Tag: ISS
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Butch and Suni weren’t the only ones: the stories of astronauts “stranded” in space
After a planned eight day mission to the ISS that launched in June 2024, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down near Florida over nine months later on March 18, 2025. The two astronauts missed family events, birthdays, and Christmas while engineers tried to determine whether Boeing’s Starliner capsule would be safe to return with…
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Expedition 73 underway on ISS, crew perform spacewalk
With Expedition 73 now underway, the International Space Station is hosting seven crewmembers again. Thursday saw the astronauts complete the Station’s third spacewalk of the year. The ISS crew is also getting ready for the upcoming arrival of the commercial Axiom-4 mission as well as conducting the usual science and maintenance tasks. Visiting Vehicles The…
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Soyuz MS-27 launches three new crew members to ISS
The fourth crewed space mission of 2025 is now underway. Soyuz MS-27 launched successfully at 05:47 UTC on Tuesday, April 8, from Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Roscosmos’ Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritsky, and NASA’s Jonathan “Jonny” Kim were onboard, flying to the International Space Station (ISS). After its nominal launch, Soyuz MS-27…
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Crew-9, Starliner CFT astronauts return to Earth aboard Dragon
After more than nine months in space, the crew of the Boeing Crew Flight Test mission have returned home. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams boarded SpaceX Crew Dragon C212 Freedom and undocked from the International Space Station on March 17, and splashed down off the coast of Florida on March 18. They were…
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Dream Chaser completes more pre-flight milestones
Testing continues ahead of the first flight of Dream Chaser. The so-called “mini shuttle” will be the first spacecraft to dock to the International Space Station (ISS) and then land back at the Launch and Landing Facility (LLF), formerly the Shuttle Landing Facility, since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Tenacity, the…
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Launch Roundup: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Firefly set to launch amid busy launch manifest
This week, a busy launch manifest saw SpaceX launch the Crew-10 and two Starlink missions from Florida and the delayed SPHEREx/PUNCH and Transporter 13 missions from California. Outside of the United States, Rocket Lab flew an Electron from New Zealand. A Chang Zhang 8 rocket launched from a new commercial pad in China which also…
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Elon Musk recommends that the International Space Station be deorbited ASAP
In a remarkable statement Thursday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the International Space Station should be deorbited “as soon as possible.” This comment from Musk will surely set off a landmine in the global space community, with broad implications. And it appears to be no idle comment from Musk who, at times, indulges in deliberately…
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Sen: capturing Earth’s beauty from space in 4K
Sen is on a mission to democratize space through the use of high-quality video from above the Earth. The cameras it has launched into space so far include a free 4K video livestream from the International Space Station (ISS). NSF recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Charles Black, who hopes these views will be accessed…
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Vast space station qualification article passes major milestone
Vast is one step closer to launching its first private commercial space station. The company recently completed testing of its Haven-1 qualification article in Mojave, California, and reported that it successfully passed its tests. The company’s current goal is to launch the flight article aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than May 2026.…
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Spacewalks resume from U.S. segment of ISS after six month hiatus
The International Space Station (ISS) kicked off 2025 with a long-awaited return to extravehicular activity (EVA) spacewalk activities from the U.S. segment of the ISS. These spacewalks were sharply curtailed in 2024 due to issues with the aging Space Shuttle-era Extravehicular Mobility Unit suits. Before this latest spacewalk, EVA-90 was the most recent to be…