Spaceflight

Russian adventurer Fedor Konyukhov, who last year flew around the world solo in a gas balloon, setting a new speed record, now is working on a plan to build the biggest-ever hot-air balloon and fly it to a record-setting altitude of 82,000 feet. The balloon envelope, to be built by Cameron Balloons in the United […]

The New Age Space Conference will convene March 11 at the MIT Samberg Conference Center to discuss the future of the commercial space industry. Barret Schlegelmilch, the conference organizer and an MIT graduate student, told AVweb the conference is “is one of the only places where you’ll find entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, astronauts, startup founders and […]

Several hundred pieces of software written by NASA engineers for air and spacecraft design, business optimization, systems interaction and biomedical applications have been released by the agency for free public use. The software is being made available through the NASA Technology Transfer Program (motto, “Bringing NASA Technology Down to Earth”). The available codes are listed […]

It’s getting so a poor blogger can’t catch a breath around here. No sooner do I write about NASA considering sending the first Orion mission around the moon than along comes Elon Musk to say, never mind, we’re going next year. While fellow billionaire Richard Branson struggles to shoot a few tourists on a crummy […]

SpaceX will send two people on a trip around the Moon next year in a Falcon Heavy rocket, the company announced on Monday. The two private citizens, whose names have not yet been released, have already paid “a significant deposit,” SpaceX said. “Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying […]

Here’s an aerospace story that hasn’t generated much notice. The Trump White House is apparently pushing NASA to consider making the first flight of the new Orion manned space system a circumlunar flight, rather than an unmanned test mission. That has a nice, if somewhat melancholy, resonance to it. Fifty years after the fact, we […]

Planet has agreed to acquire Terra Bella (formerly Skybox Imaging) from Google, who acquired Skybox Imaging in August 2014. Will Marshall, CEO at Planet Labs, writes for the company: “Planet Labs is thrilled to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Google, wherein Planet will acquire the Terra Bella business including the SkySat […]

It was 50 years ago, in 1967, that NASA scheduled the first Apollo mission, with the aim to land on the Moon, and EAA will celebrate that era of exploration this summer at AirVenture, with a reunion of Apollo astronauts and a slate of special events. The reunion is expected to be the largest gathering […]

The contenders in the international Lunar XPrize have been narrowed down to five finalist teams who will attempt to be the first to launch and land a robot on the moon by the end of the year. XPrize.org, which is offering a grand prize of $20 million sponsored by Google, announced this week that each […]

Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, died Monday at the age of 82. Cernan has been suffering from a “long illness” when he died surrounded by family. “Even at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our […]