Spaceflight

Congress needs to take action now to ensure that commercial space operations are safely integrated into the national airspace, ALPA president Tim Canoll told the U.S. House aviation subcommittee on Tuesday. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation must work with the industry to develop standards for communication, navigation and surveillance, Canoll said, and certify […]

The U.S. government issued a policy directive aimed at managing growing space traffic more safely and effectively, including tackling increasing orbital debris, on Monday. Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3) calls for “a new approach to space traffic management (STM) that addresses current and future operational risks.” SPD-3’s goals also include encouraging commercial space travel, developing STM […]

Alan Bean, an Apollo astronaut who was the fourth man to walk on the moon, died Saturday at the age of 86 in a Houston hospital. Bean was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 and also commanded the second crewed mission to Skylab in July of 1973. He was a Navy Test Pilot School […]

SpaceX successfully completed the first flight of its upgraded Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, carrying the Bangladesh telecommunications satellite Bangabandhu-1 into orbit last Friday. According to SpaceX, the Block 5 is “the final substantial upgrade” to the Falcon 9 rocket, which the company hopes to use to transport people into space in the not-too-distant future. […]

Build A Plane, the nonprofit that offers kids a chance to restore an airplane using donated aircraft, now is expanding into rocketry, and with help from a major unnamed donor, recently bought up the assets of XCOR, the bankrupt company that had been working to build the Lynx spaceplane, for $1.1 million. “Our donor heard […]

Private space startup Blue Origin launched its eighth test flight from Texas Sunday, boosting microgravity experiments and an instrumented dummy astronaut to an altitude of 66.5 miles, the company reported. The reusable New Shepard booster was making its second flight and landed successfully on a concrete pad near the launch point about eight minutes after […]

Ellen Stofan has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Stofan begins her tenure April 30. She brings more than 25 years’ experience in space-related organizations and a deep research background in planetary geology. She is the first woman to hold this position. Stofan was chief scientist at NASA (2013-2016), serving […]

NASA says it’s hiring a new round of flight directors to oversee U.S. human spaceflight for the upcoming Orion missions and the International Space Station, responsible for the success of missions and the highly trained teams of engineers and scientists that make them possible. “Flight directors play a critical role in the success of our […]

As the huge Stratolaunch aircraft prepares for its first flight at Mojave, company founder Paul Allen is thinking about using it not just to deliver satellites to space, but perhaps also to carry an all-new space shuttle. “I would love to see us have a full reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, […]

Stratolaunch, the giant airplane in development in Mojave, is continuing taxi tests at higher speeds and longer durations, the company said this week. Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who is funding the project, posted video of the taxiing airplane on Facebook on Monday. The airplane reached a top taxi speed of 40 knots, Allen said. […]