• Norway's melting glaciers are revealing objects from the Stone Age, Iron Age, Medieval, and Viking eras.
• Some ancient artifacts are mysteries, but they still indicate trade routes through the mountains.
• Here's what Norway's glacial archaeologists found in the meltiest part of last summer.

Mysterious and fascinating artifacts are surfacing on melting glaciers across the planet.

From ancient human remains to strange wooden tools and statues, these objects are drawing archaeologists into the high, frozen mountains each year.

Norway is at the forefront of this emerging field of research, called glacial archaeology. With about 4,500 artifacts discovered, the country claims more than half of the planet's glacial archaeology findings, according to Espen Finstad, who co-leads the Norwegian program, called Secrets of the Ice.

Archaeologists there are piecing together clues about ancient industries and trade routes across the glaciers.

They just had one of their best field seasons yet. Here's what they found.

People have trekked over Norway's glaciers for thousands of years to sell and buy goods.

Ancient hunting, travel, and trade routes crossed the mountains between the Norwegian coast and inland areas since the Stone Age.

"We are lucky that some of these trade routes have gone over ice," Finstad told Business Insider.

Objects that ancient travelers left behind were frozen into the ice for centuries — until recent decades.

As humans have burned fossil fuels for energy, releasing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, global temperatures have been rising for decades. Glaciers everywhere are melting, releasing the ancient artifacts preserved inside them.

Some of these objects look familiar, like this mitten.

Others, like this whisk, are quite different from what we know today.

The Lendbreen ice patch is the most fruitful site the archaeologists visit.

"There are so many treasures in the ice there," Finstad said.

Lendbreen was a common travel route during the Viking and Medieval eras. The archaeologists go there almost every year.

In the summer of 2024, heavy melting meant lots of new discoveries.

"The melting really came rapidly at the end of the season," Finstad said.

Finstad's team of about seven archaeologists visited nearly a dozen sites across the mountains to search for artifacts.

At Lendbreen, they used pack horses to bring gear up to the site and set up their camp.

They stayed there about nine days, Finstad said.

Their findings included "two of the best-preserved arrows we ever found," Finstad said.

One of them was just lying on top of the ice, waiting to be found. Usually there's a little excavation involved, but the archaeologists simply picked this arrow up.

"It's very seldom to find them that well preserved on the ice. So it was kind of a gift. It was very beautiful," Finstad said.

Arrows are abundant in the glaciers because reindeer hunting was "almost like an industry" in the Iron and Medieval Ages, Finstad said.

People hunted for their own food, of course, but also to sell in a market.

Arrows can hold clues about past societies.

For example, some arrowheads found on the glaciers have tips made from river mussels that must have come from far away, cluing researchers in to just how far people were traveling and trading over the ages.

Some of the prehistoric arrows Finstad's team found last season were so well-preserved they still had fletching.

Fletching is delicate and doesn't usually last thousands of years. These were rare findings.

Some items they find are just "strange," Finstad said.

Small bits of wood, leather, and textile are often impossible to identify.

Finstad estimated they had found about 50 such mysterious, small objects at Lendbreen in 2024.

"It's all kind of small things, daily life things from the Viking Age or older, which you don't find in other archaeology contexts at least in Norway, because it's gone. It degrades," Finstad said.

Heavy snow cut off the archaeologists' efforts — but now they know where to look this summer.

"We are excited to go back," Finstad said.

• The Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace is flying its first moon mission, called Blue Ghost.
• New photos show how far the spacecraft is traveling for its moon landing attempt on March 2.
• Photos like these are rare since NASA ended the Apollo program 52 years ago, but a new era is beginning.

A new mission to land on the moon is beaming back stunning photos that put our world into perspective.

Look closely at the above image. There are two worlds in the photo. The moon is a tiny dot in the distance, visible below Earth.

The photo comes from the uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft, built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. The mission is en route to descend to the lunar surface on March 2.

Success would make Firefly the second private company to ever land on the moon, just one year after a historic touchdown by Intuitive Machines.

The mission is a harbinger of a new era in space, where companies race to the moon to build the infrastructure for a future economy of lunar tourism, mining, and exploration.

Photos from the Blue Ghost spacecraft

The below image, which Firefly released on February 12, shows Earth reflecting off the spacecraft's solar panel. Believe it or not, the moon is in this photo, too. See it?

On its way to the moon, the spacecraft has crossed over 715,000 miles in space.

As it crept closer to the moon, the spacecraft conducted a critical engine burn to insert itself into lunar orbit, where it's set to hang out until it's time for landing.

A few hours after the burn, the spacecraft sent its first up-close images of the moon.

"I almost started crying because we're finally at the moon," Ray Allensworth, the director of Firefly's spacecraft program, told Business Insider.

Looking at the photos is "really surreal," she said.

Blue Ghost has 10 experiments and plans to capture a lunar sunset

Blue Ghost is carrying 10 experiments and instruments for NASA, including a system to collect samples of moon dust and a radiation-tolerant computer that will test whether the technology can survive the extreme radiation on the moon.

If the mission successfully lands on the moon, its payloads are set to operate for about 14 days, which is a complete lunar day.

If all goes to plan, one of its final acts will be to capture the lunar sunset, studying how the sun causes moon dust to levitate, a mysterious phenomenon observed by Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Until then, Blue Ghost is orbiting the moon while its human operators prepare for landing.

Photos from fresh new spacecraft headed to the moon have been scarce since NASA ended the Apollo program, with no US moon landings since 1972 until last year's Intuitive Machines mission. These images could become common again, though, if Firefly has its way.

"Ultimately, our goal is that we're going to the moon at least yearly and hopefully increase that cadence over time," Allensworth said.

• A stunning new photo shows the International Space Station passing in front of the moon.
• The ISS appears tiny against the moon's vastness — and it's almost 239,000 miles closer.
• Can you see the ISS? The photo has another Easter egg too — a site for future human moon landings.

The moon isn't Earth's only iconic satellite. The International Space Station is up there too, circling the planet 16 times each day. You just don't see it.

A stunning new photo shows just how small the football-field-sized orbiting laboratory is compared to the moon.

Take a look:

Can you see the space station? Here's a hint: It's near the boundary between light and dark.

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured this image of the ISS as its orbit carried it across the face of the moon, from his perspective in Arizona. The ISS is about 250 miles away, and the moon is about 239,000 miles away.

Let's zoom in a little closer.

Do you see the ISS now? It's right here, near the top:

"I think there's a very nice juxtaposition," McCarthy told Business Insider of the photo, adding that the ISS has "a haphazard-looking design with the way the radiators jut out and the solar panels jut out," next to the moon's rugged, natural craters.

It was daytime, which lends the image a "soft, pastel-y look," he said.

The telescope almost missed it

Taking a photo like this is no easy feat.

To capture the few seconds when the ISS zoomed across the moon's face, McCarthy said he had to drive three hours to set up his telescope and computer equipment in the right area and point it to exactly the right spot of the sky at exactly the right time.

Once he'd pulled over to the side of a dirt road and set up all his equipment, McCarthy said he was racing to solve technical problems and get the shot. The sun was bright, which made it difficult to see the computer screen where he was recording what his telescope saw.

"I had no idea if it was really in focus," he said.

Then, one of his laptops died. No matter, McCarthy thought, because he had two different telescope-laptop-camera stations in case this happened. He sells prints of these photos, after all.

However, the second station's camera wasn't recording enough frames per second. By the time he'd swapped cameras, there were only two minutes left until the space station zoomed past — and his telescope was looking at the wrong part of the moon.

McCarthy recalled the final moments of his telescope drama: "I try to keep my cool, to slowly pan across the moon until I get to the area where I know the station is going to transit. The moment I get there, I see the station zip through the screen."

McCarthy wasn't sure if he'd gotten a crisp image until he reloaded the video, scanned through the 6,000 images in it to find the moment of the space station's transit, and looked at each frame. He was relieved to see the result.

"It was amazing — like the best one I've ever done," he said.

McCarthy stayed at the spot for another hour to slowly pan his telescope across the rest of the moon, capturing each portion of it in the same crisp, zoomed-in field of vision. He stacked and stitched together about 108,000 images to get a complete, high-resolution mosaic of the entire moon with the ISS.

NASA's future moon-landing site

There's another Easter egg in this photo, too. Near the top you can see Shackleton Crater on the lunar south pole.

