Space Flight

The first flight of Ingenuity, the drone helicopter taken to Mars on the Perseverance mission, has been postponed until at least Wednesday after a high-speed rotor test was shut down prematurely on Friday. The spin-up of the counter-rotating rotors to 2500 RPM was cut short when the “watchdog timer” on the craft detected a problem […]

Virgin Galactic introduced the first of its SpaceShip III suborbital spaceplanes, named VSS Imagine, on Tuesday. The third generation SpaceShip features a modular design that will, the company says, “enable improved performance in terms of maintenance access and flight rate.” Virgin Galactic is also in the process of building the second member of the SpaceShip […]

NASA has marked April 8 as the first possible flight date for its Mars helicopter technology demonstrator, which arrived on the planet on Feb. 18 attached to the Perseverance rover. Named Ingenuity, the demonstrator is designed to be the first powered, controlled aircraft to fly on another planet. Once it detaches from the rover, the […]

NASA successfully completed the second hot fire test of the core stage of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Thursday at Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The rocket’s four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines fired for 8 minutes and 19 seconds while running through a series of operational conditions designed to simulate […]

SpaceX has caught the eye of the U.S. Air Force and not because of the occasionally explosive nature of its testing programs. Air Force contractor Ball Aerospace, whose sole business is “building conformal antennas for tactical aircraft,” is working with SpaceX to see if the Starlink satellite internet service has military applications. The deal was […]

After a two-week investigation, the FAA has apparently decided that all is well with the SpaceX Starship interplanetary rocket test program even though its last two rockets blew to smithereens while attempting to land at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test facility. “The SN9 vehicle failed within the bounds of the FAA safety analysis,” the […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Thursday afternoon, 203 days after it launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station aboard a ULA Atlas V 541 rocket. The 2,263-pound rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of ancient microbial life along with collecting samples of rock and regolith from Mars’ […]

NASA has assigned astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines to its SpaceX Crew-4 mission, which is expected to launch in 2022. Along with additional crew members to be assigned by NASA’s international partners, Lindgren and Hines will be headed to the International Space Station (ISS) for a long-duration stay. Lindgren will serve as spacecraft commander […]

The FAA has announced it will investigate last week’s spectacular crash landing of SpaceX’s SN9 Starship prototype in Texas. The silo-like rocket performed flawlessly through launch to 50,000 feet, where it hovered briefly before doing its “belly flop” maneuver to descend. One of the engines needed to brake the rocket in its final descent didn’t […]

Shift4 Payments and Draken International founder Jared Isaacman has booked a trip with SpaceX that is being called “the world’s first all-civilian mission to space.” Named Inspiration4, the multi-day orbital flight is currently being planned for the fourth quarter of 2021. Isaacman, whose accomplishments as a pilot include two around-the-world speed records and over 100 […]