Science Breakthroughs: Moon Missions, Space Postponements, and Cosmic Discoveries

Recent science news covers a variety of topics: Japanese billionaire Maezawa's moon mission cancellation, a postponed Boeing Starliner crewed test flight, the discovery of a fern with the world's largest genome, and NASA's James Webb Telescope identifying the earliest-known, surprisingly bright galaxy from the universe's infancy.

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

Japanese billionaire Maezawa cancels moon flyby mission

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa cancelled his "dearMoon" mission, which the project said would have been the first private flight around the moon, the mission announced on Saturday. The team had originally aimed to make the circumlunar flight with celebrities on board by the end of last year but that became "unfeasible", the mission said in a statement on its website.

Boeing Starliner capsule's first crewed test flight postponed moments before launch

A second attempt at launching Boeing's new Starliner space capsule on its inaugural test flight with NASA astronauts on board was automatically halted with minutes to go before liftoff by a computer-abort system, mission officials said. The scrubbed launch, capping a string of 11th-hour technical issues that ground teams worked through and resolved earlier in the countdown, meant the highly anticipated and much-delayed test flight would be postponed again for at least a day.

Humble fern from New Caledonia boasts world's largest genome

You thought the living organism with ;/"he largest genome might be the blue whale, an African elephant or perhaps a giant redwood tree? Not even close. A human being? Wrong again. That honor instead goes to a little fern that grows in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. New research shows that this fork fern species, called Tmesipteris oblanceolata, has a genome - all the genetic information of an organism - that is 7% larger than that of the previous record-holder, the Japanese flowering plant Paris japonica, and more than 50 times the size of the human genome.

Earliest-known galaxy, spotted by Webb telescope, is a beacon to cosmic dawn

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest-known galaxy, one that is surprisingly bright and big considering it formed during the universe's infancy - at only 2% its current age. Webb, which by peering across vast cosmic distances is looking way back in time, observed the galaxy as it existed about 290 million years after the Big Bang event that initiated the universe roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the researchers said. This period spanning the universe's first few hundred million years is called cosmic dawn.