Tag: Space
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Virgin Galactic and the FAA are investigating a dropped pin on last spaceflight
Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06, which took place 12 days ago from a spaceport in New Mexico. In a statement released Monday, the company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of…
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Daily Telescope: A stunning new image of Io reveals a volcanic plume
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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Starlab—with half the volume of the ISS—will fit inside Starship’s payload bay
The Starlab commercial space station will launch on SpaceX’s Starship rocket, officials said this week. Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and…
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For the first time NASA has asked industry about private missions to Mars
NASA is starting to take its first steps toward opening a commercial pathway to Mars. This week, the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a new solicitation to the industry titled “Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies.” This is a request for proposals from the US space industry to tell NASA how they would complete…
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Fuse leads $6M round for Quindar, which uses AI for satellite support and is partnering with KSAT
A screenshot shows Quindar’s spacecraft management platform at work. (Image via Quindar) A space-centric startup called Quindar says it has successfully closed an oversubscribed $6 million funding round that will give a boost to its cloud-hosted, AI-supported software platform for satellite management. The seed extension round was led by the Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse,…
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It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew
Much has been written about the plucky exploits of NASA’s small Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. And all of the accolades are deserved. “The little mission that could” did, flying 72 sorties across the red planet and pushing out the frontier of exploration into the unknown. Yet as impressive as Ingenuity‘s exploits were over the last…
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The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more
Something has gone wrong with NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this…
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NASA loses, and then recovers, contact with its historic Mars helicopter
The US space agency prompted widespread dismay in the spaceflight community on Friday evening when it announced that communication had been lost with the Mars Ingenuity helicopter during its most recent flight on Thursday, January 18. “During its planned descent, communications between the helicopter and rover terminated early, prior to touchdown,” according to a statement…
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What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
Taylor Wang was deeply despondent. A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade…
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Meet Helios, a new class of space tug with some real muscle
In recent years there have been a number of modest “tugs” brought online to ferry small satellites to designated orbits. These miniature spacecraft provide so-called last-mile service and are particularly useful for satellites that launch as a part of rideshare missions and seek to reach a different altitude or inclination than that of the primary…