PARIS — A problem with Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle caused an in-flight abort a minute after liftoff Sept. 12, causing a capsule filled with payloads but not people to fire its launch abort motor and parachute to a safe landing.

At a meeting of the Earth Science Advisory Committee Aug. 2, Greg Stover, program manager for NASA’s Earth System Pathfinder Program, said NASA was in talks with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to fly the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument on a future Italian satellite.

HOUSTON — As NASA prepares to select the crew of the second Artemis mission, the agency’s chief astronaut says the entire astronaut corps, and not a previously announced subset, is eligible for that flight and future missions to the moon.

WASHINGTON — A large ship that Blue Origin planned to convert into a landing platform for New Glenn boosters is instead being sent to the scrapyard as the company changes its recovery plans.

Two coronal mass ejections (CMEs), eruptions of charged particles from the sun’s upper atmosphere known as the corona, burst from the sun on Aug. 14 and 15 respectively, according to the U.K. forecaster Met Office (opens in new tab). As the CMEs cross the 900,000-mile (150 million kilometers) distance between the star and our planet, they might cannibalize each other, according to SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab), creating a single super powerful CME. 

American Airlines has agreed to buy 20 Boom Supersonic Overture passenger jets, which are expected to carry passengers at twice the speeds of conventional passenger aircraft.

LOGAN, Utah — Spaceflight shipped its Sherpa-LTC2 orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) Aug. 10 to Cape Canaveral in Florida, where it will make a second attempt to debut the chemically powered space tug on a SpaceX launch.

LOGAN, Utah — The growth of the small launch vehicle industry is slowing, with fewer new vehicles entering the market and more vehicles going defunct, as demand for such vehicles lags expectations.

The Space Force will take over control of the Wideband Global Satcom and Defense Satellite Communications System constellations of military satellites. The satellites were built and launched by the U.S. Air Force but the Army controlled the payloads. 

In a new study, researchers studied two types of underwater snow found on Earth as an analog for understanding how Europa’s shell thickens from below. Frazil ice forms in supercooled water columns and floats upward to accrete onto the bottom of ice shelves, while congelation ice grows directly from under the ice shelf. Intriguingly, the researchers determined that ice formed by these processes retains just a fraction of the salt from the water from which it formed. Frazil ice retains just 0.1% of the ocean’s salinity and could be common on Europa, according to the study, suggesting that Europa’s ice shell could be orders of magnitude purer than previous estimates.

New evidence supports the idea that Earth’s continents were created in its distant past when massive meteorites struck the planet. 

The Air Force said Starlink is ‘the only LEO satellite network provider that is currently being used in a contested environment: Ukraine’
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command awarded SpaceX a $1.9 million one-year contract to evaluate Starlink internet services in Europe and Africa starting this month.

SAN FRANCISCO – Telespazio intends to play a key role in the future in-orbit servicing market, providing customers seeking satellite relocation, refueling, repair or removal with the necessary space and ground-based capabilities.

SAN FRANCISCO – Orbion Space Technology will supply a propulsion system for a U.S. Space Force prototype weather satellite, under a contract with General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS).

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission will not launch this year as previously planned after the agency concluded there was not enough time to complete testing of the spacecraft’s software before its launch window closes.