Tag: commercial-space
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Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now”
Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago. The Moonwalking experience will amount to an…
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Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions
Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together. Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’…
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SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight
SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program’s two previous launches. But minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after…
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FAA: Airplanes should stay far away from SpaceX’s next Starship launch
The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year. The failures set back SpaceX’s Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket’s development back on track with…
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The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch
The payload fairing at the top of Gilmour Space’s first Eris rocket was supposed to deploy a few minutes after lifting off from northeastern Australia. Instead, the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to leave the launch pad Thursday. Gilmour, the Australian startup that developed the Eris rocket, announced the…
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A privately developed Australian rocket is ready for a historic launch
Gilmour Space, a venture-backed startup based in Australia, is about to launch a small rocket from its privately owned spaceport on a remote stretch of the country’s northeastern coastline. It’s the first time anyone has attempted to reach orbit with a rocket designed and built in Australia. Gilmour’s three-stage rocket, named Eris, could launch at…
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Firefly’s rocket suffers one of the strangest launch failures we’ve ever seen
Firefly Aerospace launched its two-stage Alpha rocket from California early Tuesday, but something went wrong about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, rendering the rocket unable to deploy an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin. The Alpha rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base about 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles at 6:37 am…
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A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink
The first 27 operational satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network lifted off from Florida’s Space Coast on Monday evening, the opening salvo in a challenge to SpaceX’s dominant Starlink global Internet service. Amazon’s Project Kuiper, costing up to $20 billion, will beam high-speed, low-latency broadband signals to consumers around the world. Monday’s milestone launch kicks…
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SpaceX just took a big step toward reusing Starship’s Super Heavy booster
SpaceX is having trouble with Starship’s upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket’s enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship’s first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company’s Starbase launch site in South…
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SpaceX just took a big step toward reusing Starship’s Super Heavy booster
SpaceX is having trouble with Starship’s upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket’s enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship’s first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company’s Starbase launch site in South…