March 19th, 2026
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Yet another wait-a-minute moment. While it remains unclear whether or not new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman favors putting in place a lunar Gateway, the European Space Agency has just released a schematic overview of the multi-component station. The lunar Gateway is envisioned by advocates as the first international space station around the Moon, dedicated to […]
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Engineers are targeting 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time today, Thursday, March 19, to start rolling the Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B at the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 will make the four-mile route from Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad. […]
Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake put chalk to chalkboard and devised a formula to estimate the number of communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Just how many alien societies exist and are detectable? Then there’s the paradoxical and cosmological query asked a decade earlier by physicist Enrico Fermi. If indeed there is a […]
There has been a streamlining of all launch and reentry licensing announced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Those commercial space license approvals will now occur under the Part 450 rule, which consolidates four old rules into one. It provides more flexibility and more methods of compliance, reducing the administrative and cost burdens on industry and the […]
China’s Shenzhou-21 crew aboard the country’s orbiting space station completed their mission’s second series of extravehicular activities (EVAs) today, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). The astronaut spacewalkers — Zhang Lu, Wu Fei — worked for roughly seven hours and completed their tasks, assisted by the space station’s robotic arm, stay-inside colleague Zhang […]
China’s Shenzhou-21 astronauts continue to perform a series of tasks aboard the country’s Tiangong space station, including in-orbit experiments, equipment maintenance and health The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said on March 15 that the crew — mission commander Zhang Lu and astronauts Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang — have spent more than four months […]
In the U.S. and China-led race to put astronauts back on the Moon, there is, in fact, one shared goal: establishing a sustainable, permanent, crewed Moon base. But their specific plans to achieve that moonshot are far from similar, with key differences that could dictate which country gets there first—and, just maybe, which controls […]
China is making progress on the country’s mission to retrieve samples from Mars. Xinhua news agency reports that the Tianwen-3 flight model development phase is to be completed within the year. Liu Jizhong, chief designer of the Tianwen-3 mission, said last week that building on preliminary technical research and demonstrations, the mission has achieved breakthroughs […]
Arizona’s meteor crater and other leftover scars from inbound space rocks continue to serve up secrets. These impact features continue to be on-going research sites, generating new data on wayward, mean and nasty creatures from the surrounding cosmos. “The crater is still providing new insights every year, so continued studies there are really important,” […]
For the first time, legislation has been unanimously passed that gives the go for NASA to establish a permanent moon base as part of sustained American presence on the lunar surface. While not a done deal – both the U.S. Senate and House chambers must agree on the language – the impetus for establishing a […]
