WASHINGTON — NASA’s Artemis program of human lunar exploration can help pave the way for human Mars missions, according to a new report, although some tweaks to those plans may be required. The report, released by the space exploration advocacy group Explore Mars during its virtual Humans to Mars Summit, is based on a workshop…
WASHINGTON — European launch provider Arianespace conducted a successful return-to-flight mission of Vega, its light-lift rocket, on Sept. 2, completing the vehicle’s first launch in 14 months. Vega lifted off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, at 9:51 p.m. Eastern, carrying 53 satellites to low Earth orbit in the debut of Arianespace’s…
Europe’s Vega rocket is back in action. The four-stage booster, which is operated by French company Arianespace, lifted off tonight (Sept. 2) at 9:51 p.m. EDT (0151 GMT on Sept. 3) from Guiana Space Center in South America, carrying 53 satellites to orbit for 21 different customers from 13 countries. Today’s mission was the first…
WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory announced Sept. 2 it will pursue two new space experiments — one will test the performance of satellite instruments in low orbits and the other is to advance sensor technology to monitor cislunar space The experiments are run by AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base,…
WASHINGTON — NASA and Northrop Grumman successfully tested Sept. 2 a solid rocket booster developed for the Space Launch System that incorporates improvements intended for future SLS missions. The five-segment booster, built by Northrop Grumman for the Flight Support Booster 1 test, ignited at 3:05 p.m. Eastern at a company test site in Promontory, Utah.…
Arianespace’s Vega rocket is scheduled to fly tonight (Sept. 2) for the first time in more than a year. The four-stage Vega last launched in July 2019, and that mission did not go well. The 98-foot-tall (30 meters) rocket’s second-stage motor suffered an anomaly, resulting in the loss of the Vega and its payload, the…
NASA’s new moon rocket finished a full-scale flight support booster (FSB) test Wednesday (Sept. 2) as the agency gets its Space Launch System (SLS) ready to fly astronauts one day. The two-minute test was broadcast live from Promontory, Utah at 3:05 p.m. EDT (1:05 p.m. local time or 1905 GMT) on NASA Television, and the…
A commercial spacecraft that has been designed to launch people on brief trips into space has inspired a new creative use — as a canvas for artwork. Uplift Aerospace has partnered with Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, to paint commissioned murals on the side of Blue Origin’s New…
WASHINGTON — Newcomer satellite operator MonacoSat is close to ordering its second geostationary communications satellite, and could complete the process by year’s end, its chief executive said Tuesday. “You cannot stop with one satellite, so now we are developing the new satellite,” Ilhami Aygün, CEO of MonacoSat, said during a Sept. 1 webinar for the…
To receive FIRST UP Satcom, a weekly SpaceNews newsletter for satellite and telecom professionals, sign up here. TOP STORIES Analysts see a limited opportunity for satellite broadband companies in the connected car market. Northern Sky Research projects revenue from the connected car market, in which it includes buses and trains, to crest $1 billion by 2029, even…
Pushing commercialization on the International Space Station to the next level will take a combination of government will, tax incentives and regulatory clarity, said panelists at an online panel onThursday (Aug. 27). Participants in the “Building the [low Earth orbit] LEO Economy” panel at the ISS R&D (Research and Development) conference explored how the space…
While our Moon is airless, research indicates the presence of hematite, a form of rust that normally requires oxygen and water. That has scientists puzzled. Mars has long been known for its rust. Iron on its surface, combined with water and oxygen from the ancient past, give the Red Planet its hue. But scientists were…
David Blaine’s aerial stunt may have been impressive and dramatic, but other ballooning skydivers have gone far higher. Blaine rose into the Arizona sky today (Sept. 2) beneath a bouquet of multicolored balloons, employing the escape strategy pioneered by curmudgeon Carl Fredricksen in the 2009 Pixar film “Up.” During the livestreamed event, called “Ascension,” Blaine…
NASA research could help to improve forecasts of whether a hurricane will suddenly intensify, which could give people in its path more time to prepare. In October 2015, Hurricane Patricia in the Northeast Pacific Ocean blew up from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 monster within 24 hours, its winds leaping from 86…
SAN FRANCISCO – Made In Space Europe, a Redwire subsidiary, announced an agreement Sept. 1 with space transportation company Momentus to jointly develop a robotic spaceflight mission to launch in 2022. Under the memorandum of understanding, the companies will mount a Made In Space robotic arm on a Momentus Vigoride transfer vehicle. With the robotic…
A new sound has joined the symphony of the universe as we hear it. Since 2015, astrophysicists have been using gravitational-wave detectors to “hear” chirp-like signals and decode massive collisions that send subtle ripples across spacetime. Now, scientists have heard a new kind of sound, a fast, deep “bang” that could unlock even more cosmic…
SpaceX plans to launch another big batch of its Starlink internet satellites on Thursday (Sept. 3), and you can watch the action live. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped with 60 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off Thursday at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There’s an 80%…
WASHINGTON — NASA and the Department of Energy will seek proposals for industry later this year for the development of a compact nuclear power system that can support the agency’s long-term lunar and Martian exploration plans. In a Sept. 1 presentation to the Technology, Innovation, and Engineering Committee of the NASA Advisory Council, agency officials…
Has the universe been around forever? If so, perhaps it’s been bouncing back and forth in a never-ending cycle of big bangs in which all matter bubbles out of a singularity, followed by big crunches, in which everything gets swallowed up again to form that dense point from which the universe is born again. And…
Information might seem immaterial. But within a few short centuries, the total amount of digital bits produced annually by humanity could exceed the number of atoms on our planet and, even more unexpectedly, account for half of its mass. Those are the conclusions of a mind-bending new study looking at the growth of data over…