Tag: NASA
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Station commander flatly denies any crew involvement in Soyuz leak
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Drew Feustel, commander of the space station’s Expedition 56 crew, works with an experiment in this image from July. Credit: NASA The head of the Russian space agency caused a stir last week when he said a hole drilled through the side of a Soyuz ferry ship docked…
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Dwindling fuel levels and a balky thruster can’t keep Kepler down
Artist’s concept of the Kepler spacecraft. Credit: NASA After downloading science data and bypassing a balky thruster, NASA’s Kepler mission has resumed its search for planets around other stars after a two-month pause in observations, but engineers expect the spacecraft to soon run out of fuel. NASA said in a statement Wednesday that the Kepler…
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Photos: SLS mobile launch platform rolls to pad 39B
The Space Launch System’s mobile launch platform approaches a fork in the crawlerway leading to launch pad 39B, in the background. Credit: NASA/Jamie Peer The towering structure to be used for liftoffs of NASA’s Space Launch System rolled from a construction site to launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week,…
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Systima wins a contract to supply hatch mechanisms for NASA’s Orion spaceship
Astronauts rehearse crew egress procedures using an Orion test model in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas in July 2017. (NASA Photo) Systima Technologies says it’s been awarded a contract from Lockheed Martin Space Systems to provide pyrotechnically actuated hatch mechanisms for NASA’s Orion deep-space crew capsule. The mechanisms will be part…
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Commercial branding on spacecraft? Five key points in NASA’s evolving space vision
As a joke, NASA spacewalker Dale Gardner holds up a “For Sale” sign during a shuttle mission in 1984, in an era when the space shuttle fleet took on commercial satellite servicing tasks. (NASA Photo) Why can’t commercials be filmed on the International Space Station? How about astronaut endorsements of energy drinks or tennis shoes?…
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Blue Origin scores big in NASA’s latest batch of flight opportunities for space tech
Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster heads for a touchdown after a test flight in December. (Blue Origin Photo) NASA’s Flight Opportunities program has selected 15 promising space technologies for testing on suborbital flights, and almost half of them are set to fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship. Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture, headquartered…
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Don’t panic: Space station crew works to patch up tiny air leak in docked Soyuz craft
An air leak on the International Space Station has been localized to a Russian Soyuz spacecraft like this one. The orbital compartment is the upper chamber of the Soyuz shown here. (NASA Photo) The International Space Station’s flight controllers detected a minute pressure leak overnight, but a temporary fix was made with epoxy and a…
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Godspeed, Robb Kulin: For first time since Apollo, astronaut candidate leaves training
News Brief: NASA says Alaskan astronaut candidate Robb Kulin is leaving his training program at the end of this month, one year after his selection for the Class of 2017. NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean confirmed that Kulin was resigning for personal reasons, marking the first time since 1968 that an astronaut candidate has left the…
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SLS mobile launch platform to go on the move this week
The Space Launch System’s mobile launch platform is pictured with a crawler-transporter during a lift procedure earlier this year. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett The mobile platform intended to carry NASA’s Space Launch System will trek to the mega-rocket’s launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as Thursday, before heading inside the spaceport’s…
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VP Mike Pence revs up NASA schedule for putting astronauts on station in lunar orbit
Vice President Mike Pence is flanked by portraits of NASA’s Orion space capsule and a space station in lunar orbit as he speaks at Johnson Space Center in Texas. (NASA via YouTube) During a pep talk to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, Vice President Mike Pence today highlighted what he saw as the mistakes…