NASA is eyeing the area around that 13-mile-wide depression for its next human moon landing — the first mission to put astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972.

Scientists believe that permanently shadowed craters on the lunar south pole are rich in frozen water, which will be a crucial resource for expanding further into deep space. Water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel rocket launches — perhaps enough fuel to launch from the moon to Mars.

The ISS, meanwhile, is aging and due for retirement in the 2030s. McCarthy's new image shows two eras of space exploration — the space-station era coming to a close and the moon-base era that NASA and its business partners are forging anew.

"In this photo, you're looking at the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering," McCarthy said. "The space station has taught us so much about the human body, and it's given us a lot of information that we're going to use as we continue to pursue those seemingly impossible frontiers."

• Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 1.3% chance of impacting Earth in 2032, NASA reports.
• Astronomers all over the world are watching the asteroid, trying to narrow down its future path.
• The risk will likely drop to 0%, but if not, NASA may have to plan a mission to push the asteroid away.

An asteroid large enough to flatten a city may be on track to crash into Earth on December 22, 2032, but the odds are very small, NASA announced Wednesday.

"There should be no particular panic or great concern about this object," Davide Farnocchia, the technical lead at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told Business Insider.

Even so, the object — called asteroid 2024 YR4 — is Earth's biggest known impact threat in 20 years and it's already triggered international planetary-defense planning.

What's the threat level?

As of Thursday morning, the chance of a 2032 impact was 1.3%, or odds of 1 in 77.

As a result, two international asteroid-response groups are actively monitoring the situation: the International Asteroid Warning Network, chaired by NASA, and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, chaired by the European Space Agency.

SMPAG is meeting in Vienna next week. If the risk remains above 1%, the group "may begin to evaluate the different options for a spacecraft-based response," the ESA wrote in a Wednesday statement.

A telescope in Chile first discovered the asteroid in late December, but fresh January data drove its risk level past 1%.

That sounds low, but a risk above 1% is uncommon and, therefore, significant for asteroid watchers, Farnocchia said. "It just means that we pay close attention and do everything that we need to do to better understand the situation," he said.

As telescopes all over the planet gather more data on the asteroid, the odds of impact will likely change.

The last time this happened was with the discovery of asteroid Apophis in 2004. It briefly had a nearly 3% impact risk, but after further data narrowed down its future path, it proved to be no threat at all.

That's what NASA expects for 2024 YR4, saying it will probably rule out the possibility of impact by April.

April is the cutoff point because, after that, the asteroid will be too far away for telescopes to continue tracking its path. It won't be observable again until 2028.

If the risk is still above 1% in April, the world's space agencies may find themselves plotting the first-ever mission to deflect an incoming asteroid.

How big is asteroid 2024 YR4?

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is somewhere between 130 to 300 feet wide — not big enough to pose a global threat.

Richard Binzel, an MIT professor of planetary sciences, told BI that if it struck Earth, the effect would be similar to the Tunguska event that occurred in Siberia in 1908, when an asteroid or comet exploded as it plowed through the atmosphere.

The fireball and blast wave flattened 500,000 acres of forest — about 34 times the size of Manhattan.

It's too early to determine the exact location of a potential impact for 2024 YR4.

The asteroid's size and risk make it a 3 out of 10 on the Torino Scale, which categorizes potential impact threats, with 10 being a certain impact that threatens the future of civilization.

A rating of 3 means YR4 will likely prove to be a non-threat, but given the eight-year timeline, it deserves close attention.

"I like our chances," said Binzel, who invented the Torino Scale. He expects more incidents like this "as we're finding more and more of these objects."

How NASA could deflect an incoming asteroid

NASA has already practiced deflecting a dangerous asteroid.

The agency's DART mission in 2022 slammed into a small asteroid and pushed it into a different orbit around the larger asteroid it's circling. It was a test, and it showed the method works.

Binzel thinks eight years is enough warning time to organize a larger deflection mission for asteroid 2024 YR4, if necessary. Given the asteroid's size, it won't take as big of a punch to budge it as, say, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Failing that, there's always the possibility of evacuation for the affected area. Farnocchia said it's important to remember that Earth is mostly ocean, and then a lot of its land is uninhabited.

However, "it's a little too early to talk about that scenario because we have time now," he said. "The priority is getting observations and better understanding what the situation actually is."

The risk could increase before it drops

The risk could rise before it falls. If new data narrows down the asteroid's possible paths through space, but an Earth impact is still one of them, the risk of impact will be higher.

Even then, further data could completely remove Earth from the cone of probability. That's still the most likely outcome.

Asteroid hunters like Binzel have long fought to increase space surveillance enough to spot potentially dangerous asteroids. In that sense, the discovery of 2024 YR4 is a kind of victory.

• NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission found ingredients for DNA and RNA on the asteroid Bennu.
• The discovery shows asteroids could seed planets with the precursors for life.
• It's also more evidence that life could arise on the dwarf planet Ceres and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

NASA probed an asteroid and found an ancient repository of ingredients for life.

The findings, published in two papers in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy on Wednesday, point to a missing link in the origins of life on Earth, but also possibly elsewhere.

"The findings do not show evidence of life itself, but they do suggest that the conditions necessary for the emergence of life were likely widespread across the early solar system," Nicky Fox, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a briefing on Wednesday.

"So this, of course, increases the odds that life could have formed on other planets," she said.

NASA's groundbreaking mission to an asteroid

A mission called OSIRIS-REx landed on an asteroid named Bennu in 2020, jammed its arm into the rock's surface, and scooped up a heaping sample of grit and dust. It was NASA's first-ever score of fresh, unadulterated asteroid material.

The mission sealed the Bennu sample in a protective capsule in space and shot it back to Earth, where NASA divvied it up to labs worldwide. Now, surprising science results are rolling in.

"I'm excited to announce that the OSIRIS-REx team discovered that Bennu contains many precursor building blocks of life, along with the evidence that it comes from an ancient wet world," Fox said.

Not only does Bennu contain evidence of ancient pools of liquid water — it also carries minerals crucial to life, amino acids, and the five nucleobases for DNA and RNA.

As asteroids crash into worlds across the galaxy, "they're essentially seeding these planets with the necessary ingredients for life," Tim McCoy, the curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-lead of one of the studies, told Business Insider.

That's promising for the possibility of life on other worlds — including a few within our own solar system.

Clues in tiny grains of asteroid dust

Researchers have spent thousands of hours peering through special electron microscopes, mapping each grain of material from Bennu.

Each millimeter-sized grain takes about a month to map, McCoy said, because it "probably realistically has at least 10,000 mineral grains in it, and you're just trying to find the one you're looking for."

In a sample the size of a bar of soap, "you're looking for a grain that's a hundredth the width of a human hair, and there might be one or two of them," McCoy said.

Scientists found phosphates and clay, which are both essential to the formation of life on Earth. A salty brine also indicated that mineral-rich pools of water had once evaporated from the parent asteroid that Bennu splintered from.

McCoy had expected some water, envisioning Bennu's parent asteroid spotted with "ancient mud." Instead, he said, "it was like an ancient mud with pockets of water in it."

So, not only did the asteroid carry the basic elements for life, it also had a watery environment to help synthesize them into complex ingredients — like the DNA nucleobases that the NASA team discovered.

That synthesis is a key step in the development of life.

After that, nucleobases must interact with phosphates (which were on Bennu) and sugars (which scientists are still looking for in Bennu's samples) to form the nucleotides that bind to make the double helix of DNA or its single-stranded cousin, RNA. From there, DNA or RNA provides the instructions for cells and, eventually, can evolve into self-replicating life.

That doesn't necessarily mean asteroids are flying around with DNA and small alien bacteria. However, that early pre-life chemistry may have started on an asteroid in space before it crashed into Earth.

Potential for alien life in our solar system

With its water gone, Bennu is probably not conducting life-ingredient chemistry today — but two planetary bodies in our solar system probably are.

The dwarf planet Ceres and the Saturn moon Enceladus both feature salty brines with large bodies of water.

Those water bodies are much bigger and have probably been around much longer than the water on Bennu's parent asteroid, so the chemical pathway to life "could have gone much further," McCoy said.

Both are contenders for possible alien life. The Bennu discoveries are another point in their favor.

Asteroid Bennu has more to offer

At the Smithsonian, McCoy said scientists have mapped about 15 millimeter-sized grains of Bennu dust, with hundreds more to go.

