Tag: Space
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Daily Telescope: Peering into the remnants of an 800-year-old supernova
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a…
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Seeing this eclipse is probably the highest-reward, lowest-effort thing one can do in life
If you enter “how to see the eclipse” into your favorite search engine, you’re bound to see thousands—millions?—of helpful guides. Some of these are extremely detailed and thorough, almost as if the author were getting paid by the word or augmented by AI. In reality, seeing a solar eclipse is just about the easiest thing…
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It’s a few years late, but a prototype supersonic airplane has taken flight
A prototype jet independently developed by Boom Supersonic made its first flight on Friday, the company said. The XB-1 vehicle flew from Mojave Air & Space Port in California, reaching an altitude of 7,120 feet (2.2 km) and a maximum speed of 273 mph (439 kph). In a news release, Boom Supersonic said the initial…
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A Soyuz crew launch suffers a rare abort seconds before liftoff
On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station. However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket’s engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were…
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The US government seems serious about developing a lunar economy
For the first time ever, the United States is getting serious about fostering an economy on the Moon. NASA, of course, is in the midst of developing the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. As part of this initiative, NASA seeks to foster a lunar economy in which the space agency is not…
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After Thursday’s flight, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built
One of the best things about spaceflight is its power to dazzle us. I will never forget seeing the first images of Pluto and its moon Charon for the first time, with their vibrant colors and exotic geology. A world with super-sized ice volcanoes? Oh my. Similarly affecting were up-close views of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, revealed…
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Rocket Report: Starship heats up in third flight; Chinese lunar launch failure
Welcome to Edition 6.35 of the Rocket Report! It’s been a big week for rocket failures, with a small launch in Japan going sideways shortly after liftoff, a rare misstep for China’s Long March family of rockets, and another Starship flight test. The latter mission was not really a failure, of course, in that the…
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NASA grapples with budget cuts as it undertakes ambitious programs
It’s budget-palooza, NASA nerds. For the first time in more than a decade, the US space agency is grappling with budget cuts. Be forewarned, there will be a lot of numbers in this story, but we’ll do our best to make sense of them. First of all, the space agency only just received its budget…
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After Astra loses 99 percent of its value, founders take rocket firm private
Astra’s long, strange trip in the space business is taking another turn. The company announced Thursday that it is going private at an extremely low valuation. Four years ago, the rocket company, based in Alameda, California, emerged from stealth with grand plans to develop a no-frills rocket that could launch frequently. “The theme that really…
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The next Starship mission has a tentative launch date: March 14
After SpaceX completed a fueling test of its third full Starship stack on Sunday night, successfully loading more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellant onto the rocket, it was only a matter of time before the world’s largest rocket took flight. Now, we have a tentative date. In a post on…