Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach on the steppes of Kazakhstan. No one has ever done it on their 70th birthday. Perhaps this is appropriate because NASA astronaut Don Pettit is ..
Tag : space
The Pentagon has a long-standing policy of not publicizing hypersonic missile tests before they happen, except for safety notices for civilian airplanes and ships downrange. But the Defense Department declared the previous Dark Eagle test flight a success within a few hours of the launch, and did not do so this time. Hypersonic missiles offer ..
Back from the brink… The Alameda, California-based company, which was delisted from Nasdaq in June 2024 after its shares collapsed, is now targeting the first test flight of Rocket 4 in 2026. Astra’s arrangement with the Defense Innovation Unit includes two milestones: one suborbital (point-to-point) and the other orbital, with the option to launch from ..
• 1998: Deep Space 1 — Delta II rocket — $86 million • 1999: Mars Polar Lander — Delta II rocket — $88 million • 2001: Mars Odyssey — Delta II rocket — $96 million • 2003: Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers — two Delta II rockets — $87 million per launch • 2004: Swift ..
Secretary of Transportation weighs in That was pretty much how things stood until Thursday evening, when the Secretary of the US Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, shared some thoughts on the social media site X. “The last FAA guidelines under the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program were clear: Crewmembers who travel into space must have ..
Should the city of Houston, which proudly bills itself as “Space City,” have a prized Space Shuttle orbiter on public display? More than a decade ago, arguably, the answer was yes. After all, the Space Shuttle program was managed from Johnson Space Center, in southeastern Houston. All the astronauts who flew on the shuttle trained ..
Officials blame changing requirements for much of the delays and rising costs. NASA managers dramatically changed their plans for the Gateway program in 2020, when they decided to launch the PPE and HALO on the same rocket, prompting major changes to their designs. Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, declined to commit to the ..
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency. This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, ..
Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is ..
SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately That equates to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA for the bulk of the missions. Going into the competition, military officials set aside seven additional missions to launch ..
