Spaceflight

The rapid growth of the commercial satellite-launch industry has the FAA moving ahead to take over some safety oversight duties from the Department of Defense. Someone has to be responsible for overseeing collision avoidance for objects in orbit, and traditionally that has been the military’s role. But the FAA and the Pentagon appear to be […]

Every once in a while, it’s fun to cast off the wispy tendrils connecting sanity to what passes for reality these days and consider a real crack pipe concept: What if Elon Musk made airplanes? This occurred to me this week when the news broke that tech billionaire Jeff Bezos plans to build a giant […]

Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced Monday a new family of heavy boosters capable of putting manned and heavy cargo payloads into earth orbit and beyond. Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said there will be both two- and three-stage versions of the booster and that one version will be capable of […]

Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, flew a first trial Thursday as the company continues to develop the newest version of its space-tourism vehicle. Virgin Galactic called the test, which lasted 3 hours and 43 minutes, a “captive carry” trial, during which the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft carried the space vehicle throughout the flight to monitor performance. […]

As an aviation journalist, my job description isn’t exactly to cheer when a flying machine craters, runs amok, blows up or otherwise goes awry. Hey, two wings, one love, right? So it was with a little guilt when, like a beer burp you can’t quite keep down, I had this moment of so there, when […]

The fallout following this week’s fiery destruction of a SpaceX rocket during a test at Cape Canaveral include delayed satellite launches for customers around the world that had hired the company to send equipment into orbit. It was the second total loss of a rocket since June of last year for SpaceX, which had one […]

Explosions this morning at Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX is testing an unmanned rocket to prepare for a satellite launch, were due to “an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload,” SpaceX said following the incident, which shook buildings in the area. “Per standard procedure, the pad was clear […]

Moon Express, a Cape Canaveral-based private company, announced this week it has received government approval to send an autonomous lander to the moon and plans to do so next fall. The multi-agency collaboration with the company includes NASA and the FAA. The approval puts Moon Express in the lead among other contenders for the $20 […]

Somewhere in the considerable reading I’ve done on the Apollo program, a comment from William Anders stuck with me. Anders was the lunar module pilot on the historic Apollo 8 mission in 1968. It marked the first time a manned spacecraft had departed earth orbit to journey to another body in the solar system. Anders […]

The world’s most powerful rocket, designed for future manned spaceflight, had a successful startup test this week – the latest milestone for NASA’s Space Launch System. This final qualification ground test at an Orbital ATK site in Promontory, Utah, allows NASA to plan for a first unmanned test flight with its Orion spacecraft in 2018 […]