Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft successfully rolled out to its Florida launch pad early Wednesday (May 18), setting the stage for a crucial test flight for NASA this week. The Starliner spacecraft, perched atop an Atlas V rocket built by the United Launch Alliance, rolled out to its pad at Space Launch Complex 41 of the Cape … Read more
SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a host of other private companies helped to make 2021 the year with the most space launches in history, but scientists say this mad dash to space could be causing further damage to our atmosphere. The number of launch attempts has lined in the last decade. And after counting all of … Read more
Voyager 1 continues to operate well, despite its advanced age and 14.5 billion-mile distance (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. And it can receive and execute commands sent from NASA, as well as gather and send back science data. But the readouts from the attitude articulation and control system, which control the spacecraft’s orientation in space, … Read more
In the world of renewable energy, there’s perhaps no more ambitious goal than fusion power. This involves fusing hydrogen atoms to create helium—a process that generates an ungodly amount of energy as a result. It’s a reaction that occurs every single moment in the sun, but replicating it on Earth is a much rarer and … Read more
New York CNN Business — Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company, a primary US defense contractor, and a titan of a global aviation duopoly. A few years ago, the idea that it would dominate commercial space was a given, and companies like SpaceX, a relatively young business relying on a strategy of moving fast … Read more
The team will continue to monitor the signal closely as they continue to determine whether the invalid data is coming directly from the AACS or another system involved in producing and sending telemetry data. Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft … Read more
Conventional solar technology soaks up rays of incoming sunlight to bump out a voltage. Strange as it seems, some materials are capable of running in reverse, producing power as they radiate heat back into the cold night sky. A team of engineers in Australia has now demonstrated the theory in action, using the kind of … Read more
With the cost of launching a rocket into space falling, the number of rocket launches is, well, taking off. Last year, governments and companies across the world successfully launched 133 rockets into orbit, breaking a record that stood for 45 years. But there’s a catch. Breaking free from Earth’s gravity requires a rocket to release … Read more
The spacecraft, which flew by the sun on March 26, has returned a treasure trove of new images and insights after coming within one-third the distance from the sun to the Earth. Solar Orbiter’s heat shield reached about 932 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), but functioned as expected and protected the spacecraft during its historic … Read more
Side view of the Moltke crater taken from Apollo 10. Credit: Public Domain Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing millions of thousands of square miles of the orb’s surface in hot lava. Over the eons, that lava created the dark blotches, or maria, that gives the … Read more