A little while ago, the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in its CRS-35 (Cargo Resupply Service 35) mission,...

RAVENSWOOD – Jim Justice, West Virginia’s junior U.S. senator, has often referred to the state’s economic potential as a “rocket ship ride,” but Wednesday he paid tribute to the men and women who are making the nation’s return to the moon possible. Justice made his first visit to the Constellium Rolled Products Ravenswood plant Wednesday morning, along with his English bulldog Babydog, to celebrate the facility’s contributions to NASA’s Artemis space program. Speaking to a room full of plant employees, Justice said “exciting” would not adequately describe the accomplishments of the Constellium team. “That’s the understatement of all time. It’s amazing,” Justice said. “You give us in so many ways, dignity and excellence and craftsmanship and intelligence. You give us all that. And the world stands to the side and says, ‘I can’t possibly believe it.'” Workers at Constellium manufactured critical structural elements for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket constructed by Boeing and the Orion Crew Module constructed by Lockheed Martin. These included the capsule itself that sent NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen orbiting around the Moon on a 10-day mission in April for Artemis II, returning safely to Earth...

Christina Birch is busy showing the world you can do it all, because the 39-year-old former cyclist will soon be flying to space for NASA. The Arizona native and multiple U.S champion has been selected for the SpaceX-14 mission, which is set to launch in the spring of 2027, according to Velo. Birch...

A few hours ago, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Grace spacecraft docked with the Harmony module of the International Space Station, completing the first part of its...

Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk has successfully reached the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission, marking his first spaceflight. The 44-year-old mission specialist, who grew up on an Alberta cattle farm, expressed disbelief upon learning he had made it to space, stating, 'I don't really believe it yet.' Kutryk is part of a four-person crew that includes NASA commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The Crew-13 mission achieved the fastest flight time ever to the ISS, taking just under eight hours to reach the station. After docking procedures, Kutryk and his crewmates were welcomed by the seven astronauts already aboard the ISS. During a welcome ceremony, Kutryk emphasized the importance of Canada's presence on the ISS, stating, 'Looking forward to a good mission after some sleep. That's what I'm going to go do next.' The six-month mission will involve conducting experiments, research, and critical maintenance work on the ISS. Notably, Kutryk's wife is expected to give birth to their third child during his deployment. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly attended the launch from Kennedy Space Center, marking her first time witnessing a launch. She highlighted the significance of international cooperation in space exploration, particularly during 'tense geopolitical times,' and discussed Canada's potential contributions to future lunar and Mars exploration with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) expressed pride in Kutryk's achievement, with CSA Director Mathieu Caron noting that for the first time in his 30-year career, his children consider him 'cool.' This mission follows a notable year for Canadian space exploration, including Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen's participation in the Artemis II mission, which marked humanity's first trip to the moon in over 50 years. Joly also announced plans for a new Canadian Space Agency president and a new space strategy to promote Canada's goals in space exploration, emphasizing the importance of space research for industry, job creation, and national sovereignty. The mission underscores Canada's growing role in international space collaboration and its commitment to advancing space technology and exploration.

Rocket science is hard. Famously so. Spacecraft have millions of components, each performing thousands of steps. A single mistake can jeopardise the entire mission. Mission controlers can’t simply dispatch a technician to Mars or the deep void of space to fix the problem if something goes wrong. Instead, they spend hours checking and testing every aspect of the mission to make sure everything is working as planned. But even rocket scientists are still only human. They have their bad days and sometimes make foolish mistakes. From forgetting to turn on the radio to farting astronauts, here are 10 of the most embarrassing space screw-ups ever. A NASA probe was destroyed by a very expensive maths error On 23 September 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) arrived at the Red Planet, ready to monitor Mars’s ever-changing weather. First, it needed to enter orbit. Rather than using thrusters to slow down, NASA planned to skim across Mars’s thin atmosphere, using the drag as a brake. Minutes before the manoeuvre was due to occur, the spacecraft’s signal vanished, never to be heard again. The reason for the failure turned out to be a single number measuring how much force MCO’s thrusters were producing...

It was the morning in the USA when SpaceX conducted a new flight test of its Super Heavy rocket and Starship prototypes, launched from its base in Boca Chica,...

