Tag: NASA
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Former head of Boeing’s Starliner program returns to role
Officials from NASA, Boeing, United Launch Alliance and the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron participate in a prelaunch briefing for Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Dec. 17, 2019. From left are Kathy Lueders, NASA Commercial Crew Program; John Mulholland, vice president and program manager, Boeing Commercial Crew…
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Bennu asteroid samples yield watery history, key molecules for life
A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers, and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek…
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Launch Roundup: New Shepard to simulate lunar gravity, India and Japan launch navigation satellites
This week’s schedule has a mix of orbital and suborbital missions launching from seven different sites around the globe. In addition to launches from the Florida space coast, India and Japan have both launched navigation satellites. Rocket Lab is launching another batch of satellites for its French customer, Kinéis, while SpaceX has launched a next-generation replacement…
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NASA’s CLPS program accelerates as two landers head for the Moon
As NASA focuses on returning humans to the Moon with Artemis, commercial providers are gearing up to deliver cargo to the lunar surface for NASA and other customers. Over a dozen uncrewed lunar missions are scheduled to be launched in the coming years, and more concepts are being developed globally. Two commercial lunar landers are…
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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…
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NASA moves swiftly to end DEI programs, asks employees to “report” violations
NASA’s acting administrator is moving swiftly to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—programs from the space agency. In an email sent to agency employees on Wednesday afternoon, acting administrator Janet Petro wrote, “We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders…
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Here’s what NASA would like to see SpaceX accomplish with Starship this year
SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It’s the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built. There are many things on SpaceX’s Starship to-do…
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Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space
SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft. For a few moments, SpaceX officials discussing the launch on the company’s live webcast were unsure of the outcome of the test flight. However,…
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Two lunar landers are on the way to the Moon after SpaceX’s double moonshot
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months. The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour…
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American, Japanese robotic landers share rocket launch to the Moon
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander pictured atop a bespoke payload canister, which encased ispace’s Resilience lunar lander prior to encapsulation inside SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairings. Image: SpaceX For the first time in lunar exploration, two robotic landers, from two different nations launched to the Moon on one rocket. But despite Texas-based Firefly Aerospace…