Spaceflight

NASA announced on Thursday that it has selected Colorado-based Maxar Technologies to develop and demonstrate power, propulsion and communications capabilities for its Lunar Gateway project. The contract begins with a 12-month base period followed by a 26-month option, a 14-month option and two 12-month options. During the base period, Maxar will be expected to design […]

Although originally planned for 2028, NASA says it can accelerate the next Moon mission to 2024 and it wants more money to do it. NASA and the White House have requested a $1.6 billion budget amendment to fly the so-called Artemis mission four years sooner than planned. The project is named after the Greek goddess […]

Virgin Galactic took a big step away from its test program toward commercial development of space tourism with a move from the high California desert to a purpose-built passenger flight facility in New Mexico. CEO Richard Branson announced Friday that it will be moving a significant part of its operation to a taxpayer-funded spaceport in […]

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, introduced a new Blue Origin lunar lander on Thursday. Called Blue Moon, the cargo version of the lander is designed to deliver payloads of up to 3.6 metric tons to the lunar surface. According to Blue Origin, Blue Moon will be equipped with fuel cells […]

Nearly two weeks after the event, SpaceX has confirmed that its Crew Dragon capsule was destroyed during ground testing on April 20 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. As previously reported by AVweb, the incident occurred during tests of the capsule’s abort thrusters. According to SpaceX Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability Hans Koenigsmann, the problem […]

NASA says its InSight Mars probe has “measured and recorded for the first time ever a likely ‘marsquake.’” The agency says the “first recorded trembling” appears to have emanated from inside the planet, as opposed to noise signatures from events on the surface. “InSight’s first readings carry on the science that began with NASA’s Apollo […]

SpaceX suffered a setback in its manned program when one of its Crew Dragon capsules experienced “an anomaly” on a test stand at Cape Canaveral on Saturday. The nature of the incident was not immediately released but a cloud of orange smoke was reported rising over the SpaceX facilities at the Cape. There were no […]

SpaceX’s first successful commercial mission came off almost without a hitch last week. Almost. Despite landing safely on a drone ship off the Florida coast, one of the three boosters was lost before it could return to dry land. By design, the two outboard boosters returned safely to land, while the larger, center booster successfully […]

The world’s largest airplane took its first flight early Saturday. The Stratolaunch, a six-engine, twin-fuselage behemoth with a 385-foot wingspan, took off from Mojave after years in development. The aircraft was conceived by Paul Allen and Scaled Composites founder Burt Rutan as an aerial launch platform for low Earth orbit satellites that will reduce launch […]

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket successfully completed its second launch and first operational mission on Thursday. After a 24-hour delay due to weather, the rocket launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. local time. The Falcon Heavy’s payload was the Arabsat-6A, a telecommunications satellite that will deliver television, radio, internet […]