The company, based in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, said Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round. Several other new investors also joined the round, including Spark Capital, Point72 Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Alameda Research and Global Founders Capital. Several investors in the company’s $9.1 million seed round, announced in February, participated as well.

In 1956, a mid-air collision between two commercial planes above the Grand Canyon killed all 128 passengers. The rapid growth of commercial air traffic combined with a lag in air traffic control (ATC) improvements made such a disaster inevitable. Federal budget cuts prevented the government-operated ATC framework from establishing the necessary radar systems to improve air traffic safety. Unfortunately, it took the 1956 mid-air collision to trigger the funding and reforms needed to improve air safety.

HELSINKI — Spanish launch startup PLD Space has debuted a fully assembled Miura 1 reusable suborbital rocket as a step towards its inaugural flight in 2022.

WASHINGTON — Concerns about the long-term viability of some existing International Space Station modules and the potential of delays in development of commercial space stations heighten the risk of a gap in low Earth orbit destinations, a new report warns.

The newly announced exoplanet belongs to a category scientists refer to as “hot Jupiters.” These worlds are built more or less like our solar system’s behemoth, but orbit much closer to their stars, hence the nickname. Although astronomers have identified more than 400 hot Jupiters to date, researchers say none are quite like the new discovery, which is designated TOI-2109b.

The Milky Way is playing a violent game of tug-of-war with its two toughest neighbors — the rowdy sibling dwarf galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. It’s hardly a fair contest. With a combined heft of about 17 billion solar masses (nearly 100 times scrawnier than the Milky Way), the two dwarf galaxies are slowly being torn apart by the gravity of our galaxy, and by each other. 

A pair of supermassive black holes that will soon become one has been discovered hiding in a nearby galaxy.
The two black holes dance around each other at the center of the galaxy NGC 7727, located some 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Scientists say they have never seen such a pair so close to our planet, but also so close to each other. 

Will humans ever find themselves at home at Alpha Centauri?  With life on Earth facing increasing challenges as humans battle against massive problems like climate change and its ever-worsening consequences, people often wonder if humanity could possibly live on another planet. In the show “Lost in Space,” which got a 2018 revival on Netflix after its original iteration in the 1960s, the Space Family Robinson family pursues doing exactly that. The show sees the family journeying out to a planet in Alpha Centauri, the closest solar system to our own.

On Nov. 8, the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, carrying the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission, departed the orbiting lab after a 6.5-month stay. Endeavour didn’t head directly home to Earth, however; it first performed a complete, 360-degree fly-around of the ISS, a maneuver not performed by a crewed spacecraft since NASA’s space shuttle fleet retired in 2011.

NASA’s much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope remains on track to launch next month.

A Long March 3B launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 11:40 a.m. EST Friday (1640 GMT, or 12:40 a.m. Nov. 27 local time). Orange and red exhaust briefly illuminated the launch pad and surrounding hills as the rocket rose from the pad and into the night sky.

NASA aims to put astronauts on the moon in this decade and on the Red Planet in the 2030s. To help make these ambitious goals a reality, the agency is performing lots of research aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — monitoring astronaut health, behavior and performance on year-long orbital missions, for example, to better understand the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body and mind.

Debris from Russia’s anti-satellite missile test last month has forced some SpaceX Starlink internet satellites to dodge in order to avoid in-orbit collisions, the company’s CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday (Nov. 30).

The Prichal, or “Pier,” module, propelled by a modified Progress cargo spacecraft, docked with the nadir port of the Nauka module at 10:19 a.m. Eastern, a little more than two days after its launch on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic has selected the winner of a contest to fly on a future SpaceShipTwo suborbital flight while Blue Origin prepares for its first New Shepard launch with a full six-person crew.

In the coming months, NASA will launch the first Artemis mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. This milestone not only puts the United States on a path to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Program, but also sets the stage for the next giant leap: exploration of Mars.