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WASHINGTON — Sierra Space announced an agreement with the Turkish Space Agency and an affiliated company June 29 that could lead to cooperation on human spaceflight and lunar missions.
TAMPA, Fla. — Italian rocket maker Avio secured 340 million euros ($358 million) in government funding June 29 to develop launch vehicles for the next decade.
On Sept. 16, 2021, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ascended into space with a crew capsule atop it, carrying four private citizens—two men and two women. It was the first orbital spaceflight in history without a government employee aboard. More recently, in April of 2022, another milestone was achieved, with the first fully private flight to the International Space Station, in which the four-man crew performed research there for more than two weeks before returning to Earth.
WASHINGTON — An Electron rocket successfully launched a NASA-funded cubesat mission June 28 that will test the stability of the orbit around the moon the agency plans to use for future Artemis lunar missions.
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is one step closer to starting its journey to Jupiter’s icy moon.
The clash of two galaxy clusters in Abell 2146 is teaching astronomers about the kinds of “collisionless” shock waves that occur in our own solar system.
NASA’s Voyager 1 team is trying to work out why the spacecraft appears to be confused about its location in space, but the mission’s distance from Earth makes solving the issue challenging.
PASADENA, Calif. — In-space transportation company Impulse Space, which raised $20 million in a seed round earlier this year, announced June 17 it raised another $10 million to help accelerate work on orbital transfer vehicles.
In a June 15 statement, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) acknowledged the impending end of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.7-meter infrared telescope mounted in its fuselage. NASA announced April 28 an agreement with its partner on SOFIA, the German space agency DLR, to cease flight operations of SOFIA at the end of September. That announcement came a month after NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget request proposed ending the project.
SAN FRANCISCO – Space logistics company D-Orbit announced a $2 million contract June 9 with the European Space Agency to upgrade production of its ION Satellite Carrier.
The rising number of satellites launched in recent years, driven by the emergence of new actors and commercial satellite constellations in low-Earth orbit, has amplified concerns about preserving the long-term use of the space environment. Each year, the space industry sees record numbers of satellite launches, while not enough satellites are removed from already congested orbits at the end of their lives.
Kitt Peak National Observatory, in the southern part of the state, includes more than two dozen telescopes and has hosted astronomers for more than six decades. But now the site is facing the Contreras Fire, which began on June 11 and has been steadily growing due to high winds and lots of dry vegetation.
TAMPA, Fla. — Danish startup Quadsat said June 16 it has secured European Space Agency funding to productize the drones it uses to calibrate and test satellite antennas.
PASADENA, Calif. — As SpaceX gears up for another launch of Starlink satellites, astronomers are concerned the company maybe backsliding in its efforts to reduce the brightness of those satellites.
SEOUL, South Korea — The second launch of South Korea’s first domestically built rocket is set for June 21, a delay of a week due to strong winds and a technical glitch.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has assigned two veteran astronauts to the first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in the latest reshuffling of personnel assigned to the long-delayed mission.
