Dave Griggs, pictured during the Space Shuttle program’s first contingency spacewalk in April 1985, lost his life 30 years ago this month. Photo Credit: NASA Thirty years ago, America’s Space Shuttle program had risen from the depths of despair—following the calamitous loss of Challenger—to a triumphant return-to-flight and the three surviving orbiters, Columbia, Discovery and Atlantis, were beginning to establish ...

Artist’s concept of the Psyche spacecraft near the metal asteroid Psyche. This type of asteroid has never been visited by any earthly spacecraft before. Image Credit: SSL/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Psyche mission is preparing to go someplace that no other planetary mission has been to before: a metal asteroid. Now, NASA Headquarters in Washington has approved the start of the final ...

B1051 punches through low-level murk and into crystal-clear California skies, beginning its effort to deliver three Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) satellites into near-polar orbit. Photo Credit: SpaceX For the fifteenth time in under six years, the roar of Merlin rocket engines rolled across a fog-enshrouded Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., earlier this morning (Wednesday, 12 June), as SpaceX smoothly delivered ...

Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt with the U.S. flag and the Earth in the sky. Taken during the mission’s first EVA on the lunar surface on December 19, 1972. Photo: NASA President Trump, in a tweet on June 7th at 1:38 PM, publicly put himself at odds with a policy directive that he himself signed just a year-and-a-half ago. That ...

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David National Geographic, 2019 hardcover, 224 pp., illus. ISBN 978-1-4262-2005-0 US$26.00 Well, that was close. For a time Friday afternoon, it appeared that President Trump was bringing NASA’s accelerated return to the Moon to a sudden halt. “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going ...

Astronomers waited until after the launch of the first Starlink satellites to start worrying about

David Shomper (circled) and his crew—barely visible—atop the Mobile Service Structure

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Part of NASA’s new low Earth orbit commercialization effort includes offering a docking port on the

Crew Dragon soaring on Demo-1 from KSC pad 39A on March 2, 2019. Tuesday’s long-delayed flight of the Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) will see the second flight by the B1051 core. Photo: Alan Walters/AmericaSpace A trio of identical satellites, each bearing the maple leaf of Canada, will rise to orbit on Wednesday, 12 June, from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-4E at ...