KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and one Canadian launched into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, flying the most powerful rocket ridden by humans on the first leg of a nine-day voyage around the Moon. Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the four astronauts lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center ..
Tag : space
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA’s Artemis II rocket know well. “It is actually a very long day,” said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. “We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there’s a pretty tight schedule of ..
But observing objects in cislunar space from the Earth is not easy. First, the Moon is a quarter-million miles away, so spacecraft or debris will appear vanishingly faint to sensors near the Earth. The Moon and the Sun far outshine these objects. Second, using a satellite stationed near the Moon to obtain a fix and ..
“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said. Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, ..
The mission will last more than nine days from liftoff to splashdown. After separation from the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft will spend a little more than a day in an elliptical high-altitude orbit ranging more than 40,000 miles from Earth. The astronauts and mission controllers in Houston will spend this time activating and testing ..
After speaking with a number of officials both in industry and the government, here’s an overview of what I believe is happening. How we got here NASA has never been good at transitions, be it from the end of Apollo to the space shuttle or the painful period from 2011 to 2020 when the shuttle ..
More to come?… Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, the Space Force’s deputy chief of operations, told a House subcommittee Wednesday that the military was looking at moving more missions off of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to other providers. Currently, only ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are certified for national security launches. The Vulcan ..
In addition to efficiency, a nuclear-electric propulsion system has the benefit of using conventional plasma thrusters. But instead of using solar power to energize the thrusters’ xenon fuel, SR-1 will use electricity generated from a nuclear reactor. “Our nuclear program, SR-1, is not about going and lobbying for billions of dollars to undertake a brand-new ..
At the end of a long day on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at a table littered with microphones and jokingly referred to the space agency’s new Moon base manager, Carlos Garcia-Galan, as the “Lunar Viceroy.” It was a bit of humor, but it also seemed to represent affection from Isaacman for a ..
But the Swift spacecraft will surely crash back to Earth, likely before the end of this year, without a reboost. That’s where Katalyst comes in. The company’s robotic servicing spacecraft, named Link, will attempt to rendezvous and dock with the Swift satellite, then raise its altitude to give the observatory a new lease on life. ..
