Rocket Science and Propulsion

A Large Object Landed on His Sheep Farm. It Came From Space.

Mick Miners was herding sheep on a four-wheeler last week when he stumbled upon a pointy black object that looked more than nine feet tall. It reminded him of either a burned tree or a piece of farm machinery. “Pretty frightening, actually,” Mr. Miners, 48, said by phone on Thursday from his roughly 5,000-acre property […]

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NASA to Launch Capstone, a 55-Pound CubeSat to the Moon

June 26, 2022: On Sunday, NASA announced a delay of at least one day for the launch of CAPSTONE to allow more time to perform final systems checks. The article has been updated. In the coming years, NASA will be busy at the moon. A giant rocket will loft a capsule with no astronauts aboard […]

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After Years of Trouble, Boeing Repeats Launch of Starliner Spacecraft for NASA

Boeing’s second chance at a do-over is off to a successful start as Starliner, its space taxi, launched to orbit on Thursday. The spacecraft was built for NASA to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But before it can do that, it has to complete a test flight without astronauts to show […]

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How Space Tourism Is Skyrocketing

Sales in the space tourism space, Mr. Curran acknowledges, “are reasonably difficult to make,” and mostly come from peer-to-peer networking. “You can imagine that people who spend $450,000 to go to space probably operate in circles that are not the same as yours and mine,” he said. Some of Mr. Curran’s most popular offerings include […]

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Rocket Lab Grabs Booster Falling From Space With a Helicopter

Catch a falling rocket and bring it back to shore … On Tuesday (Monday evening in New York), Rocket Lab, a small company with a small rocket, pulled off the first half of that feat during its latest launch from the east coast of New Zealand. After sending a payload of 34 small satellites to […]

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NASA Sees ‘Otherworldly’ Wreckage on Mars With Ingenuity Helicopter

The object resembles a flying saucer that crashed on Mars. And indeed it is. But it doesn’t belong to aliens. Instead, the wreckage is the work of NASA, a component called a backshell that detached during the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet in February 2021. “There’s definitely a […]

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SpaceX and Axiom Launch Private Astronaut Crew to Space Station

On Friday, a retired NASA astronaut and three paying customers set off on a journey to the International Space Station. The mission is the first to go to the space station on which all of the passengers are private citizens, and it is the first time that NASA has collaborated in arranging a space tourism […]

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Russia’s Loss of Rocket Launch Business Becomes SpaceX’s Gain

OneWeb, a British satellite internet company that canceled rocket launches with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, is turning to SpaceX to send broadband satellites into space. The alliance, announced on Monday by OneWeb, is unusual because SpaceX is currently OneWeb’s primary rival in the market for beaming high-speed internet from orbit to users on […]

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Dreaming of Suitcases in Space

LAKE ELSINORE, Calif. — The mission to turn space into the next frontier for express deliveries took off from a modest propeller plane above a remote airstrip in the shadow of the Santa Ana mountains. Shortly after sunrise on a recent Saturday, an engineer for Inversion Space, a start-up that’s barely a year old, tossed […]

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