longer test hops across the lunar surface using hydrazine-fueled thrusters for flight and cameras and lasers for navigation.
If those excursions go well, it will hop into the nearby pitch-black crater, an estimated 20 meters (65 feet) deep. Science instruments from Hungary and Germany will take measurements at the bottom while hunting for frozen water.
It will be the first up-close peek inside one of the many shadowed craters dotting both the north and south poles. Scientists suspect these craters are packed with tons of ice. If so, this ice could be transformed by future explorers into water to drink, air to breathe and even rocket fuel.
NASA is paying $62 million to Intuitive Machines to get its drill and other experiments to the moon. The company, in turn, sold space on the lander to others. It also opened up the Falcon rocket to ride-sharing.
Tagalongs included NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which will fly separately to the moon over the next several months before entering lunar orbit to map the distribution of water below. Also catching a ride was a private spacecraft that will chase after an asteroid for a flyby, a precursor to asteroid mining.
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