General

WASHINGTON — The center core of the Falcon Heavy rocket that launched a communications satellite April 11 fell over after landing in rough seas, but SpaceX said the mishap won’t affect upcoming launches. In an April 15 statement, SpaceX said that the booster core, one of three on the Falcon Heavy rocket, was unable to…

ORLANDO – U.S. combatant commanders are eager to employ space systems to improve Earth observation, missile warning, space situational awareness and position, navigation and timing, said Chuck Finley, former technical director of the Pentagon’s Operational Responsive Space office and its successor Air Force Space Rapid Capabilities office. “We recently did a triage and I will…

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted Nov. 15 to approve four proposed satellite constellations, authorizing nearly 8,000 small telecom satellites to serve U.S. entities from low Earth orbit. The new regulatory approvals set the stage for two companies, SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, and Telesat of Ottawa, Canada, to expand constellations already approved last year with more…

As NASA starts to build up details about its plans to return humans to the moon, the agency is studying concepts for “human-class” lunar landers that would involve three-stage vehicles whose individual components could be flown on a range of launch vehicles. At a pair of meetings last week, agency officials said their examination of concepts for…

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is NASA’s planned spacecraft to take astronauts into space beyond Earth orbit. The agency launched the first test flight of the spacecraft in December 2014. A second flight will happen on the first uncrewed test of the Space Launch System rocket, with crewed missions scheduled to follow in the 2020s.…

The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (or M31), is one of the most distant objects visible to unaided human eyes. This spiral galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away from our sun, is considered to be a “twin sister” to our own galaxy in appearance. Look for it as a faint and elongated fuzzy…

A few months from now, the International Space Station (ISS) could be unoccupied for the first time in nearly two decades. Russia’s workhorse Soyuz rocket suffered a serious anomaly just minutes after launching two astronauts toward the ISS today (Oct. 11), forcing the spaceflyers’ crew craft to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan. Those two explorers —…

All systems go for landing on Mars on Nov. 26, NASA personnel affiliated with the InSight mission confirmed during a pair of news conferences held today (Nov. 21). As of that news conference, the spacecraft had traveled about 295 million miles (475 million kilometers) of the 301 million miles (484 million km) that will make up its total…

NASA has set Jan. 7 as the date for the launch of the first commercial crew test flight, an uncrewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that will start a series of high-stakes missions over the next year. In a Nov. 21 statement, NASA said the Falcon 9 launch of the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a mission designated…