Space Flight

China’s Chang’e-6 ascender module blasted off from the surface of the moon late Monday after receiving a container of rocks and soil from the landing module at its landing spot near the moon’s south pole. The ascender went into a lunar orbit and will rendezvous with a reentry spacecraft to transfer the load. The reentry […]

Just four minutes before liftoff, the launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule was once again scrubbed due to a “technical issue.” A retry was possible as early as Sunday, but NASA announced late Saturday that it was pushing the next attempt back to at least Wednesday at 10:52 a.m. EDT to troubleshoot a balky launch […]

The next group of SpaceX space tourists hope to include a spacewalk in their Polaris Dawn mission. It would be the first-ever private spacewalk, and some expensive preparations have been made. SpaceX has modified the interior of the Crew Dragon capsule to permit vacuum exposure and built new spacewalk-capable spacesuits for the four private astronauts: […]

A NASA contractor is warning the agency to perform more safety inspections before greenlighting the inaugural launch of its Starliner rocket slated for as early as next week. Reports say ValveTech, a subcontractor for NASA supplying the company with parts for the Starliner aircraft, has issued a press release urging NASA to postpone the latest […]

Gen. Tom Stafford, who helped bring Cold War enemies together in cooperation 140 miles above the Earth, died in a retirement home near Cape Canaveral on Monday at the age of 93. Stafford was the commander of an American capsule that docked with a Soviet Soyuz ship in July of 1975, heralding decades of future […]

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship launched successfully at 9:25 a.m. EST today (March 14). But controllers lost contact with the orbital flight about an hour into the mission. At about 10:40 EST, the New York Times reported that SpaceX acknowledged the orbiter did not survive re-entry but declared the launch successful from the standpoint of mission […]

Rather than entering lunar orbit next week for a planned Moon landing in late February, the space vehicle carrying the ashes of Gene Roddenberry and half the cast of the original Star Trek TV series will burn up this week on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander has aborted its lunar mission […]

The first U.S. attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon in more than 50 years is in jeopardy after the Peregrine lander vented fuel from its propulsion system while being used to address another issue. After a good launch aboard a Vulcan Centaur rocket developed by the joint Lockheed Martin and Boeing venture United […]

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket successfully launched a classified military space plane from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday night.  The Dec. 28 launch marked the seventh mission for Space Forces’ X-37B space plane and the first time it launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket, according to SpaceNews. The mission had been delayed several […]

The Space Force’s X-37B “space plane” is expected to launch back into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday. It will join a similar spacecraft launched by China last week and the pair will become “two of the most watched objects on orbit while they’re on orbit,” according to Gen. Chance Saltzman, who heads […]