September 23rd, 2025
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Virgin Galactic and Purdue University announced today a groundbreaking partnership to send an all-Boilermaker crew on a suborbital research flight, the first of its kind for a U.S. university. The mission, Purdue 1, is slated for launch in 2027 and will include Purdue engineering professor Steven Collicott and distinguished graduate student(s) and alumni who will […]
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Two Mars-bound spacecraft for NASA have been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center for launch, scheduled to occur no earlier than this fall on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. The University of California’s Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory’s ESCAPADE mission probes were built, tested and integrated by Rocket Lab, as part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions […]
Yet another wait-a-minute moment for NASA’s return to the Moon with humans program. As it has repeatedly warned, panel members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) – a group that reports to NASA and the U.S. Congress – have once again red-flagged the SpaceX Starship’s development tied to the space agency’s needs to return […]
New research is being called the first detailed examination of sintering “real” lunar regolith. Used in the work were precious Moon samples returned to Earth by Apollo 11, Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 moonwalkers. There is growing interest in establishing a permanently crewed base on the Moon. Lunar regolith sintering has gained significant attention as […]
Declared as a new program milestone, the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) payload is now integrated with the Northrop Grumman Mission Robotics Vehicle (MRV) spacecraft bus. This robotic spacecraft is designed to extend and upgrade satellites already in orbit. The RSGS program is the result of over 20 years of research and development at […]
It’s alive! NASA has picked Blue Origin to deliver the VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole. The contentious NASA VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project has gone through a paywall of issues in the past. Following a comprehensive internal review, NASA announced on July 17th, 2024 its intent to discontinue development of the […]
Russia’s Bion-M No. 2 descent module returned to Earth September 19, touching down in the Orenburg steppes. The spacecraft was launched from Baikonur on August 20 and after 30 days in space, the cargo of living organisms on board have been recovered. Images taken of the recovered craft suggest the landing sparked a small […]
The quest for human permanence on the Moon, that grimy, rock-laden and crater-pocked world, would be made smoother by the presence of mini-highways. These special paths could handle back-and-forth traffic, while limiting exposure to the pervasive lunar dust that plagued Apollo astronauts. Progress is being made on establishing thoroughfares on the Moon, to not only […]
Volcanic emissions of reactive sulfur gases on early Mars may have made for a unique Martian environment. If so, that environment on the Red Planet could have been hospitable to certain forms of life. That is one output from new research led by geoscientists at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. This finding comes […]
The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) released a new report titled “Redshift: The Acceleration of China’s Commercial and Civil Space Enterprise and the Challenge to America.” The CSF document offers a thorough review of China’s civil and commercial space activities over the past decade following the announcement of their “Space Dream” and implementation of the Belt […]