"We're seeing new things in almost every one," he said, so there are surely more discoveries to come.

While they continue mapping the minerals in each grain, NASA's Goddard team plans to look for sugars that would be crucial to forming nucleotides. McCoy's team also hopes to find bits of water trapped in the crystalline structure of Bennu's mineral grains and trace that water's history, to find clues about how water has moved through the solar system and its planets.

"I mean, that's one of the great questions: How did we get oceans and life, and why didn't every other planet get them?" McCoy said. "This may be part of the answer."

• A special planetary alignment is occurring in January and February.
• Four planets are visible to the naked eye, with two more faintly showing.
• Here's how, where, and when to see the planets line up — including a bonus appearance from Mercury.

The planets are lining up, forming a rare and special parade across the night sky in January and February.

Four planets — Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars — are bright enough to see with the naked eye this month. Uranus and Neptune are visible with a telescope.

They'll be "strewn across" the sky and look like extra bright stars, the astrophotographer Dan Bartlett told Business Insider.

"Mars is brighter than any of the stars right now," he added. "Jupiter is bright. Venus is spectacular."

In late February, as Saturn and Neptune descend into the glare of the sun, Mercury will rise above the nighttime horizon. So you can see every planet in our solar system over the next month.

Here's what you need to know to spot each planet.

What is the planetary alignment?

Though they appear in an arc across the sky, the planets aren't actually arranged in a straight line in space.

In fact, according to the stargazing website EarthSky, a perfect straight-line alignment of all the planets will probably never happen.

Rather, since the planets all orbit along or near the plane of our solar system, called the ecliptic, they appear in a line across the sky. It's the same reason the sun always follows the same path across the sky. That's nothing special.

However, it's uncommon for so many planets to be on the same side of the sun, visible in the night sky, at once.

Where and when to see the planet parade

Since all the planets will be following the same general path across the sky, they're easier to spot than a random comet or supernova. You can see them all in the first few hours after sunset.

Find a safe and comfortable spot with a clear, wide view of the sky, far from city lights. The top of a hill might be a good option. If you have binoculars or a telescope, bring them with you. You'll catch a lot more detail that way.

Even from the city with a pair of binoculars, Jupiter is "fantastic," Bartlett said, adding that you can often see its four biggest moons appearing as "little stars around it."

How to find the planets after sunset

Start by looking to the west. Venus is the brightest "star" in the sky, with Saturn just below it. Draw a line between the two planets, then follow that line upwards to find Jupiter high overhead.

Keep following the line, and you'll see Mars glowing red to the east. It's extra bright in January because it's directly opposite the sun from our position. As a result, we're mostly seeing Mars' day side, with the sun reflecting brightly off its surface.

For guidance to spot each planet, consult an app like SkySafari ($4.99 in the Apple App Store) or Stellarium (free).

Bartlett recommends finding out when the International Space Station will pass overhead at your location. If it coincides with planet-viewing hours, you can go at that time and grab a view of the planets while you're out. The ISS is "as bright as Venus, sometimes many times brighter," he said.

Check spotthestation.nasa.gov to find sighting opportunities near you.

A telescope will show much more

With a telescope and some practice, you can spot two more planets: Neptune glowing blue just above and south of Venus, then Uranus just to the west of Jupiter.

A telescope also reveals more detail on the other planets. Bartlett said he can often see canals on Mars, clouds circling Jupiter, and the faint sheen of Saturn's rings.

Mercury's appearance

Mercury can be tough to spot because it's closest to the sun. On February 28, though, it will start to peek above the horizon just after sunset, then rise to meet Venus in early March.

By then, Saturn will have sunk out of view into the sunset, with Neptune following a few days later.

Watch the planetary parade online

For an at-home peek at the planetary parade, the Virtual Telescope Project plans to broadcast a live feed from its telescopes in Tuscany.

The livestream, below, is set for Saturday beginning at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

Even so, if you're out after sunset in the next month, take a moment to look up. The four naked-eye planets should be clear to anybody — even in the city if you have binoculars. "You'll see these bright stars, and most of them are planets," Bartlett said.

• Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin scored a major win Thursday with its first New Glenn launch.
• The heavy-lift vehicle is poised to open up an entirely new business for Bezos' company.
• Meanwhile, SpaceX forges a path of full reusability with its revolutionary Starship rocket.

Jeff Bezos's spaceflight company, Blue Origin, made a huge leap forward on Thursday when it successfully launched its uncrewed New Glenn rocket into space on the first try.

It's a pivotal moment for Blue Origin. New Glenn — named after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn — is the company's first and only orbital rocket.

It's poised to open up a new business for Blue Origin and accelerate the company's effort to catch up to SpaceX as a dominating force in spaceflight.

There is a lot of catching up to do, even though SpaceX had a setback the same day as New Glenn's launch when its Starship exploded during its seventh spaceflight.

"Comparing them directly with SpaceX at the moment is premature, as they have years to go to catch up," Abhi Tripathi, a former SpaceX mission director who now leads mission operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, told Business Insider in an email.

"Getting to orbit on the first attempt of a new rocket is commendable," he added. "Now the real work can begin: demonstrating the reliability and repeatability of your rocket."

New Glenn can't match Starship, and it isn't meant to

New Glenn is a big step for Blue Origin, but it's nowhere near as revolutionary to the launch industry as Starship, SpaceX's most ambitious project.

Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut who consulted for SpaceX on its Safety Advisory Panel for 12 years, called Starship "the most exciting thing" since the Apollo era.

"It is going to be really disruptive" because of its size, power, and full reusability, he told Business Insider in December.

While New Glenn is designed to reuse its booster — much like SpaceX's Falcon rockets — Starship is set to be fully and rapidly reusable. Both its upper and lower stages are meant to return to Earth, get refurbished quickly, and fly again repeatedly. That could cut the cost of spaceflight tenfold.

The latest explosion could ground Starship for some time if the Federal Aviation Administration launches an investigation. Still, SpaceX has already proven Starship can land itself upright from suborbital flights and landed the rocket's booster in one piece twice.

New Glenn isn't meant to be a Starship competitor anyway, Tripathi said.

New Glenn has a payload capacity in between that of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which is "a nice place to be," Chiao told BI in an email.

It fills a slightly different niche in launch services, with a more spacious fairing than the Falcon Heavy. That could allow customers more flexibility in how they pack their satellites or spacecraft in for launch.

In that range of rockets, it's "good to have some competition," Chiao added.

SpaceX and Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment.

Blue Origin is an orbital newcomer. SpaceX is a giant.

SpaceX and Blue Origin are in different business positions, too.

As the company's first orbital rocket, New Glenn opens up new revenue streams for Blue Origin. It already has dozens of missions on the books worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters. That includes launches to build up Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet network, a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink with far fewer satellites in operation.

SpaceX has been making money on orbital launches with Falcon 9 for more than a decade. It's been using the rocket to fly both astronauts and tourists to orbit regularly since 2020.

The Falcon rockets drove an increase in global launches last year, accounting for 134 of a record 259 orbital launch attempts worldwide, according to a SpaceNews analysis. SpaceX launched more orbital rockets than the rest of the world combined.

Blue Origin, by comparison, had not launched a single rocket to orbit until now. Instead, the company's launch business has been roughly 10-minute, edge-of-space tourist trips like the one that Bezos brought William Shatner on in 2021.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has flown three private missions to orbit led by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman who is now President-elect Trump's nominee for NASA Administrator.

Weeks before New Glenn's debut launch, during the New York Times 2024 DealBook Summit, Bezos said that Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."

Still, he added, "It's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in."

Even so, it's going to take more than New Glenn to reach SpaceX levels of launch prowess.

• SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the seventh time on Thursday.
• It performed an epic booster catch for the second time, but the Starship exploded shortly after.
• The launch marked the first flight of a new-generation Starship.

SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket has stumbled on the road to commercial use. On Thursday, it unexpectedly dropped out of communications and exploded as it screamed toward space for its seventh flight.

Shortly after Starship's explosion, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, wrote on X, "Improved versions of the ship & booster already waiting for launch."

The mishap happened on the same day the SpaceX rival Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit. Blue Origin lost New Glenn's booster during Thursday morning's test flight.

What happened to the Starship

After liftoff, the rocket's Super Heavy booster heaved the Starship spaceship toward space, separated itself, and fell back toward Earth. As the falling booster approached SpaceX's Texas facilities, it nailed a complex maneuver that had happened only once before.

