Tag: NASA
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Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool
NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 spacecraft—the second-most distant object ever built by humans and flung into space—nearly two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe. This caused Voyager to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. At the time, the space agency said it wasn’t panicking. The mission’s scientists…
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Delayed Falcon Heavy launch pushes back Crew 7 mission
NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli and the other members of the Crew-7 mission train at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in the runup to launching to the International Space Station.Image: SpaceX The next quartet bound for the International Space Station will wait a bit longer before they can punch their ticket to space after Falcon Heavy…
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A nearly 20-year ban on human spaceflight regulations is set to expire
In 2004, Congress passed a law that established a moratorium on federal safety regulations for commercial astronauts and space tourists riding to space on new privately owned rockets and spacecraft. The idea was to allow time for new space companies to establish themselves before falling under the burden of regulations, an eventuality that spaceflight startups…
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A nearly 20-year ban on human spaceflight regulations is set to expire
In 2004, Congress passed a law that established a moratorium on federal safety regulations for commercial astronauts and space tourists riding to space on new privately owned rockets and spacecraft. The idea was to allow time for new space companies to establish themselves before falling under the burden of regulations, an eventuality that spaceflight startups…
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The US government is taking a serious step toward space-based nuclear propulsion
Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter. NASA announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the US Department of Defense to launch a nuclear-powered rocket…
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SpaceX teases another application for Starship
You’ve probably heard about SpaceX’s plans to use its giant new Starship vehicle to land people on the Moon and Mars, send numerous Starlink satellites or large telescopes into space, or perhaps even serve as a high-speed point-to-point terrestrial transport for equipment or people. There’s another application for SpaceX’s Starship architecture that the company is…
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NASA gives Blue Origin $34.7M to work on technology for making solar cells on moon
The Blue Alchemist project aims to produce solar cells from lunar materials. (Blue Origin Photo) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won $34.7 million in funding from NASA to support the development of a system that could produce solar cells on the moon from materials that are available on site. The Blue Alchemist project…
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After bopping an asteroid 3 years ago, NASA will finally see the results
Christmas Day for scientists who study asteroids is coming in just two months when a small spacecraft carrying material from a distant rubble pile will land in a Utah desert. The return of the OSIRIS-REx sample container on September 24 will cap the primary mission to capture material from an asteroid—in this case, the carbonaceous…
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DART asteroid impact created a 10,000-kilometer debris field of boulders
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission was a success from the perspective of planetary defense, as it successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid. But the mission had a scientific element to it, and we’re still sifting through the debris of the collision to determine what the impact tells us about the asteroid. That’s…
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NASA starts building ice-hunting Moon rover
The search for ice at the Moon’s poles has loomed large in the field of lunar science since an instrument on an Indian satellite discovered water molecules inside shadowed crater floors more than a decade ago. NASA is now assembling a golf cart-size rover to drive into the dark polar craters to search for ice…