Space Flight

Space launch solutions company Stratolaunch has been sold, according to an announcement made last Friday. The future of Stratolaunch has been uncertain since the death of founder Paul Allen in 2018, with reports surfacing last June that the company might be closing after unsuccessful attempts to sell it. The identity of the new owner and […]

SpaceX has formally unveiled the massive retro-looking spacecraft it intends to use for interplanetary flights and CEO Elon Musk says it could be doing earth orbit flights within six months. The Starship is made of stainless steel, stands 164 feet tall and is 30 feet in diameter and that’s just the spacecraft. The massive booster […]

The hardware for NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission is beginning to come together. According to NASA, the engine section of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is now assembled and ready to be joined to the rest of the SLS core stage. As shown in the video below, the engine section serves as the attachment […]

Clayton Turner has been selected as the next director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Monday. Turner joined NASA in 1990 as a design engineer with the Lidar In-Space Technology Experiment project and has served as Langley’s deputy director since 2015. He will replace David Bowles, who is […]

SpaceX’s Starhopper launch vehicle prototype completed what is likely to be its last test flight on Tuesday evening. The hover test lasted about a minute and the vehicle reached an altitude of approximately 150 meters (about 500 feet) before touching down on its landing pad. The test, which took place at SpaceX’s facility in Boca […]

A couple of commercial space launch companies are steering clear of bringing their boosters back to Earth under their own power and are instead borrowing a technique from the dawn of space exploitation. Wired says United Launch Alliance and small-launch provider Rocket Lab plan to grab their boosters out of the air with helicopters as […]

Although it didn’t make for especially dramatic video, SpaceX made a big step toward its goal of visiting Mars with the first flight test of an early version of its Starhopper reusable spacecraft late Thursday. The odd-looking device, which even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk jokes looks like a water tower, hovered for about 20 seconds […]

Legendary NASA flight director Christopher C. Kraft, who was an instrumental manager in the nation’s space program, died in Houston on Monday. He was 95. Kraft’s name is emblazoned on the side of the mission control center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the longtime base of ground support operations for space flights dating […]

In commemoration of what many have called man’s greatest adventure, CBS news is live streaming its original coverage of the Apollo 11 launch on July 16, 1969. The coverage is running in real time and features Walter Cronkite in hours of continuous live coverage of the landing and eventual exploration of the lunar surface. Coverage […]

NASA completed a successful test of the launch abort system (LAS) on its Orion spacecraft at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday. The Ascent Abort-2 (AA-2) test involved launching a test version of the Orion crew module on a modified Peacekeeper missile to an altitude of approximately 31,000 feet, at which point the […]