Space Flight

The FAA has finished a wholesale overhaul of its commercial space launch and reentry regulations, giving launch companies more flexibility and responsibility in scheduling and managing operations. “The old regulations were woefully out of date and really out of step. Industry told us that loud and clear,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said in an online […]

In partnership with seven other nations, the United States signed an agreement on Tuesday designed to establish the principles that will guide cooperation among international participants in NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program. Rooted in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the principles laid out in the Artemis Accords include a commitment to peaceful exploration, transparency and […]

NASA and Boeing have announced that NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore will replace Chris Ferguson as commander for the first crewed mission of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner. Ferguson, a three-time NASA space shuttle veteran, is stepping back from the position for undisclosed personal reasons. He will assume the roles of director of Mission Integration and […]

United Launch Alliance says it will be at least a week before it can try again to launch an expensive spy satellite from Cape Canaveral. Its Delta IV Heavy rocket automatically aborted starting its engines just three seconds before liftoff early Saturday. The launch had already been postponed from its Aug. 27 planned liftoff. In […]

Astronaut Gerald “Jerry” Carr passed away on Wednesday at the age of 88. Selected for NASA’s astronaut program in April 1966, Carr performed Capcom duties during the Apollo 8 and Apollo 12 missions and was involved in the development and testing of the lunar roving vehicle (LRV) used by Apollo flight crews. On Nov. 16, […]

An opinion writer for Forbes has postulated that the future of the pilot trade is just that, “semi-professional” monitors of autonomous machines that actually discourage human intervention because we are so sloppy. In a column, Paul Kennard says humans are too imprecise to get the best performance and longevity out of aircraft systems and cost […]

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rode their SpaceX Dragon capsule to a flawless splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday right on time at 2:48 p.m. EDT marking the U.S.’s successful return to manned space launch business after a nine-year absence. “Welcome back to Planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” Mission Control said […]

Boeing has been awarded a contract extending its support of the International Space Station (ISS) through September 2024. The company has been contracted to supply engineering support services, resources and personnel for the ISS activities along with management of some station systems. ISS operations are currently slated to continue until at least 2024. “As the […]

Environmental groups are asking the FAA to do a full-scale environmental assessment on SpaceX’s explosion-prone facility in Texas. Seven organizations have jointly signed a letter to three FAA administrators to look into the activities at the Boca Chica assembly and live test site in south Texas. The site is used for development and testing of […]

A joint NASA-Boeing independent review team has completed its evaluation of three anomalies that occurred during the December 2019 orbital flight test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule. During the uncrewed test, the Starliner team ran into intermittent space-to-ground communication issues and two software coding errors that resulted in the capsule failing to make it […]