The booster fired its engines to lower itself to a catch tower, where a pair of giant "chopstick" arms closed around its trunk and caught it.

This technological feat is key to reaching SpaceX's goal of building a fleet of rapidly, fully reusable rockets to help slash spaceflight costs, advance the company's business model, and ultimately build a city of people on Mars.

"Kudos to you and the whole SpaceX team on the flawless booster catch! Very impressive," Bezos wrote to Musk on X about the achievement.

Shortly after the booster catch, SpaceX said the upper stage of the system, Starship itself, was lost. The company later confirmed on X that it had suffered a rapid unscheduled disassembly, which is another way of saying it exploded.

"We were just coming up to the end of that ascent burn for the ship when we started to lose a couple of the engines," Dan Huot, one of the hosts of SpaceX's livestream of the launch, said in the broadcast.

Then the ship dropped out of communications, meaning there was some kind of anomaly, and Starship was lost, Huot said.

"This was a brand-new vehicle essentially," he added. "With that, there's a lot of things you're upgrading, but there's a lot of things you're going to learn as all those systems are now interacting with each other for the first time."

In an X post on Thursday night, Musk wrote that preliminary indicators suggested Starship "had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk added.

Dean Olson, who captured footage of the Starship debris while he was in Turks and Caicos, told Business Insider he heard the sound of constant "thunder" for about a minute after witnessing the explosion.

"I'm just walking out of the restaurant holding a cocktail, and I just looked up," Olson said. "Everyone's breath is kind of just taken away."

"Nobody knew what was going on," he added. "There was a lot of people panicking, to be honest with you."

SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX's 7th Starship flight didn't achieve all it set out to

For the first time, SpaceX flew Starship with a reused Raptor rocket engine.

The Super Heavy booster runs on 33 Raptor engines. For the entire rocket to be reusable, as Musk has said he intends it to be, those engines must be recycled and reused, too.

Aboard Thursday's flight, one of those engines was the same one that SpaceX flew on its October flight.

Also flying for the first time was SpaceX's new-generation second-stage Starship. This new generation comes with significant upgrades designed for "bringing major improvements to reliability and performance," the company wrote on its website.

For example, the flaps on this upgraded Starship are smaller and reoriented, so they're not exposed to as much heat upon reentry. These flaps are designed to eventually help Starship fly back and touch down on land, making it reusable.

But SpaceX has not yet recovered a Starship from spaceflight. So far, every Starship that has flown to space has sunk into the Indian Ocean. The ship on Thursday's flight was expected to have the same fate before it was lost shortly after launch.

Starship was scheduled to deploy a set of 10 Starlink simulators, or dummies. They were about the same size and weight as SpaceX's next-generation V3 Starlink satellites. Deploying them was practice for eventually the real thing, which is a key part of SpaceX's business plan.

Starship is set to make other SpaceX rockets obsolete

In its final form, Starship should be able to release up to 100 second-generation Starlink satellites at a time, increasing SpaceX's internet coverage and a core pillar of its income.

Once Starship is operational, its sheer power will probably make it the cornerstone of SpaceX's business, which has long hinged on the comparatively wimpy Falcon 9 and its hefty counterpart, Falcon Heavy.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," SpaceX's chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said at the Baron Investment Conference in November, according to Ars Technica.

"We'll be flying that for six to eight more years," she added, "but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."

• Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, has launched its first orbital rocket, New Glenn.
• New Glenn is one of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built.
• The maiden launch marks a milestone for Blue Origin.

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin has entered the rocket big leagues.

At 2:03 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Blue Origin's 32-story-tall New Glenn rocket fired its seven engines and climbed atop a cloud of fire and steam for the first time, roaring into the skies above the launch complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars," Blue Origin wrote in an X post on Thursday morning.

Bezos, who was present at New Glenn's launch, uploaded a minute-long clip of the launch on X shortly after liftoff.

New Glenn belongs to a new generation of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built, next to Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starship and NASA's new moon rocket, the Space Launch System.

These heavy-lift vehicles have roughly the size and heft of NASA's Saturn V — the rocket that launched Apollo astronauts to the moon — but they're designed for even more ambitious goals.

Musk and Bezos have espoused plans to establish permanent human settlements on Mars and on a giant space station, respectively. NASA aims to build permanent science stations on and around the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars with SpaceX's and Blue Origins' help.

First, though, Blue Origin needs to strengthen its business. New Glenn's maiden launch positions the company to fly payloads to orbit and challenge SpaceX's dominance.

Blue Origin was originally planning to launch New Glenn on Monday. The launch was repeatedly delayed and eventually postponed after Blue Origin said they had to "troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue."

"I'm incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp on Thursday. "We knew landing our booster, So You're Telling Me There's a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We'll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone."

Blue Origin loses booster in an otherwise successful launch

In a statement two hours after the launch, Blue Origin confirmed that it had lost its booster after it separated from the rocket

The booster was meant to return to Earth and land on a platform in the ocean, which would have been the company's first step to proving the reusability of its booster.

This makes SpaceX the only company to have recovered and reused a rocket's booster. The Musk-led rocket company has been retrieving its much smaller Falcon 9 first-stage boosters for reuse in this way for years.

SpaceX's Starship booster recently proved a different landing method, lowering itself into the waiting arms of a landing tower in October.

Like Falcon 9, and unlike Starship, New Glenn is only partially reusable — its second stage is not designed for reuse.

Musk congratulated Bezos shortly after New Glenn's successful liftoff.

"Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt! @JeffBezos," Musk wrote on X.

Blue Origin's future depends on New Glenn

Trailing behind SpaceX, Blue Origin is one of the leading companies paving the way for reusable rockets, which can help slash spaceflight costs.

Weeks before New Glenn's debut launch, during the New York Times 2024 DealBook Summit, Bezos said Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."

He added, "It's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in."

New Glenn is Blue Origin's second rocket, but its first designed to insert itself into Earth's orbit.

The company began construction on New Glenn in 2016. Bezos has said he isn't happy with the company's speed of progress.

"Blue Origin needs to be much faster," Bezos told Lex Fridman in December 2023. "And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago."

For comparison, SpaceX began developing its first orbital rocket, the Falcon 9 v1.0, in 2005. It made its debut launch five years later, in 2010.

That said, New Glenn is more than three times more powerful than SpaceX's first Falcon 9.

Blue Origin's comparatively tiny New Shepard rocket, which carries paying customers and other payloads to suborbital space, has been reused nearly 30 times since its first launch in 2015.

New Glenn's maiden voyage is carrying a test payload

As Blue Origin's barge sails the booster back to the coast, the rocket's second stage is scheduled to remain in space for about six hours while carrying the company's prototype Blue Ring pathfinder spacecraft.

Blue Ring is designed for multiple mission types, including transporting, refueling, and communicating with other craft in space. The pathfinder prototype launched on Thursday is a test launch and is set to remain onboard and not be deployed into space.

"There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits," Limp wrote on X in December. Blue Ring is designed to fulfill that need for both government and commercial customers, the Blue Origin CEO said.

The Federal Aviation Administration has granted Blue Origin a license to launch New Glenn to orbit from Cape Canaveral for the next five years.

Blue Origin's customers include NASA, Amazon, and several telecommunications providers.

• The Los Angeles fires share a key feature with wildfires that burned down Lahaina, Hawaii and Paradise, California
• Powerful winds met flash-dried landscapes full of vegetation to fuel the flames.
• The climate crisis is increasing the odds of events like these.

The Los Angeles firestorms of the past week share a crucial feature with two of the most horrific wildfires in recent American memory.

The Palisades and Eaton fires may be unprecedented in some ways, but they share a common root cause with the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, California, and the 2023 fire that destroyed Lahaina in Hawaii.

In Paradise, Lahaina, and now Los Angeles, the blazes grew to monster fires because powerful winds met a parched, overgrown landscape.

Scientists expect to see more of that in the future.

"There's definitely a trend that increases this kind of situation," Louis Gritzo, the chief science officer at the commercial property insurance company FM, told Business Insider.

In all three cases, sudden drought had sucked the moisture out of local vegetation, creating abundant kindling for fire to feed on. Then strong winds picked up the embers and carried them into residential areas.

"When we look at the recent really bad fires — the Camp Fire, the fires in Hawaii — they all have that thing in common," Gritzo said. "They have a wet period, dry period, heavy winds, very rapid fire spread, a lot of ember transport."

