Space Flight

Three Russian Cosmonauts spent Sunday relaxing and watching the World Cup finale on the International Space Station as the smart people who put them there figured out how to get them down. The station’s remote robot arm will take photos of the coolant leak that will likely make their Soyuz capsule unuseable for the trip […]

NASA has finalized a contract with Boeing to continue the manufacture of core and upper stages for Space Launch System (SLS) rockets for the agency’s Artemis missions. According to NASA, the SLS Stages Production and Evolution Contract will cover production of the core stages for the Artemis III and IV missions, procurement of core stage […]

Lockheed Martin’s Orion space capsule is on its way to San Diego after a flawless re-entry and splashdown capped an almost equally successful shakedown mission around the moon. The ship, which will ultimately be used to carry astronauts to the moon and perhaps Mars, hit the surface of the Pacific off Baja Mexico at 12:40 […]

NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, logged its 34th successful flight last week, staying in the air for 18 seconds and reaching a maximum altitude of 5 meters. The brief flight was the helicopter’s first with its latest software update, which is expected to add capabilities including hazard avoidance during landing and the use of digital elevation […]

NASA’s Orion spacecraft, launched last Wednesday (Nov. 16) atop the Artemis 1 Space Launch System (SLS), sent back compelling images of the Earth and made a low pass over the dark-side surface of the moon on Monday. “Low” is relative, of course, but descending to within 81 miles of the moon’s surface yielded some breathtaking […]

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) set a new endurance record on Saturday, landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after spending 908 days in orbit. The uncrewed flight was the sixth for the Boeing-built vehicle, which has now traveled over 1.3 billion miles and logged 3,774 days in space. According to Boeing, the mission hosted […]

NASA has confirmed that an object discovered underwater off of the east coast of Florida is an artifact from the space shuttle Challenger. According to the agency, the artifact was located by a film crew on a dive looking for the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft. NASA stated that it is still considering […]

China’s latest piece of uncontrolled space junk hit the Pacific Ocean 620 miles off Acapulco in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, but the most serious impact was on the other side of the world. Spain briefly closed large areas of its airspace on Friday morning when a Chinese booster rocket used to propel a section […]

NASA has awarded medals to six Northrop Grumman Corporation employees for their contributions in designing and building the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb Telescope team vice president and program manager Scott Willoughby and director and chief engineer Charlie Atkinson received NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal; Webb director of vehicle engineering and sunshield manager Jim Flynn […]

The NASA SpaceX Crew-5 mission docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday evening, beginning a six-month stay for NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. The mission, which used SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, Endurance, launched from the […]