Space Flight

NASA has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to build a lightweight rocket designed to carry samples from the surface of Mars back Earth. The Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will be part of the NASA’s Mars Sample Return program, which is working to retrieve rock, sediment and atmospheric samples collected by the agency’s Perseverance rover. If […]

The James Webb telescope finished the complex two-week deployment process on Saturday and is now on its way to its final parking spot, the so-called Lagrange Point 2, a point about a million miles from Earth that is at the gravitational point of equilibrium of the sun and Earth. “With the successful deployment and latching […]

Boeing has given up trying to fix the faulty fuel oxidizer valves that scrubbed its second attempt to send an uncrewed Starliner capsule to the International Space Station last July. The do-over test flight, made necessary by the failure of the first attempt to reach the correct orbit, was canceled about five hours before launch […]

NASA announced Wednesday that its Ingenuity Mars helicopter reached a total flight time of 30 minutes during its 17th flight on Dec. 5. The 117-second trip brought the total time in the air logged by the rotorcraft to 30 minutes and 48 seconds. As previously reported by AVweb, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to operate […]

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 […]