Tag: Space
-
It’s almost showtime for SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket
SpaceX announced on Friday that the company is targeting “mid-November” for the second flight test of the Super Heavy rocket and its Starship upper stage. The company said the launch date is pending regulatory approval, which means that the Federal Aviation Administration and US Fish and Wildlife Service have yet to complete the environmental review…
-
How long will Jeff Bezos continue to subsidize his New Shepard rocket?
Virgin Galactic smoothly completed its sixth human spaceflight in six months on Thursday, continuing an impressive cadence of missions with its VSS Unity spacecraft. This performance has made the company the clear leader in suborbital space tourism. A key question is where this leaves the other company with a launch system capable of carrying private…
-
Rocket Report: ICBM test aborted after “anomaly”; FAA wraps Starship safety review
Welcome to Edition 6.18 of the Rocket Report! In this newsletter we have a double dose of news from China, where there are two separate efforts to duplicate SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. On the American side of the pond we also have two stories about United Launch Alliance and its effort to get Vulcan flying,…
-
Scientists will soon find out whether the Lucy mission works as intended
A little more than two years have passed since the Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately bound for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and now it is nearly there. On Wednesday,…
-
Putin wants to know why Russia can only build 40 satellites a year
Based on preliminary data, nearly 2,400 spacecraft have been launched into orbit this year. A significant majority of these, about 75 percent, were Starlink satellites built and flown by SpaceX. But other countries, such as China, have also built and launched hundreds of satellites this year. There has been a dramatic growth in the production…
-
Russia renamed its ambitious satellite program after Putin misspoke its name
It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much. The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a…
-
Daily Telescope: A look at a young star cluster in a nearby galaxy
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…
-
Rocket Report: Key Ariane 6 test delayed; NASA urged to look at SLS alternatives
Welcome to Edition 6.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news here today about big rockets, including a push by SpaceX to speed up launch licensing by the Federal Aviation Administration. The full-court press in Washington, DC, comes as the company says its Starship rocket is ready for a second flight test but still awaiting…
-
India sets sights on a Moon landing in 2040, but is it realistic?
In recent years the nation of India has embraced spaceflight as a means of establishing itself as a major geopolitical player. The Soviet Union and United States, of course, pioneered the use of space exploration to exercise soft power in the 1960s during the Cold War. More recently China has used its various space missions,…
-
Citing slow Starship reviews, SpaceX urges FAA to double licensing staff
In a remarkably frank discussion this week, several senior SpaceX officials spoke with Ars Technica on background about how working with the Federal Aviation Administration has slowed down the company’s progress not just on development of the Starship program, but on innovations with the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as well. The SpaceX officials said…