Tag: Space
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Rocket Report: Astra warns of “imminent” bankruptcy; Falcon Heavy launch delay
Welcome to Edition 6.33 of the Rocket Report! If you check the “next three launches” list below you’ll see that all three are for Falcon 9 rockets. That’s not the first time this has happened this year, nor will it likely be the last. It’s starting to look like SpaceX might actually come close to…
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That moment when you land on the Moon, break a leg, and are about to topple over
After six days and the public release of new images, engineers have finally pieced together the moments before, during, and after the Odysseus lander touched down on the Moon. During a news conference on Wednesday, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, Steve Altemus, described what his company has learned about what happened last Thursday evening…
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It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data
HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one…
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SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle
A little more than three months after the most recent launch of a Starship vehicle, which ended with both the booster and upper stage being lost in flight, the Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation of the mishap. “SpaceX identified, and the FAA accepts, the root causes and 17 corrective actions documented in SpaceX’s…
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Final images of Ingenuity reveal an entire blade broke off the helicopter
It has now been several weeks since NASA’s tenacious helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, made its final flight above the red planet. This happened last month. On January 6, Ingenuity flew 40 feet (12 meters) skyward but then made an unplanned early landing after just 35 seconds. Twelve days later, operators intended to troubleshoot the vehicle…
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SpaceX seeks a waiver to launch Starship “at least” nine times this year
As SpaceX nears its first Starship launch of 2024—possibly as soon as within three weeks—from its Starbase facility in South Texas, the company is pressing regulators to increase its cadence of flights. During a press availability this week, the administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, Kelvin Coleman, said the agency is…
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A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon
For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon. There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the…
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Blue Origin has emerged as the likely buyer for United Launch Alliance
Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has emerged as the sole finalist to buy United Launch Alliance. The sale is not official, and nothing has been formally announced. The co-owners of United Launch Alliance (ULA), Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have yet to comment publicly on the sale of the company,…
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NASA faces a quandary with its audacious lunar cargo program
Most of NASA is a pretty buttoned-down place these days. Nearly 70 years old, the space agency is no longer the rambunctious adolescent it was during the race to the Moon in the 1960s. If you go to a NASA field center today, you’re much more likely to get dragged into a meeting or a…
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A big European satellite will make an uncontrolled return to Earth Wednesday
Nearly three decades ago, the European Space Agency launched its largest and most sophisticated Earth observation satellite to date, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite, on an Ariane 4 rocket. The spacecraft functioned well for more than 15 years before the space agency decided it was reaching the end of its operational lifetime. Over the…