Space Flight

The FAA says its astronaut “wings” program has served its purpose and it will stop handing out the mementoes in the New Year. But that also means Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin Galactic head Sir Richard Branson and Star Trek’s Capt. Kirk, actor William Shatner, along with about a dozen others, will each be officially […]

NASA has chosen ten candidates for its 2021 astronaut class, the agency announced on Monday during an event at Ellington Field in Houston, Texas. Selected from among more than 12,000 applicants, the candidates are the agency’s first new astronaut class in four years. They are scheduled to report to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to begin […]

Northrop Grumman has been awarded a contract to build boosters for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The Booster Production and Operations Contract (BPOC), which is valued at $3.19 billion, will support nine SLS flights through Dec. 31, 2031. Along with support for NASA’s first three Artemis missions, for which Northrop Grumman has already produced […]

Late Tuesday evening PST (Nov. 23), an unmanned NASA spacecraft is scheduled to launch from California on a 6-million-mile suicide mission to slam into an asteroid named Dimorphos. Unlike in a science fiction movie, Dimorphos is not on course to threaten Earth in any way. But the mission, dubbed the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), […]

NASA is pushing its plans for a crewed mission to the Moon back until at least 2025, the agency announced in an update on its Artemis program on Tuesday. Originally aiming to land “the first woman and next man” on the Moon in 2024, the Artemis team still needs to complete a planned uncrewed mission […]

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft’s valves may have frozen because they couldn’t handle Florida’s humidity, according to a report by United Press International. UPI quotes NASA and Boeing spokespeople as saying the famous Florida stickiness may have caused corrosion in the valves that kept them from functioning prior to a an uncrewed test launch of the capsule […]

NASA and Boeing have announced that the next launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has been pushed back to next year while the company works to correct an oxidizer isolation valve issue on the vehicle’s service module propulsion system. The problem was discovered last August when unexpected valve position indications caused the cancellation of an uncrewed […]

NASA has reassigned astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada from missions aboard Boeing’s Starliner to the SpaceX Crew-5 launch. Mann was previously assigned to NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test while Cassada was scheduled for the Starliner-1 mission. NASA noted that the change was made “to allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner while […]

Virgin Galactic says it’s planning its next crewed launch in mid-October after some remedial training from the FAA on the role of the push-to-talk button when flights don’t go according to plan. The agency has lifted its grounding order on the enterprise after the July publicity flight carrying founder Sir Richard Branson and other Virgin […]

After all these years, it seems that actor William Shatner, almost as well known as Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, is heading to the final frontier. The 90-year-old actor, who played arguably the world’s second most famous astronaut (Neil Armstrong has to be number one) in the cult classic 1960s TV series “Star Trek,” is reportedly […]