The winds were bad luck, but flash-dried vegetation is happening more often as global temperatures rise.

How the climate crisis creates more fire fuel

In Paradise and Los Angeles, the dry months followed unusually wet seasons that fed an explosion of plant growth.

Last winter, heavy rains in Southern California led to about double the average amount of grasses and shrubs, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

This winter has not been so generous. The past few months have seen almost no rainfall, shriveling up all those grasses and shrubs.

Swain has coined the term "hydroclimate whiplash" — or simply "weather whiplash" — for these drastic swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions. He has observed it across the planet in recent years, from various regions in the US and Europe to the Middle East and China.

Globally, whiplash has already increased by 33% to 66% since the mid-twentieth century, Swain and his colleagues found in a new paper, published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Thursday.

That's because warmer air holds more moisture. As global temperatures rise, the ceiling on how much water our atmosphere can hold is also rising.

That thirsty atmosphere sucks more moisture out of the ground sometimes and, at other times, dumps more rain. Hence, greater extremes of flood and drought — and more wildfire fuel.

The effect of the climate crisis on wildfires "has been slow to emerge, but it is very clearly emerging, unfortunately," Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a Friday press briefing announcing that 2024 was the hottest year on record.

The scientific organization World Weather Attribution has discovered a clear link between the climate crisis and specific instances of extreme fire weather in Brazil, Chile, Australia, and Canada.

The climate signal is "so large" now that it's clear in the global and continental data, but also "you're seeing it at the local scale, you're seeing it in local weather," Schmidt said.

The transition from wildfire to urban fire

So climate change is seeding fire fuel in forests and grasslands.

However, once wild blazes enter dense residential areas like Lahaina or the Pacific Palisades, they burn wood fences, ornamental yard plants, mulch landscapes, and leaves built up in roof gutters — then grow to consume homes.

"The natural fuels may be showering us with embers, but what's burning our homes down and forcing us to run and evacuate is human fuels," Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience, told Business Insider.

As the climate crisis loads the dice toward extreme wildfires, he says it's important for city governments and residents to manage those urban fuels by reducing them and spacing them apart.

"I think just about anybody could be next under the right circumstances," Durland said. "It depends on the fuel and the climate."

• The Los Angeles firestorms show how quickly wildfires can turn into urban fires.
• Flying embers, not direct flames, often ignite homes first.
• Homeowners can mitigate fire risk by maintaining a clear perimeter around their properties.

The firestorms razing Los Angeles show how quickly wildfires can turn into devastating urban conflagrations.

Two fire management experts say there's a common misunderstanding about how homes ignite under these conditions. Understanding how a brush fire becomes urban can help homeowners prepare their properties for future fires.

Take a look at the below photo. Not all the homes on this block are up in flames yet, and blazes in the distance appear to be spaced apart.

"These are scattered ignitions. It's not this wave of destruction," Jack Cohen, a former fire research scientist at the US Forest Service, told Business Insider.

Cohen isn't in Los Angeles, but he studied wildland-urban fires for more than 30 years, both in the lab and in the field. The magnitude of the LA fires is unprecedented, he said, but the process by which they burned down homes probably is not.

It's not a wall of flame or radiative heat from a wildfire that overtakes neighborhoods, he said. Often it's flying embers landing in flammable spots on and around homes.

These "spot ignitions" are like kindling. Embers accumulate on roofs or in yards. Soon ornamental plants, leaf-filled gutters, firewood piles, or deck chairs are up in flames.

If those little fires are close enough to the house, the flames can start to overtake the building.

How homeowners can reduce future fire risk

Homeowners can help prevent future fires from spreading to their homes by maintaining a five-foot perimeter of no flammable materials — no mulch, no ornamental plants, no layers of fallen pine needles, and no piles of wood.

Even better is a 30-foot perimeter that's "lean, clean and green," according to FEMA. If you have that much space around your house, keeping it clear of dead branches and keeping trees and bushes well-spaced can help.

"You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference," Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience, told Business Insider.

With the proper perimeter, Cohen said, even homes caught in conflagrations like the Palisades and Eaton fires could survive.

However, photos from the aftermath so far in the Palisades don't seem to show surviving houses unique amid burned blocks.

Cohen noted that trees are still standing in some of those areas, which is visible in live news coverage, showing the fires didn't move through neighborhoods like a wall of flames.

Because embers can travel far, spot ignitions can crop up in various, seemingly random locations throughout a wildfire-adjacent neighborhood. Suddenly a house is on fire here, and another one over there.

Then the houses spread the fire to each other.

Sometimes that happens when a burning house's roof collapses, Cohen said, which sends a convective column up into the wind, which can then push flames into other houses.

Alternatively, the wind can loft burning material from a house and carry it to other homes, igniting new fires.

The extreme winds that have buffeted LA this week spread those embers and bits of burning debris far and wide.

Some houses are close enough to their neighbors that, if the next house has flammable siding — made of wood, perhaps — the mounting flames can quickly overtake it.

Even when houses are close together, building with non-flammable materials can help.

Once houses are up in flames in a place like the Palisades, Cohen and Durland said, it's no longer a wildfire. It's an urban fire.

With thousands of homes ablaze and powerful winds stoking the flames, firefighters have been unable to contain the fires in Los Angeles.

To stop things from getting to that point — before fires ever start — it's crucial for cities and communities to clear dry, highly flammable grasses and brush, whether through controlled burns, livestock grazing programs, or other means.

"This is a team sport, okay? Nobody can solve this alone," Durland said. "It is going to take community planning and it's going to take leadership at the political level and the community level and the state level."

• The Palisades and Eaton fires have razed thousands of homes and burned tens of thousands of acres.
• Some buildings have survived, though, like the Getty Villa art museum in Pacific Palisades.
• The Villa is not your average home, but homeowners can learn from what Getty staff have been doing all year.

As the Palisades and Eaton fires burned through thousands of acres on Tuesday, razing nearly 2,000 homes, the iconic Getty Villa remained standing with minor damage. Meanwhile, homes and trees around it went up in flames.

"We deeply appreciate the tireless work and dedication of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and other agencies," the museum said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The Getty Villa is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which includes the largest endowment of any museum in the world, estimated at more than $8 billion in 2023. It houses the trust's collection of Ancient Greek and Roman art.

Fire departments used "state-of-the-art air handling systems" to help protect the building, Katherine E. Fleming, the president and CEO of the Getty Trust, told USA Today.

Moreover, builders designed the galleries with double-walled construction, which also helped protect the precious art inside.

However, it wasn't just expensive architecture and state-of-the-art firefighting that helped. Getty staff have been consistently clearing brush from the surrounding area all year as part of its fire-mitigation efforts, the museum said.

That's a crucial lesson for homeowners in fire-risk areas.

Yard work to save your home

The Palisades fire has become the most destructive ever to hit Los Angeles, CNN reported, citing CalFire data.

The fire has been fueled by an explosion of grasses and brush that grew abundant over the past two winters, which were rainier than usual. But with drought conditions over the past few months, that brush dried out, becoming kindling for the fast-moving blazes.

To mitigate the risk of fire, cities, fire departments, and community members can clear dried grasslands around residential areas.

Individual homeowners can also protect their properties by clearing a 5-foot perimeter around their houses and removing flammable materials like ornamental plants, bark mulch, or deck furniture.

"This is an urban fire. We're burning urban fuels," said Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience.

Keeping gutters and roofs clear can also prevent spot ignitions that can send entire structures up in flames.

"People believe that they're helpless," Durland told Business Insider in 2023. But that's not the case, he said. "Nine out of 10 times, this boils down to two words: yard work."

Homeowners can also install noncombustible, 1/8-inch mesh screening on any vents to a crawl space or attic to prevent embers from entering the home that way.

"You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference," Durland said.

• Major fires in the Los Angeles area have leveled entire communities.
• Satellite images show flames wreaking havoc on houses, businesses, and other structures.
• At least 10 people have died, and the fires have destroyed about 10,000 structures.

Widespread fires have besieged the Los Angeles area for four days. At least 10 people have died and more than 150,000 have been ordered to evacuate their homes.

As of Friday afternoon, six separate fires were still burning in parts of the city and its surrounding areas, but firefighters were making progress during a reprieve from powerful winds.

Satellite and aerial images provided to Business Insider by Maxar Technologies and Nearmap show the trail of destruction the fires have left in Altadena, Pasadena, Malibu, and Pacific Palisades, some of the most heavily affected areas.

