WASHINGTON — NASA has selected Blue Origin to develop a lunar lander to transport astronauts on Artemis missions starting at the end of the decade.

A team of researchers arrived at the new birth date estimate for Saturn’s rings by studying the build-up of dust around the gas giant planet. Tiny grains of rock stream through the solar system on a near-constant basis, resulting in thin layers of the material building up on planets, moons and asteroids and in icy ring systems like that of Saturn. To try and arrive at a new age estimate for Saturn’s ring system, researchers studied how rapidly this dust layer gathers, similar to determining how long a surface in your house has been left untouched by running a finger over it. 

WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency is planning a new procurement of 100 satellites to continue to build out a military constellation in low Earth orbit.

WASHINGTON — NASA has ended the mission of a cubesat intended to go into orbit around the moon but which was unable to do so because of problems with its propulsion system.

WASHINGTON — Two companies have disclosed details about how they could raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA evaluates that and other concepts offered to the agency.

WASHINGTON — A radar antenna on a newly-launched European mission to Jupiter has finally deployed after weeks of effort to loosen a stuck pin.

TAMPA, Fla. — An Italian Earth observation project funded by pandemic relief euros has ordered at least 34 satellites and a pair of Vega launches in recent months.

The Miyin project envisions sending four light-collecting telescopes and a beam combiner to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. Flying in formation, the spacecraft will use interferometric techniques to provide high angular resolution mid-infrared observations to directly image and characterize exoplanets around stars up to 65 light-years away.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is getting a second launch pad on the West Coast after gaining approval to lease Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, a historic site previously occupied by United Launch Alliance. 

TAMPA, Fla. — Spanish Earth observation satellite provider Satlantis has bought a majority stake in British university spin-out SuperSharp to expand into the thermal imaging market.

TAMPA, Fla. — Spaceport Cornwall, which provided the runway for Virgin Orbit’s failed launch from the U.K. in January, opened a new operations facility April 27 to attract more businesses in the wake of its flagship customer’s bankruptcy.

WASHINGTON — The Russian government has agreed to continue participation in the International Space Station to at least 2028, the last partner to agree to an extension of the station’s operations.

The Gravity-1 rocket will launch from a mobile sea platform developed as part of sea launch facilities developed at Haiyang in Shandong province during the second half of 2023, CEO Yao Song said in a mid-April meeting with provincial government leaders. Earlier announcements point to a fourth quarter launch.

BORDEAUX, FRANCE – Parabolic flight pilots are a rare breed. There are only eight of them in Europe capable of sharing the aircraft’s controls during these nerve-wracking series of up-and-down maneuvers that create brief spells of weightlessness and reduced gravity conditions. These aviators include the cream of the crop of Europe’s military and test pilots and even one active astronaut. Probably the most experienced of these magnificent eight is Eric Delesalle, the head pilot at Bordeaux-based company Novespace, a spin-off from French space agency CNES and Europe’s only provider of parabolic flights for scientific, and sometimes entertainment purposes. 

Moonquakes may be  be smoothing out the surfaces of moons orbiting gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, new research has revealed. The findings could solve a long-standing mystery regarding why many of these icy moons have such smooth terrain.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said the first integrated test flight of his company’s Starship vehicle met his expectations despite a cascading series of engine failures and other malfunctions that eventually caused the rocket to lose control.