Tag: Space
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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…
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After a decade and $1.2 billion, NASA reveals its booty from Bennu: 121 grams
After years of speculation, NASA finally revealed on Thursday the totality of the asteroid sample returned from Bennu to Earth last fall: 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams). To put that number into perspective, the total mass is only slightly more than one-half cup of sugar or a box of 100 paper clips. It’s about the same…
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Fueling a spacecraft while it’s on a rocket? “Not trivial,” SpaceX official says.
Are you ready for round two of the lunar lottery? As early as Thursday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a privately developed lunar lander may launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle, built by a Houston-based company called Intuitive Machines, will be the second US-made lunar lander to launch from Florida in…
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Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it
MiMi Aung could barely contain her excitement as she drove up Oak Grove Drive, the leafy thoroughfare leading to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Aung had spent her formative years in Burma and Malaysia, two countries without a space program. A career in aerospace seemed beyond her reach. Yet here she was, at 22 years old,…
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Rocket Report: US military still wants point-to-point; India’s big 2024 ambitions
Welcome to Edition 6.30 of the Rocket Report! Looking ahead, there are some interesting launches coming up in the middle of this month. Here are some we have our eyes on: Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander on a Falcon 9 and a re-flight of Japan’s big H3 rocket next week; then there’s an Electron launch of…