The Palisades and Eaton Fires

These two blazes spread for days with firefighters unable to stop their growth.

As of Friday at noon Pacific Time, the Palisades fire had consumed more than 20,400 acres and was 8% contained, and the Eaton Fire had burned more than 13,600 acres with 3% containment, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Together, they've destroyed about 10,000 structures, the agency estimates.

Entire neighborhoods burned to the ground

Charred, leveled communities like this are emerging in the paths of both fires.

A windstorm quickly spread the fires

Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles County, was the first to be devastated. The fire there broke out on Tuesday morning.

The blaze spread so far, so quickly in part because of a windstorm that the National Weather Service called "life-threatening and destructive."

Gusts up to 100 mph carried burning embers far into residential areas, igniting spot fires that grew into an urban conflagration.

In the above image, you can see where some of those spot fires began far from the initial brush fire.

Some of the world's most expensive homes burned

The Palisades Fire alone has become the most destructive fire ever to hit Los Angeles County, CNN reported Wednesday, citing Cal Fire data. Fire experts suspect it could be the costliest in California history, maybe even in US history.

The Altadena neighborhood also burned

These satellite images show houses burned down in the Altadena neighborhood, one of the areas most affected by the Eaton Fire.

The neighborhood was virtually destroyed

Houses and buildings on East Altadena Drive are glowing orange with flame and shrouded in smoke in this image from Wednesday.

Flying over the area after the flames subsided, the ABC7 helicopter pilot Scott Reiff said, "it looks basically like it was carpet-bombed."

In Pasadena, idyllic streets turned to ash

When houses are built this close together, one burning building can easily ignite its neighbors. A house fire burns much hotter than a forest fire because of the materials that are burning, according to Louis Gritzo, the chief science officer at the commercial property insurance company FM.

Many homes didn't stand a chance. They were under siege from "the high heat release from one burning structure combined with a continual ember attack," Gritzo said.

The road to Malibu burned

The Pacific Coast Highway and Tuna Canyon Road, which connects Malibu and Topanga, were covered in smoke Wednesday as fires burned through.

Many of the homes along the PCH have been incinerated.

Malibu did, too

The true scale of devastation and loss of life may not become clear for many days.

Fire conditions may continue for days

A red flag warning for critical fire weather is set to continue in Los Angeles and Ventura counties through 6 p.m. Friday.

The National Weather Service expects about 18 hours of reprieve before another round of "gusty" winds late Saturday into Sunday, with a stronger wind event possible Monday night through Wednesday.

"We're not out of the woods yet," said Courtney Carpenter, a warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

Correction: January 9, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service. She's Courtney Carpenter, not Courtney Carpen.

• NASA scrapped its $11 billion plan to return samples from Mars to Earth by 2040.
• It now has not one but two new options to choose from — both are faster and cheaper.
• The samples could return as soon as 2035 and may contain the first-ever signs of ancient alien life.

The Perseverance rover is building up a stash of rocks on Mars that could contain the first-ever signs of alien life, but NASA is scrambling to figure out how it will bring them back to Earth for analysis.

NASA had a plan but it got "out of control," in the words of the agency's administrator, Bill Nelson. After a series of delays, the cost ballooned to $11 billion and the samples wouldn't be landing on Earth until 2040.

So Nelson scrapped that plan in April and called for new proposals from outside and within NASA.

After months of assessment, on Tuesday, Nelson announced that "the wizards at NASA" had come up with a new plan, which could bring the Mars rocks to Earth as early as 2035 for as cheap as $5.8 billion.

"We want to have the quickest, cheapest way to get these 30 samples back," Nelson said during a NASA presser on Tuesday.

For that to work, he said the incoming Trump administration will need to get on board.

"This is going to be a function of the new administration in order to fund this," Nelson said. "And it's an appropriation that has to start right now, fiscal year '25."

The search for alien life on Mars

NASA is not looking for active alien life but rather fossilized hints of long-gone microbial life.

The $2.4 billion Perseverance rover has spent the last four years exploring Jezero Crater, which was a lake billions of years ago. If microbes ever lived on Mars, this is the ideal spot to search for evidence of them.

In fact, in July, Perseverance stumbled on a rock in Jezero Crater that contained some of the strongest potential evidence of ancient alien life to date.

One of the rock's outstanding features was tiny white "leopard spots" that could suggest the presence of chemical reactions similar to those associated with microbial life on Earth.

It's still uncertain whether this is truly a sign of alien microbes. There could be non-biological explanations for the spots. To check, NASA needs to get that rock here to Earth for study in laboratories.

NASA's new plan

Bringing Perseverance's Mars samples to Earth will be complicated.

NASA must launch a mission that collects the samples from the Martian surface and launches them into Mars' orbit, where they must meet up with a European spacecraft designed to grab them and carry them back to Earth.

To make things simpler and reduce costs, NASA focused on how it would drop that mission to the Martian surface.

In order to maximize the chance of the sample return mission moving forward, NASA chose not one but two options to pursue.

The first option would involve using existing technology that's previously landed on Mars. That's a sky crane, similar to the ones that helped lower NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars' surface.

The second option involves working with existing commercial partners, like SpaceX and Blue Origin. In that scenario, NASA would use new commercial technology, untested on Mars, like a heavy lander, Nelson said.

Both paths would cost around $6 or $7 billion and deliver the samples to Earth before 2040, NASA determined.

Nelson said he expects NASA to choose one of those paths forward in 2026 since the engineering work required to fully understand each option will take about a year.

He added that NASA will need $300 million to do that work in fiscal year 2025. Trump would have to include that expense in his budget proposal, and Congress would have to approve it.

"And if they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they're going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year 25. And that would be the case every year going forward," Nelson said.

As part of the transition to the new Trump administration, Nelson will likely be handing the agency over to Trump-nominee Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and two-time SpaceX astronaut.

After Trump nominated him for NASA Administrator, Isaacman wrote in a post on X that "Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars."

His position on the Mars Sample Return mission is unclear. Nelson said he had not spoken with Isaacman about it.

• The Palisades and Eaton fires are devastating parts of Los Angeles, destroying entire communities.
• Photos offer a glimpse at the scale of destruction that occurred in just a day and a half.
• The situation is still ongoing and dangerous, with evacuation orders in many areas.

The Palisades and Eaton fires are ripping through parts of Los Angeles and causing mass destruction.

Firefighters are still struggling to contain the blazes, which grew rapidly and have continued for more than 24 hours.

The fires have destroyed at least 1,000 homes. Five people are reported dead. These counts are preliminary, as the situation is still dynamic.

It's difficult to grasp the scale of these fires, but emerging photos paint a grim picture.

The massive Palisades and Eaton fires ripping through Los Angeles show how quickly brush fires can escalate under dry, windy conditions.

More than 70,000 people were under evacuation orders on Wednesday afternoon. Officials have warned that people in many other surrounding regions should prepare to leave their homes at a moment's notice.

Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience, told Business Insider that if he lived in the area, he would leave before evacuation orders even hit his home.

"I would have left and gone to the beach or gotten a hotel," he said.

A giant smoke plume was rising over Santa Monica within an hour of the Palisades Fire igniting Tuesday morning.

UC San Diego's ALERTCalifornia camera network captured it from the other side of Santa Monica. At that time the fire covered about 200 acres.

So many people had to evacuate that Palisades Drive was gridlocked.

Many people abandoned their cars and fled on foot.

Since then, the Palisades Fire has burned through more than 15,800 acres. This was the area with evacuation zones early Wednesday afternoon.

That's where the acreage stood at 2:30 p.m. PT on Wednesday. Throughout the morning it was increasing hour by hour.

The most up-to-date evacuation orders and warnings are available through CalFire.

Photos are emerging from areas where the Palisades Fire has burned its way through.

The Eaton Fire in nearby Pasadena also rapidly ballooned overnight and Wednesday morning.

The Eaton Fire covered 10,600 acres as of 1 p.m. PT on Wednesday.

Images from that area show a similar situation to Pacific Palisades: frantic evacuations and destroyed homes.

The smoke from the fires filled the Los Angeles area, darkening the skies and causing unhealthy air quality.

A powerful windstorm spread the flames quickly, sending embers flying and igniting new spots, even jumping across roads.

Hurricane-force winds peaked overnight and Wednesday morning, and firefighters were unable to contain the blazes.

