Tag Archives: space program

SpaceX Starship Breaks Up: “We Have Lost Ship 28”

The New York Times reports: The third try was closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as the company’s flight test of the mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled almost halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere. The flight achieved some key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which …

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SpaceX Launches Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built

CBC News reports: SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, by far the most powerful ever built, blasted off on its third test flight Thursday morning. The test aimed to boost the unpiloted upper stage into space on a sub-orbital hop to a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The giant rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, gulping 40,000 pounds of liquid …

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US Mission Lands On Moon For First Time Since 1972

Yahoo News reports: An unmanned, robotic lunar lander launched by a private U.S. company landed on the moon Thursday evening. “We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon,” said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that operated the Odysseus spacecraft. “Welcome to the moon.” Altemus had estimated that Odysseus …

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NASA Rover Finds Evidence Of Major Floods On Mars

Mashable reports: Ancient Mars wasn’t simply just wet. It experienced momentous floods. As clear evidence of this water-filled past, NASA released an image snapped by its Perseverance rover, showing large heavy boulders absolutely blanketing part of the Jezero Crater, a dried-up river delta. “The rounded boulders seen here are believed to have been washed into Jezero Crater, which Perseverance is …

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NASA Streams Cat Video From 19 Million Miles Away

Mashable reports: NASA has a lot on its plate, between staring at strange things on Uranus, monitoring solar flares, investigating Enceladus, visualising Mars’ wet past, probing dead stars, recovering space rock, figuring out what’s going on with Voyager, and generally preparing to get humans on the moon. But there’s always time for a cat video,  On Monday, NASA announced it …

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FCC Won’t Reinstate $900M Subsidy For Musk’s SpaceX

Reuters reports: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies. The FCC said the decision impacting Elon Musk’s space company was based on Starlink’s failure to meet basic program requirements and that Starlink could not demonstrate it could deliver promised service after SpaceX had …

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SpaceX Booster Explodes After Liftoff, Starship Lost

CNN reports: The Starship system made it much further into flight than the first attempt in April, but ultimately ended in another explosion. The rocket and spacecraft safely lifted off the pad, with the Super Heavy booster igniting all 33 of its engines. During the last attempt, multiple engines shut down prematurely. Then, the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft …

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NASA Launches Tracker For Saturday’s Solar Eclipse

Space.com reports: A spectacular annular solar eclipse will grace the Americas on Oct. 14 and you can track it down to the exact second with NASA’s 2023 Eclipse Explorer. The Eclipse Explorer’s interactive map details when and where the eclipse will be visible, including the path and duration of annularity (the areas from which the ‘ring of fire’ can be …

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NASA Mission Returns With Asteroid Sample [VIDEO]

The New York Times reports: A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on. On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the …

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Sunday: NASA Asteroid Lander To Return With Samples

ABC News reports: An asteroid NASA’s been tracking for nearly 25 years could impact Earth in the future, a new report reveals. First discovered in 1999, Bennu, the near-Earth asteroid, could possibly drift into the planet’s orbit and could hit the planet by September 2182, according to the OSIRIS-REx science team. Bennu passes near Earth every six years and has …

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FAA Grounds SpaceX Rocket Over Safety Concerns

CNBC reports: The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday said Elon Musk’s SpaceX must keep its Starship Super Heavy rocket grounded, saying the company needs to take 63 corrective actions before it is cleared for another test flight. The FAA has now wrapped its probe into the April launch, which saw the rocket explode mid-flight. The corrective actions include: “redesigns of …

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India Becomes Fourth Nation To Land On The Moon

NBC News reports: India made history on Wednesday by becoming the first country to reach the lunar south pole. NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon, intends to land its Artemis III mission in the south polar region in 2025. An uncrewed robotic moon lander, operated by India’s space agency and known as the Chandrayaan-3, touched …

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Russia’s Luna-25 Mission Crash Lands On The Moon

Reuters reports: Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space program. Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday after …

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NASA To Launch Ad-Free, No-Cost Streaming Service

TechCrunch reports: NASA is getting in on the “+” streaming action. The government agency announced that it’s going to launch a new streaming service later this year called NASA+. The ad-free, no-cost streaming service will include live coverage of future launches, documentaries and new original series that will be exclusively available on the platform. NASA+ will be available via the …

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India Celebrates Successful Launch Of Moon Mission

The New York Times reports: India is on its way back to the moon after a rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, a launch site off the country’s East Coast, on Friday afternoon local time. The mission, Chandrayaan-3, is largely a do-over after the country’s first attempt at putting a robotic spacecraft on the surface of the moon nearly four years …

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Webb Telescope Offers Stunning Image On Anniversary

Via press release from NASA: From our cosmic backyard in the solar system to distant galaxies near the dawn of time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered on its promise of revealing the universe like never before in its first year of science operations. To celebrate the completion of a successful first year, NASA has released Webb’s image of …

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Sends “Postcard” From Mars

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports: After completing a major software update in April, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took a last look at “Marker Band Valley” before leaving it behind, capturing a “postcard” of the scene. The postcard is an artistic interpretation of the landscape, with color added over two black-and-white panoramas captured by Curiosity’s navigation cameras. The views were taken …

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Environmentalists Sue FAA After TX SpaceX Explosion

NBC News reports: Five environmental and cultural heritage groups are suing the Federal Aviation Administration, alleging that the agency violated the National Environment Policy Act when it allowed SpaceX to launch the largest rocket ever built from its Boca Chica, Texas facility without a comprehensive environmental review. SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy test flight on April 20 blew up the company’s …

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Musk’s SpaceX Starship Rocket Explodes After Liftoff

The New York Times reports: SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded above the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, minutes after lifting off from a launchpad in South Texas. The spacecraft failed to reach orbit. The Starship launch on Thursday at least avoided a worst-case outcome of exploding on the launchpad, which would have required extensive repairs. Once engineers determine what went wrong, …

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Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Files For Bankruptcy

The BBC reports: British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s rocket company Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the US after failing to secure new investment. The satellite launch company halted operations weeks ago but it hopes to find a buyer for the business. The company, based in California, announced last week that it would cut 85% of its 750-strong workforce. …

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