Space Flight

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule made history on Sunday but this time it was for a success. The empty crew capsule failed to make it to its intended orbit following the spacecraft’s first uncrewed test launch on Friday but after doing some math engineers were able to bring it to a soft landing on the […]

NASA’s Orion spacecraft was transported from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to Mansfield Lahm Airport (MFD) in Ohio onboard the agency’s Super Guppy aircraft on Sunday. The aircraft arrived at MFD at approximately 4:35 p.m. EST where it was greeted by a crowd of almost 1,500 people. NASA acquired the Super Guppy, which is the last […]

Boeing completed the first end-to-end test of the CST-100 Starliner crew capsule abort system as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program on Monday. Although the spacecraft experienced a “deployment anomaly” that caused only two of the three main parachutes to open, NASA and Boeing reported that the vehicle’s performance fell within the range of acceptable […]

The U.S. Air Force’s unmanned X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle successfully completed its fifth mission on Sunday, landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility after 780 days in orbit. The X-37B was launched on Sept. 7, 2017, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, onboard a Space X Falcon 9 booster. The longest the […]

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 […]