Ax-4 crew docks with International Space Station for 2-week stay
The four-member crew of Axiom Space’s fourth private mission to the International Space Station docked with the floating laboratory early yesterday morning for a two-week stay.
The quartet brought more than 60 experiments, ranging from medical, studying Earth’s upper atmospheric thunderstorms and testing pharmaceutical medicine’s shelf life in space.
For retired NASA astronaut and current Axiom Space’s director of Human Spaceflight, this is Cmdr. Peggy Whitson's second mission to the space station for the Texas-based company.
She was recently inducted into the 2025 U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
The Ax-4 crew will spend about two weeks on the ISS until they return home in a splashdown off the coast of California.
L3Harris continues construction of SLS rocket engines.
The future of NASA’s SLS rocket is in doubt, with funding limited in the proposed budget. But Rick Glasby tells us that Melbourne-based L3Harris is continuing to build the engines for the massive rocket.
So far, NASA has flown the SLS once. The next launch has been delayed until April 2026. The L3Harris subsidiary, Aerojet Rocketdyne, manufactures the RS-25 engines, originally used on the space shuttle. NASA had ordered $3.5 billion of the rocket engines to support the Artemis mission. Meanwhile, there are social media reports that L3Harris is laying off an unspecified number of employees.
Governor DeSantis launches new accreditor for Florida higher ed
Governor Ron DeSantis announced the creation of a new accreditor for the nation’s universities and colleges that has its birthplace in the state of Florida.
The Commission for Public Higher Education is a new partnership between the state university system of Florida and five other university systems in the South.
DeSantis says the new accreditor still needs to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, but he’s hopeful it will be under the Trump administration.
“If we get this done, we do the trial run that we do have to do, we get approval, it starts to stick in all the states, and I think a lot, almost all the states in our region, are going to be favorable to this. Then you could develop a track record, then it's almost impossible for a future federal administration to try to upend the apple cart.”
For now, Florida universities are primarily accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the accreditor for most of the South.
Accreditors evaluate higher education institutions throughout the U.S. and make sure they provide a quality education by meeting certain standards.
DeSantis says this new accreditor will have different standards, focusing on student achievement rather than, quote, “ideological fads.”
Brevard Schools discipline
During the 2024-2025 school year, there were a total of 103,107 discipline referrals in Brevard County, a slight jump from the previous year.
Hate-related offenses increased from eight offenses in the first semester to 42 by the end of the year. These offenses included the use of racial slurs and other behaviors.
In-school suspensions decreased in the 2023-2024 school year compared to 2024-2025 school year. On the flip side, out-of-school suspensions increased in the 2024-2025 school year over 23-24.
According to the state Department of Education, Brevard had a total of 73,577 students enrolled in its public schools last year.
Students on free or reduced lunch had the highest risk ratio for potential suspensions. Black students had the second highest risk ratio and Non-gifted special education students placed third.
More: www.floridatoday.com
