Enlarge / China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft flies above Mars. (credit: CNSA) China celebrates the start of a new year on Tuesday—it will be the Year of the Tiger—and on the particular eve of the holiday, the Chinese space program sent a special message from the red planet. The country’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which has been in orbit […]
Enlarge / OrienSpace is planning a series of rockets, from Gravity 1 through Gravity 4, over the coming decade. (credit: OrienSpace) Welcome to Edition 4.30 of the Rocket Report! There is plenty to discuss this week with NASA significantly expanding its support for the development of commercial rockets and a spicy new rocket tax proposal […]
Enlarge / Could Air Force officers fly on Boom Supersonic’s Overture aircraft one day? (credit: Boom Supersonic ) The US military has indicated its interested in commercial supersonic flight by granting as much as $60 million to Growth Supersonic for its airliner development efforts. The Colorado-based company offers announced that the Air Force awarded a […]
The James Webb Space Telescope as it will appear in orbit. (credit: NASA) I met John Grunsfeld outside a coffee shop in Houston, across the street from Johnson Space Center, a little more than five years ago. He had only recently retired from NASA after a long and storied career. Over the course of nearly […]
Enlarge / If all goes well, this is how Lunar Resources’ extractor could appear on the lunar surface in a few years. (credit: Lunar Resources) In recent years, much has been said about mining water ice in shadowed craters at the Moon’s South Pole for use as rocket propellant. Enthusiasm for this idea has led […]
Enlarge / SpaceX launched its third mission of 2022 on January 18. The rocket carried 49 Starlink satellites. (credit: SpaceX) Welcome to Edition 4.29 of the Rocket Report! There is plenty to discuss this week, including an accident in the Mojave (oh no!) and flights by two different rocket-carrying aircraft within days of each other […]
Enlarge / A rendering of the single-stage-to-orbit Radian One vehicle. (credit: Radian Aerospace) A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from […]
Enlarge / A Russian 3-stage Proton rocket blasts into the sky in 2000. (credit: NASA) Russia’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, said it is in the process of building four more Proton rockets before it shuts down production of the venerable booster. In a news release , Roscosmos stated the four rockets are on an assembly […]
Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC) SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. It already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has already received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA ) Space isn’t easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable—the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density , thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE , which stands for space […]