Tag: Space
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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After six decades, ‘Gagarin’s Start’ will meet its end as a launch pad
Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn “Gagarin’s Start” into a museum. The pad is known as Gagarin’s Start because it hosted the world’s first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019,…
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Amazon’s Project Kuiper prototype satellites are ‘stable in orbit’ and collecting key data
A member of Amazon’s Project Kuiper mission management team in Redmond, Wash., helps monitor the satellites’ activity in space. (Amazon Photo) Amazon said two prototype satellites launched on Friday on a test mission of the company’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation are stable in orbit and already collecting important data. In a blog post on Monday,…
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Oops—It looks like the Ariane 6 rocket may not offer Europe any launch savings
Nearly a decade ago, the European Space Agency announced plans to develop the next generation of its Ariane rocket, the Ariane 6 booster. The goal was to bring a less costly workhorse rocket to market that could compete with the likes of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster and begin flying by 2020. It has been well…
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For the third time in a year, Russian hardware on the space station is leaking
NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli looked out of the large windows on the International Space Station on Monday afternoon and saw that it was snowing in space. Well, not really snowing. But there were flakes flying by that looked a lot like flurries. They emanated from one of two radiators that service the “Nauka” science module…