"Despite the efforts we put in with well-trained firefighters and equipment and aircraft, the wind and the weather still are ruling these situations," Durland said of major, fast-moving fires like these.

Another ALERTCalifornia camera captured the rising smoke from a ridge on the other side of the fire about an hour after it started.

This was the view from the same trailhead Tuesday night. This camera has since gone offline.

Bone-dry vegetation provided abundant fire fuel due to a phenomenon called weather whiplash.

The last two winters in Southern California have been quite wet, even causing flooding. That led to an explosion of grasses and shrubs, nearly twice as much as a normal season, according to the UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain.

However, this winter has been different. Months without precipitation have dried out all that vegetation, blanketing the LA hillsides with fire fuel.

Grasses and shrubs help spread the fire, but it's "human fuels" that ignite homes, Durland said.

"It's bark mulch, it's ornamental grasses, it's structures that are readily flammable," Durland said.

"This is an urban fire. We're burning urban fuels," he added.

That means that cities and homeowners can do something about it. More fire-resistant landscaping and construction can help protect homes from future firestorms like this.

There are always houses that survive wildfires, Durland said, and everyone can learn from that.

It helps to build homes with ample space between them and maintain a perimeter of at least five feet that's totally free of dry or flammable vegetation or mulch.

Homeowners can also keep their roofs and gutters clear and remove anything flammable from underneath porches and decks.

The Palisades were full of multi-million-dollar homes, which means this could be the costliest fire in US history, Swain said.

According to a preliminary estimate from JP Morgan, insured losses alone could amount to $10 billion.

The Eaton fire, burning in Pasadena and Altadena, was at 0% containment as of Wednesday afternoon.

• Firestorms in Los Angeles have burned nearly 27,000 acres, destroying homes and killing five people.
• One of the biggest blazes, the Palisades Fire, could be the costliest in US history.
• The fires have spread so fast in part because of a windstorm and flood-drought whiplash.

All was well in Los Angeles at around 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

Less than 24 hours later, 2,925 acres of the Pacific Palisades were ablaze in what is being called the worst wildfire in Southern California since 2011. It has grown by orders of magnitude since.

Several more blazes have ignited in the area, with one, the Eaton Fire, engulfing another 10,600 acres.

Firefighters had not contained the fires as of early Thursday morning, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN that five people were dead, and "likely more."

More than 1,000 structures have burned and the fires could get even worse.

California is no stranger to fires, but this situation is different and especially dangerous for a few reasons.

An 'urban firestorm' that could be the costliest in history

Few brush fires in California history have intruded into such vast areas of dense, urban housing.

The UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain called it an "urban firestorm" as he assessed live images of the developing Eaton Fire on Tuesday morning.

Perhaps the best historical comparison is the 1991 Tunnel Fire, which raged through more than 1,500 acres of Oakland, but it was smaller than either of the two giant blazes in Los Angeles. It killed 25 people and injured 150, and ranks as the third-deadliest and third-most-destructive fire in California history.

The true toll of this week's fires won't be clear until later.

Swain said that he and several colleagues have estimated that the Palisades Fire could be the costliest on record in the US because of the number of structures burning and the fact that those homes are some of the most expensive in the world.

"We are looking at what is, I think, likely to become the costliest wildfire disaster in California, if not national history, along with a number of other superlatives," Swain said.

A historic windstorm spread the fire fast

A powerful windstorm buffeted the flames throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, with gusts of wind reaching up to 90 miles an hour, according to the National Weather Service.

During a 2 ½ hour period overnight, the Palisades Fire's size more than doubled, per the fire service's reports.

The winds were so powerful on Tuesday evening that water- and retardant-dropping aircraft could not fly.

It's a phenomenon that scientists have warned about: a deadly combination of high winds and dry, open land — such as the brushland now being swept by flames in Los Angeles — amounting to fires that move faster than emergency responders can keep up with.

"It's certainly unusual how fast it's grown," Douglas Kelley, a researcher at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told Business Insider. "It's definitely a lot faster than I guess a lot of people were expecting in the area at the time."

A study published in Science in October found that while only about 3% of US fires over a nearly two-decade period could be considered "fast fires," they caused disproportionate damage.

"The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast," wrote the study's authors, led by University of Colorado Boulder's Jennifer Balch.

Between 2001 and 2020, fast fires accounted for 78% of fire-destroyed buildings and a full 61% of suppression costs — or $18.9 billion, the scientists wrote. And they are getting more frequent, the study said.

The windstorm was bad luck. But the other primary factor in the fires' rapid explosions — the fuel — is strongly linked to the climate crisis.

Weather whiplash made abundant fire fuel

Southern California has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding the past two winters — which is a huge part of the problem.

Abundant rainfall spurred an explosion of grasses and brush, the primary fire fuel in Southern California. Then, with very little rainfall in the past few months, all that vegetation was flash-dried.

Kelley said those dry conditions made the Palisades especially susceptible to a fast-spreading fire.

This is part of a growing phenomenon that Swain calls "hydroclimate whiplash," or weather whiplash. As global temperatures rise, many parts of the world, especially California, are seeing more violent swings between extreme wet and extreme dry conditions.

The same confluence of weather whiplash and extreme winds was behind the Camp Fire, Swain said. That November 2018 blaze in Paradise, California, was the deadliest and most destructive in the state's history, destroying 18,804 structures and killing 85 people.

• A 65-year-old patient has died of bird flu, Louisiana officials reported on Monday.
• The patient had underlying conditions and was likely infected by exposure to birds.
• This is the first death linked to the current outbreak of H5N1, avian influenza.

Bird flu has claimed its first human death in the US.

A Louisiana patient died from a severe case of the H5N1 avian influenza, state health officials reported on Monday.

The patient, who was over 65 and had underlying conditions, is the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana.

There is still no sign that the H5N1 virus can spread between people. The Louisiana patient contracted the virus after exposure to wild birds and a non-commercial backyard flock, officials reported.

The bird flu's proliferation through bird and animal populations worldwide has led to many human spillover cases over the years. There have been 939 cases of human H5N1 infections worldwide as of November 2024, according to the World Health Organization. Of those, 464 were fatal.

"I think it's pretty clear that we will continue to see severe disease," Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude and director of the WHO animal and bird flu center, told Business Insider. "I guess the real question is are we going to see more? I don't know the answer to that one."

A new variant of H5N1 with concerning mutations

The Louisiana patient, who was hospitalized in late 2024, carried a new version of bird flu, which is unlike the bird flu that has been spreading in cattle across the US, the CDC reported. A teenager in Canada, who was hospitalized with severe bird flu in November, also carried that new version, which is called the D1.1 genotype.

Public-health experts are concerned that H5N1 could develop mutations that allow it to adapt better to infecting mammals. That could set the virus on a path to human-to-human transmission.

Webby said samples of the D1.1 genotype virus "did look like they were starting to develop some of those mutations" after infecting the Louisiana and Canada patients.

Fortunately, the mutated virus did not appear to pass from those two patients to other people.

"To be honest, the last month, six weeks, have made me a little more uneasy about the situation," Webby said.

The Louisiana Department of Health said in its report that the public health risk for the general public remains low, but "people who work with birds, poultry or cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk."

Still, Webby said the Louisiana case shows that "the risk of catching this virus is not just for those that are in a milking parlor in California," who are some of the most at-risk due to the widespread outbreak in the state's cattle.

Rather, he said, "anywhere where there's birds, there is a risk to individuals who are in contact with those birds."

• Parts of the US are being battered by Winter Storm Blair, with states of emergency declared.
• The frigid conditions are impacting travel, with icy Midwest roads and flights and trains canceled.
• Snow hit Washington, DC, on Monday as the area prepares for the Trump administration transition.

Ice-storm warnings and unpleasantly cold conditions are expected to continue in much of the northern US.

The Arctic outbreak, dubbed Winter Storm Blair by the Weather Channel, has disrupted travel and resulted in at least five deaths.

The storm is bringing heavy snow to areas in the mid-Atlantic region that haven't seen such weather in a decade, the National Weather Service warned.

Heavy snowfall has occurred in places such as Kansas City, Missouri, where local media reported 10 inches of snow on Sunday night, and Louisville, Kentucky, which saw its largest single-day snowfall in about 25 years.

On Tuesday, snow is expected to dwindle in most of the areas blanketed by it as the storm moves south.

