Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism enterprise is carrying a commercial crew of three to the edge of space for the very first time.
Virgin Galactic just performed its sixth spaceflight and first-ever commercial space tourism expedition.
The company’s VSS Unity spaceplane took off attached to its carrier aircraft VMS Eve, from Spaceport America, New Mexico at 11:00 ET (0900 GMT) today, June 29.
A team of researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with an ingenious, origami-inspired robot that can turn itself into a huge number of three-dimensional shapes.
Best of all, it can fold and unfold itself like a piece of flat-pack Ikea furniture, which its creates say makes it an ideal candidate for assisting astronauts inside the cramped environment of a spacecraft.
As seen in a video demonstration, the bot — called Mori3 — can dexterously walk and pose with four flattened limbs, or even roll around once bent into a ring shape.
Monday’s test firing of Ship 25 seems to have gone resoundingly well. On Tuesday afternoon (June 27), SpaceX tweeted images from the previous day’s proceedings, and they highlight the sheer power generated by Starship’s engines. The smoke and dust from ignition managed to stay low enough to the ground, and diffuse enough, for Starship to remain perfectly in frame, engine fire imparting an orange glow to the black tiles of the vehicle’s heat shield.
Related: SpaceX fires up Starship spacecraft ahead of 2nd test flight (video)
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk also tweeted an image from the static-fire test early on Tuesday morning. This one, from an upward perspective, shows the extreme bright light emanating from the flames, with Starship centered in the shine.
This isn’t the first time NASA has encouraged the public to add their names to objects bound for space, including those aboard Artemis I, as well the Preservation Rover and InSight on their multiple trips to Mars. In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 both launched with gold-plated phonographic records aboard featuring 90 minutes of music, including a concerto by Bach and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
At the time of writing, over 305,000 people from nearly every nation across the world have already signed the Europa Clipper’s roster, and earthbound participants have until the end of 2023 to enter in their names. Until then, you can also tune into regular livestreams of the Europa Clipper’s construction and assembly.
An international team of explorers, led by Japan, will send a tiny robotic rover to the Martian moon of Phobos very soon.
A Japanese-led mission to Mars has just signed an agreement with German and French partners to build a rover to explore Phobos.
The rover will be transported on Japan’s planned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission and operate on Phobos’ hostile, low-gravity surface.
ALBION, MI — Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last person to step foot on the Moon more than five decades ago. In 2025, someone new will take his place.
The NASA Artemis mission aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, as well as explore more of the lunar surface.
A pair of Albion College professors are participating in the mission’s research into the origins and evolution of the Moon, college officials said.
Image credit: NASA
To mark International Women in Engineering Day (INWED), prime STEM employer Northrop Grumman celebrated some of its women engineers like Sally Richardson, Jill Eskew and Erica Sandoval who are Defining Possible for the next generation, and helping put the first woman on the Moon.
SpaceX will need another six weeks or so to finish implementing hundreds of changes to its Super Heavy-Starship rocket and the gargantuan booster’s Texas launch pad before it will be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit, company founder Elon Musk said Saturday.
That’s assuming Federal Aviation Administration clearance to fly in the wake of the Super Heavy’s dramatic maiden launch April 20 in which the rocket blew itself up after multiple engine failures and the Starship upper stage’s failure to separate from the first stage booster.
In a Twitter Spaces discussion with author Ashlee Vance, Musk said SpaceX is implementing “well over a thousand” changes,” and “I think the probability of this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60 percent. It depends on how well we do at stage separation.”