WASHINGTON — Even as the space industry complains of a shortage of launch capacity, SpaceX said it has room to increase an already surging pace of launches.

WASHINGTON — Budget pressures in NASA’s planetary science program could force the agency to choose between continuing a mission to Venus that has already been delayed or requesting proposals for a future mission.

The Minister for Industry and Science, the Hon Ed Husic MP, along with dignitaries from the Australian Space Agency and NASA announced the EPE & Lunar Outpost Oceania Consortium as one of two successful groups to receive Stage 1 grant funding from the Australian Government’s Moon to Mars Trailblazer Initiative. The project received grant funding from the Australian Government through the Australian Space Agency.

TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX launched the last two satellites March 17 that SES needs to claim C-band spectrum clearing proceeds worth nearly $4 billion in total.

NASA, in its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, requested $949.3 million for Mars Sample Return (MSR), the program that will send missions to Mars to take samples collected by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth. MSR is a joint effort with the European Space Agency, with NASA leading work on a lander and ESA an orbiter.

Earth’s gravity attracts more than a hundred tons (more than 90 metric tons) of small objects and dust from space daily, according to NASA. Most of this material burns up in the atmosphere without any effect on the planet; larger chunks may produce a bright streak of light that’s visible in the night sky or a small meteorite for a rock hunter to find.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in orbit since 1998 and space debris has forced evasive maneuvers dozens of times. According to a December 2022 NASA report (opens in new tab), the ISS has course-corrected itself 32 times to avoid satellites and trackable space debris since 1999.

The moon instrument, called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), is a pathfinder being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

In a March 7 earnings call, John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, said the company’s Vigoride-5 tug, launched in January, was in good condition as it went through a “deliberate commissioning process” in orbit. The tug carries a single smallsat for Singapore-based Qosmosys as well as a hosted payload from Caltech to test technologies for space-based solar power.

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the Florida coast March 11, returning four people from the International Space Station after more than five months in space.

NASA released additional details March 13 about its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal. An outline of the proposal, published by the White House March 9, requested $27.2 billion for the agency, a 7.1% increase from 2023 that roughly keeps pace with inflation.

Just 10 years ago, a mere thousand or so operational satellites may have orbited our planet, but there will be tens or even hundreds of thousands a decade  from now. 

The investigation of geological features called coronae sheds light on how Venus loses internal heat and gives clues about its volcanic activity.

NASA announced Feb. 27 it selected Nicola Fox as the new associate administrator for science, effective immediately. Sandra Connelly, deputy associate administrator for science, had been serving as acting associate administrator since the departure at the end of December of Thomas Zurbuchen.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. — Japanese lunar lander developer ispace said Feb. 27 that its first mission remains on track to attempt a landing in two months as it makes progress on its next two missions.

SEOUL, South Korea — Japan’s space agency JAXA said Feb. 28 it had selected two astronaut candidates as part of efforts to support the NASA-led Artemis lunar exploration program.