Spaceflight

Virgin Orbit has rolled out its solution for making space more accessible to those who want to put small payloads into orbit. The company has modified a Boeing 747-400 to take a 57,000-pound, 70-foot rocket on a launcher between the inboard left engine and the fuselage. The rocket, called LauncherOne, was lifted into place and […]

Just a few days after the death of Paul Allen, whose tech fortune has been paying for its development, the huge Stratolaunch airplane completed its latest round of taxi tests in Mojave. The airplane, designed to carry payloads into low Earth orbit, reached speeds up to 90 MPH, which the company called “medium-speed” taxi testing. […]

Of all the stories told about Neil Armstrong—and there are many—my favorite was related by the lively Alan Bean, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 who died earlier this year. One morning in 1968, Bean had learned that Armstrong had just punched out of the notoriously twitchy Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, missing being incinerated […]

A Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut were recovered unharmed early Thursday after the Soyuz booster they were aboard on a launch to the International Space Station failed. The failure put the MS-10 capsule into a ballistic trajectory and it and the crew were recovered 200 miles east of the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch point, NASA […]

Lockheed Martin revealed its new concept for a fully reusable lunar lander at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Bremen, Germany on Wednesday. The lander will be designed to dock with NASA’s planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway for service, refueling and storage in between missions. According to Lockheed, it will be capable of carrying 2,000 pounds […]

SpaceX has announced that Japanese fashion entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa has purchased a flight around the moon on the company’s still-conceptual Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). Maezawa, who is also an avid art collector, says he will be offering six to eight artists free seats for the flight in the hope that they will be inspired to […]

Space Race: Virgin Vs. Blue Origin The “race” between Blue Origin and Virgin seems to come down to sales hype. Branson, the ultimate showman, has the charisma to make his rocket powered shuttlecock look inviting while Bezos’ more mundane capsule has some actual historical experience to draw upon. Only recently has Blue Origin allowed real-time […]

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Roscosmos General Director Dmitry Rogozin met on Wednesday to discuss the status of International Space Station (ISS) operations after speculation that a leak detected onboard the station two weeks ago was possibly the result of sabotage. During the discussion, NASA says Rogozin informed Bridenstine that Roscosmos was establishing a commission […]

How about a wager? Which comes first, the FAA’s vaunted NextGen collapses in scandal and budget overruns or someone—anyone—actually launches a space tourist without turning him or her into a cosmic cinder? Although there’s a Voodoo doll with my name on it at 800 Independence Ave. and restraint has never been a long suit of […]

Vice President Mike Pence visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Thursday and spoke about human spaceflight and the future of U.S. space exploration. The vice president reiterated intentions to provide support for manned missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. The administration’s space exploration goals were initially laid out in Space Policy Directive 1, […]