Space Flight

SpaceX’s Starship 8 test vehicle blew up over the Caribbean on Thursday, diverting flights into South Florida airports because of what the FAA termed “falling space debris.” The explosion occurred about 20 seconds before the engines were due to shut down after what appeared to be a successful launch from SpaceX’s south Texas launch facility. […]

SpaceX scrubbed the launch of its Starship system on Monday after anomalies started piling up in the final few minutes. An undisclosed issue with the booster that seemed to be resolved as the countdown continued was compounded by some other problems that cropped up soon after, and company founder Elon Musk said it was “best […]

An all-women crew will take flight for Blue Origin’s 31st mission, the company announced Thursday.   Lauren Sánchez, a pilot, journalist and fiancé to the company’s founder Jeff Bezos, will head the mission. Sanchez will be joined by journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry, bioastronautics scientist Amanda Nguyen, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and […]

SpaceX says it has fixed the issues that led to the intentional destruction of the upper stage of the seventh test of the Starship system on Jan. 16. The spacecraft automatically blew itself up and sent debris raining down over the Turks and Caicos about 10 minutes after launch from SpaceX’s launch facility in southern […]

Jeff Bezos’-backed rocket company, Blue Origin, announced plans to lay off about 10% of its workforce, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Approximately 1,400 of Blue Origin’s nearly 14,000 employees are being cut, primarily affecting workers in Florida, Texas and Washington, the outlet reported. The layoffs come as the company ramps up production of its massive New […]

SpaceX’s seventh launch of its starship mega rocket ended with an “unscheduled disassembly” on Thursday evening. While the first-stage booster was successfully “caught” back at the launch stand, the new-generation Starship upper stage appeared to break apart as it neared space. “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” SpaceX stated following the […]

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket on its maiden flight Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Blue Origin has now become the first private space-launch company in the Western world to successfully reach orbit on its first attempt using a rocket of its own design, as reported by PCMag. Similar to […]

On Thursday, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) head Bill Nelson announced the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, has been delayed. The agency is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II, a mission that will take astronauts around the moon and back, and mid-2027 […]

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced Jared Isaacman as his pick to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, pilot and commercial astronaut, has made two trips to space aboard SpaceX capsules in fully private missions organized through his Polaris program. He has partnered closely with Elon Musk and invested […]

Some California students set a series of records when their homebuilt rocket blasted to 470,000 feet at hypersonic speed in a launch from the Black Rock Desert in October. The University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab, a club made up entirely of undergrads, published a paper on the project in November detailing how they […]