Tag: NASA
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NASA Cancels $73M Draper CLPS Lunar Lander CP-12
NASA Cancels Draper’s $73M CLPS Mission — What Happened to CP-12? NASA has terminated a $73 million Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) task order with Draper after successive lander redesigns pushed the projected lunar landing to 2030 or 2031 — six years behind the original 2025 schedule. Of that $73 million, NASA confirmed it paid…
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Russia Extends ISS Commitment to 2030 in Isaacman Deal
Will Russia Stay on ISS Until 2030? Bakanov Says Yes After Baikonur Talks Russia has formally committed to International Space Station operations through 2030 — closing a two-year gap in partner alignment that had persisted since other ISS partners locked in that date years ago. Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov made the commitment directly to…
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Isaacman at Baikonur: ISS Crew Arrives, US-Russia Space Talks Resume
Did Isaacman’s Baikonur Trip Reopen US-Russia Space Diplomacy? NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 14 — the first NASA administrator to attend a launch there since October 2018 — as a Soyuz-2.1a rocket lifted off at 10:47 a.m. Eastern carrying Soyuz MS-29 to the International Space Station. The spacecraft docked with…
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A most improbable astronaut just went to space
Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him. For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, NASA had once again rejected…
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NASA Artemis III Demo Will Fly Two HLS Landers in 2027
Does NASA’s 2027 Artemis III Mission Actually Land on the Moon? No — and that distinction matters enormously for anyone tracking the Artemis Program schedule. NASA’s Artemis III, currently planned for 2027, is a crewed rendezvous-and-docking demonstration in low Earth orbit and cislunar space, not a lunar surface landing. The actual crewed Moon landing is…
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Soyuz MS-29 Docks at ISS With NASA Astronaut Menon
Did Soyuz MS-29 Successfully Dock at the ISS With a NASA Astronaut Aboard? Three hours and five minutes. That was the elapsed time from liftoff at Baikonur to docking at the International Space Station for Soyuz MS-29 on July 14, 2026 — a textbook fast-rendezvous profile that deposited NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts…
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Voyager Wins $298M NASA Contract After Astrobotic Deal
Does Voyager’s $298M NASA Contract Validate the Astrobotic Acquisition? $298 million. That single NASA task order — awarded June 30, 2026, and announced publicly alongside the close of Voyager Technologies’ acquisition of Astrobotic Technology — may be the clearest signal yet that the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) pipeline is maturing into a real, recurring…
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Elon Musk’s Mars illusion
Elon Musk takes a bow at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in May 2020 after the launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission, which carried two astronauts to the International Space Station, about 250 miles up, and a world away from Mars. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a…
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City Labs Launches Commercial Nuclear-Powered CubeSat on SpaceX Rideshare Mission
City Labs has launched what it describes as the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite, marking a milestone in the development of alternative power systems for spacecraft. The company’s BOHR (Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability) spacecraft was launched aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-17 rideshare mission. According to City Labs, it is also the first CubeSat to carry a commercial nuclear…
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Firefly Gets $13M to Build NASA Skyfall Mars Aeroshell
Is Firefly Aerospace Building the Heat Shield for NASA’s Mars Helicopter Mission? Yes — and JPL just cut a $13 million check to make it happen. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has awarded Firefly Aerospace a $13 million subcontract to design and manufacture the aeroshell for the Skyfall mission — NASA’s first nuclear-powered interplanetary probe, targeting…