Two people have died in a weather-related crash in Wichita, Kansas, a Missouri public works employee was fatally injured during snow removal operations, and a person in Houston, Texas, died due to cold weather, NBC reported on Monday afternoon.

As of 3 a.m. ET Tuesday, about 207,063 utility customers were without power across Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia, Illinois, and Missouri, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks power outages across the US. That was down from about 254,000 customers on Monday afternoon.

Travel delays and cancellations

More than 2,900 flights were canceled and over 9,300 flights within, into, or out of the US were delayed on Monday, according to FlightAware.

More than half of Monday flights were canceled at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, while the nearby Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport saw 125 flights, or 43% of those scheduled Monday, canceled.

Chicago O'Hare and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airports are leading the country in delays.

Amtrak, the US national rail operator, also announced a series of cancellations in the Northeast and the Midwest on Monday.

The numbers of impacted flights are expected to continue to rise.

Airlines including American, Delta, Southwest, and United have said they're waiving change fees for flights impacted by the storm.

Meanwhile, freezing temperatures led to icy roads and dangerous driving conditions in the Midwest on Sunday. The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported 436 crashes and 1,788 stranded motorists by 3 p.m. on Monday.

Heavy snow and cold to continue

The NWS Weather Prediction Center said Monday that the adverse weather would move toward the mid-Atlantic throughout the day, bringing up to 12 inches of snow and dangerously cold temperatures.

Snow — possibly mixed with sleet and freezing rain — reached about 8 inches in Washington, DC, where preparations are underway for Donald Trump's incoming administration.

Additional cold weather warnings have also been issued in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis, with officials warning to limit travel in the impacted areas, The Weather Channel reported.

The Baltimore-Washington National Weather Service said on Monday afternoon that heavy snow would continue through 11 p.m., dropping up to 3 more inches before the snow system exits the area.

On Monday night, it predicted light snow to continue into the night with an extra 1 to 2 inches near urban areas and in the mountains, and low temperatures in the single digits in the west to upper teens elsewhere.

In an X post in the early hours of Tuesday, the mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser, said more than 200 snow plows would work through the night, and that school would be closed Tuesday.

Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Arkansas have declared states of emergency, with Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey declaring a state of emergency for several counties.

In all, about half the US population is expected to experience freezing temperatures over the next week, Axios reported.

• Kenyan officials are investigating who owns a mysterious metallic object that fell from the sky.
• The giant ring fell from space, crash-landing into Mukuku Village in Kenya on Wednesday.
• No one was hurt, but space debris poses a serious threat to life on Earth and in space.

On Wednesday, Mukuku Village in Kenya got an unexpected visitor from space.

At about 3 p.m. local time, a large metallic ring weighing about 1,100 pounds and measuring 8 feet in diameter crash-landed in the village, the Kenya Space Agency said in a statement.

The agency said no one was injured, and that the space debris poses no immediate risk.

Maj. Alois Were, an officer with the Kenya Space Agency, told Citizen TV, a Kenyan news station, that the ring-like object is "possibly from a rocket separation stage."

However, it's unclear whose rocket the ring might belong to. Officials said they had collected pieces from the impact site for further analysis to determine its origins.

Were said that once they determine the owner, the space agency will use the "existing legal mechanisms under international law" to hold the person or organization accountable.

Space debris is usually designed to either burn up in Earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground or land in unpopulated areas, like the ocean. This doesn't always happen, though.

For example, in May 2024, a piece of SpaceX debris as large as a car hood crash-landed on a trail at a mountaintop resort just outside Asheville, North Carolina.

If it had landed on a person hiking the trail that day, it would have certainly killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading space debris expert, told Business Insider in July.

To date, no one has died from space debris raining from the skies. Perhaps the closest call was in March, when a two-pound piece of debris slightly smaller than a soda can fell from the International Space Station, crashing through a family's roof in Florida. The family is suing NASA over the incident.

Ever since humans started launching objects into space in the late 1950s, there has been a risk that some might fall back to Earth in an unexpected place. As humans launch more objects into space, however, that risk is growing.

Between 2008 and 2017, global space organizations launched an average of 82 orbital rockets a year. That number jumped to an average of about 130 launches a year between 2018 and 2022, according to the US International Trade Commission. In 2024, there were about 250 launches — a new record.

This poses risks on Earth and adds to a long-existing problem in space: space clutter and collisions. There's a lot of trash in space, from dead satellites and astronaut gloves to tiny bits no larger than a grape.

These millions of bits of debris are racing around our planet faster than a bullet. It's gotten so bad that about 1,000 warnings of possible impending collisions are issued daily to satellite operators, physicist Thomas Berger said in a press briefing at December's annual American Geophysical Union meeting.

Berger said a major collision could generate "an unstoppable chain reaction of further collisions, ultimately resulting in a completely filled-up space environment."

If that happens, it could make space unusable.

• Luxury beachfront high-rises on the coast of Miami's barrier islands are sinking, a new study found.
• Subsidence and rising seas are a global problem, affecting up to $109 billion of US coastal property by 2050.
• Satellites could spot buildings that are sinking or tilting for early intervention.

Coastal properties worldwide are sinking, including some of Miami's pricey waterfront high-rises.

In a study published in the journal Earth and Space Science in December, researchers found that 35 buildings along the coasts of Miami's barrier islands have sunk into the ground by 2 to 8 centimeters between 2016 and 2023.

This sinking phenomenon, called subsidence, is happening "almost everywhere that we look," said Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the Miami-area study.

That sinking can lead to expensive — and sometimes deadly — damage and flooding in some of the most populated places on Earth. It doesn't have to, though.

The new Miami study shows how satellites can help save buildings and infrastructure before the sinking contributes to catastrophic failure.

Coastal cities' sinking problem

Cities all over the world weigh so much and draw so much groundwater from beneath them that they're sinking into the ground. It's been documented on every continent.

Sinking coastal cities are extra vulnerable because the seas are rising to meet them, doubling the flood risk.

"One centimeter of sea level rise and one centimeter of subsidence each have the same effects" on flooding hazards, the lead authors of the new Miami study, Farzaneh Aziz Zanjani and Falk Amelung, told BI in an email.

Many of the most afflicted coastal cities are in eastern and southern Asia, but major hubs in Europe, Africa, and Australia are also sinking rapidly.

In the US, Shirzaei's research group found that huge swaths of the East Coast — including New York and Baltimore — are sinking by at least 2 millimeters each year.

In a follow-up study, Shirzaei's research group found Gulf Coast cities sinking even more.

Expensive flood risks and structural damage

Despite its prevalence, subsidence isn't usually factored into future flooding estimates.

By combining it with sea-level rise projections, Shirzaei's group estimated that up to 518,000 more Americans will be exposed to high tide flooding by 2050 in up to 288,000 more properties, amounting to $109 billion in property value.

It's not just flooding, though. Subsidence can also compromise a building's structural integrity.

"The situation becomes concerning when different parts of the building move at varying rates," Aziz Zanjani and Amelung said.

"This can cause structural damage, such as cracks or distortions, which could compromise the building's safety over time," they added.

Knowing if and how buildings are sinking could help prevent future damage. That's where the Miami researchers' study comes in.

Satellites can spy hot spots before they sink too far

After the 2021 collapse of the Champlain South Condominium Tower in Surfside, Florida, which killed 98 people, Miami researchers began to wonder if the ground beneath that building was part of the problem.

When they assessed satellite data, they didn't find any indication of subsidence before the incident, which surprised them because so much construction was happening in the area.

They'd found that the subsidence of other buildings was associated with nearby construction. The researchers think the difference is sand.

The limestone underground might be interspersed with sandy layers in the barrier islands. Vibrations from construction could cause the sand grains to shift and give way under the buildings' weight.

Though there are likely other factors at play, having such a specific link to the subsidence of specific structures can be helpful. That's the first step in solving a building's sinking problem.

"It would be incredibly helpful if this type of information were more readily available to researchers," Aziz Zanjani and Amelung said.

The Miami researchers are seeking more funding to study Miami's sediments and investigate uneven subsidence, where different parts of a building sink at different rates.

Shirzaei said satellite remote-sensing could be a diagnostic tool to scan specific regions — such as Miami's barrier islands — for buildings tilting on uneven land subsidence. Then, investigators can target at-risk spots and, if necessary, suggest structural reinforcements.

After all, the Miami scientists wrote in their paper, "There are no indications that subsidence will come to a stop."