Space exploration is a lot about hurry up and wait. Years and years of concept design and planning for launch vehicles and payloads, years and years of hopeful lobbying to acquire and then protect funding, patient pauses waiting for favorable…
It’s Wednesday, March 3, and SpaceX’s Starship Serial Number 10 (SN-10) launches from Boca Chica spaceport. There’s a flash of incandescent light, a gush of dark smoke, and 165 feet of gleaming stainless steel rocket ship lifts skywards atop a…
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 3:15 pm ET. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission enters orbit around the red planet and prepares to insert the complex skycrane/rover/helicopter package into the thin Martian atmosphere. The heat shield functions perfectly, the parachute deploys, the back…
Mars is getting to be a busy place. The United Arab Emirates Mars Mission Al Amal (Hope) drops into orbit February 9. China’s Tianwen-1 (Quest for Heavenly Truth 1) arrives the next day, and NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, with the…
Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 2:25:17 PM CST. It’s a scene straight out of a 1960s science fiction pulp magazine. One hundred and sixty feet of gleaming stainless steel rocket ship sitting on its fins on a launch pad in the…
Space tourism became a reality — albeit a very exclusive reality — in 2001 (appropriately enough) with Dennis Tito’s space odyssey to the International Space Station (ISS). It cost him $20 million for his flight on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-32,…
In 2018, China launched 39 space rockets into near-Earth orbit and beyond, beating out the U.S. (with 34 launches), and Russia (with 20). In 2019 China led the world again, with 32 successful orbital launches, compared to 22 flights from…
Bad news from NASA. Last Saturday’s hot fire test of the Artemis Space Launch System (SLS) was … unimpressive. The test plan called for the 212-foot, 2.3-million-pound core stage rocket to fire all four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines for a…
NASA isn’t paranoid. Someone is after them. Again. And things were finally going so well. President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration and the Constellation Program put NASA on a glorious path: complete the International Space Station, replace the…
