Space news

Striking rock formations documented by the rover provide evidence of a drying climate in the Red Planet’s ancient past.

"It's really pushing the envelope as a commercially owned spacecraft operating at the Moon."

Two multi-ton geostationary communications satellites for Malaysian and Indian operators took off on top of an Ariane 5 rocket Wednesday from French Guiana, leaving four Ariane 5s left to fly before retirement of the European workhorse launcher.

La NASA ha seleccionado a siete nuevos miembros para su cuadro de directores de vuelo, para supervisar las operaciones de las misiones de la Estación Espacial Internacional, de la tripulación comercial y del programa Artemis.

Big money for military satellites signals a slow shift to commercial services.

Viasat said June 21 that its shareholders voted to approve its $7.3 billion plan to acquire British satellite operator Inmarsat.

Germany’s Isar Aerospace announced plans June 22 to launch an orbital transfer vehicle no earlier than 2023 for Italian space logistics company D-Orbit.

A draft House spending bill would provide NASA with a smaller spending increase than requested for fiscal year 2023, with cuts spread among exploration, science and technology programs.

NASA officials said they met most, but not all, of the objectives in a countdown rehearsal of the Space Launch System, and were still determining if they were ready to move ahead with the vehicle’s first launch.

A Chinese Kuaizhou-1A rocket sent the Tianxing-1 satellite into orbit late Tuesday, marking a return to flight six months after the solid light-light launcher suffered failure.

SpaceX has begun stacking Starship’s first Florida launch tower. Less than half a year after the company restarted work on a Starship...

On June 6, 2022, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved a permit for a SpaceX construction project called “Project Echo.” The...

Foregoing another countdown rehearsal, NASA plans to return the first Space Launch System rocket to its assembly hangar at the Kennedy Space Center next week for a hydrogen leak repair and continued preparations for liftoff on the Artemis 1 moon mission.

The SmallSat Alliance is inviting U.S. university students to propose space-related solutions for formidable technical and policy challenges as part of the Collegiate Space Competition.

SpaceX warned June 21 that its Starlink broadband network would become unusable for most Americans if a proposal to use the 12 GHz band for terrestrial 5G is approved.

Two geostationary communications satellites for India’s space agency and a Malaysian company will rocket into orbit from the jungle of South America on Wednesday on a European-built Ariane 5 launcher.

The mission’s team has chosen to operate its seismometer longer than previously planned, although the lander will run out of power sooner as a result.

"It was a long day for the team, but I think it was a very successful day."

South Korea’s space agency said Tuesday that the country’s 15-story-tall Nuri launcher successfully reached orbit for the first time, giving the nation a fully domestic satellite launch capability after a $1.5 billion development program lasting more than a decade.

The House Appropriations Committee in a report accompanying the fiscal year 2023 defense appropriations bill warned about schedule and cost risks in Space Force acquisition programs.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are working together to advance space nuclear technologies.

Through the Starling mission, NASA and SpaceX will begin testing strategies for preventing autonomous satellites from crashing into each other.

NASA is preparing to launch Starling, its first satellite swarm. Instead of communicating directly with the four Starling cubesats, mission operators will send instructions to the swarm as a single entity.

The Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) has conducted its second launch of the Korea Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV)-II rocket, also known as Nuri. This was Nuri’s return to flight after nearly reaching orbit on its previous mission. The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex-2 (LC-2) at the Naro Space Center on June 21 at 16:00 Korea Time (07:00 UTC).

The planets in our Solar System show that no two ring systems are exactly alike.

Sierra Space will work with Spaceport America in New Mexico to use that commercial spaceport as a potential future landing site for the company’s Dream Chaser vehicle.

South Korea’s homegrown rocket KSLV-2 successfully put satellites into low Earth orbit for the first time in its second flight June 21.

NASA approved a demonstration flight for DiskSat, the thin round satellite designed by the Aerospace Corp.

Software startup Epsilon3 said June 20 it has raised $15 million to expand its suite of space project management solutions.

Brief updates on what the latest Shoemaker NEO grant winners have been working on.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act proposes adding $75 million to the Pentagon’s budget for “tactically responsive space."

NASA got within several seconds of completing its practice launch day exercise June 20 with the Artemis 1 vehicle on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The fourth Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) test attempt got down to T-29 seconds in a single, consolidated run of the countdown’s final ten minutes with the integrated Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for Artemis 1 fully fueled and pressurized like it will be for launch.

A week after rolling a different ‘test tank’ from its South Texas Starship factory to nearby launch and test facilities, SpaceX has...

"Has nobody at NASA read the space policy?"

China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission.

NASA came within 20 seconds of completing a full countdown rehearsal of its Space Launch System rocket June 20, although it was not immediately clear if the agency got enough data from the test to be able to proceed with a launch.

The U.S. Space Force on June 24 plans to formally establish the National Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

NASA loaded more than three-quarters of a million gallons of super-cold propellant into the first Space Launch System moon rocket Monday in Florida, achieving key milestones in a practice countdown but falling short of all the test objectives after discovering a new hydrogen leak.

SpaceX has successfully completed three Falcon 9 launches in just over 36 hours, highlighting the company’s continuous push towards ever-higher launch cadences...

A team of researchers using archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), as well as other NASA observatories have observed a white dwarf consuming and destroying a planetary system — the first time an observation of such kind has been made.

SpaceX completed a surge of three successful launches in a little more than 36 hours early June 19, days after an open letter within the company critical of founder Elon Musk led to the firing of several employees.

SpaceX hauled a Globalstar communications satellite into orbit early Sunday from Cape Canaveral, pulling off the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in 36 hours, the fastest sequence of three missions by any commercial launch company in history.

SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket on a secretive mission in the early hours of Sunday morning. Liftoff occurred at 12:27 AM EDT (04:27 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 40 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with the rocket’s official mission being the deployment of a single replacement satellite for communications operator Globalstar.

Globalstar is set to add a spare spacecraft to its commercial data relay network early Sunday with a launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but the satellite operator remained silent about the mission on the eve of liftoff.

A four-ton radar observation satellite for the German military soared into orbit Saturday from California on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, beginning a 10-year mission to collect all-weather reconnaissance imagery.

Germany’s SARah-1 military radar Earth observation satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday. The launch, which was the 25th flight of the Falcon 9 this year, occurred at 7:19 AM PDT (14:19 UTC) – less than 24 hours after Friday’s Starlink 4-19 launch from the Kennedy Space Center.

Countdown clocks began ticking Saturday for NASA’s fourth attempt to complete a dress-rehearsal countdown and fueling test of its Space Launch System moon rocket, a requirement before the huge booster can be cleared for launch on its long-awaited maiden flight.

Remote communications provider Speedcast is preparing to buy another sizable chunk of satellite capacity as demand soars beyond pre-pandemic levels.