AstroForge plans to make spaceflight history next year. The California-based asteroid-mining company has booked its Autonomy-1 mission on the first-ever flight of Stoke Space's Nova Pathfinder rocket, which is scheduled to launch in early 2027. As its name suggests, Autonomy-1 will operate independently, thanks to AstroForge's newly developed Solo spacecraft intelligence model. "Autonomy-1 will be the first space mission to complete its entire mission after separation without a single command from the ground," AstroForge CEO and co-founder Matt Gialich wrote in a Tuesday (Sept. 22) blog post announcing the mission. "Using Solo, we will remove the human operator from the loop." AstroForge was founded in January 2022 with an ambitious goal in mind, which the blog post states: "to unlock the resources of the solar system." AstroForge will go after metals, which it plans to extract using a fleet of spacecraft spread throughout the final frontier. Manually controlling a large number of such probes would be a taxing and expensive enterprise, which explains why the startup developed Solo. The intelligence model is "designed to autonomously coordinate a spacecraft's onboard functions," Gialich wrote in the blog post. "Solo works on top of AstroForge's existing deterministic, physics-based flight software, allowing the spacecraft...

After a successful late-August launch, the $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is cruising to its final orbit about a million miles from Earth. If all goes well, NASA’s latest “flagship” observatory will be sending back unprecedented cosmic panoramas and revolutionary images of exoplanets by the end of the year. Like its predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman was designed and built primarily at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. But some current and former Goddard workers say NASA would not be able to build another telescope like Roman today. There aren’t enough people or pieces of equipment left. Budget cuts and workforce reductions by the Trump administration have arguably hit Goddard the hardest out of NASA’s 10 research centers. From March 2020 to January 2025, a period that included U.S. DOGE Service layoffs and several rounds of early retirements in 2025, Goddard lost 40 percent of its personnel, shrinking from 10,000 federal workers and contractors down to 6,000. Since then managers have hired back 600 workers. In addition, NASA shut down several testing and technology development labs and broke up engineering teams, making work more difficult for those who remain. On supporting...

A little while ago, the Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus spacecraft took off on an Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), part of...

A little while ago, the Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus spacecraft took off on an Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), part of...

When NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida late last month, engineers were anxious. Expectations were high. The telescope is supposed to collect more information than any other has before about how the universe is expanding and how many previously hidden planets might be in the galaxy. Fifteen years of preparation and $4 billion had led to this moment. But with spacecraft, the smallest of mistakes can derail everything. And at NASA's premier space flight complex, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., engineers knew that teams working on the telescope had been operating under tenuous conditions. NASA's management had forced scientists to quickly move out of their labs at Goddard multiple times since last November — and as recently as a month before Roman's launch, engineers said. That affected work on the telescope. Propulsion engineers had to run tests on Roman's fuel using less sensitive gear, two engineers told NPR, because some of their tools — which they say were higher quality and more precise — had been lost in a move months before. NASA asked staff at a radio communication lab to test an antenna for Roman before launch,...

A few hours ago, the Sentinel-3C, part of the GMES/Copernicus program, and the FLEX satellites were launched from the space center in French Guiana atop a...

The European Space Agency is offering European researchers and companies a rare and exciting opportunity to run their innovative software directly in deep space aboard ESA’s Hera mission, millions of ...

by Jeremy Wilks — Euronews

Microbes from space have fueled the plots of science fiction mainstays like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Andromeda Strain.” But with more space missions launching each year, finding extraterrestrial life in a microbial form is becoming more plausible. What will the response be back here on Earth if – or when – scientists discover extraterrestrial microbes? Will the international policy and security communities be prepared for the fallout? When you hear about extraterrestrial life, your mind may go to intelligent life, like the kind present in a lot of Hollywood science fiction. But even the confirmation of microbial life that originated somewhere other than on Earth – which is much more likely – would be a paradigm-shifting event. Thinking about what these consequences might look like early on can help nations and the international community prepare. Our team is interested in this question. We’re made up of a full professor of international affairs, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, and whose expertise is on how emerging science and technologies could affect global conflict and cooperation, as well as an emerging scholar in space policy and security and an expert on social and political implications of frontier technologies, such as AI,...

A little while ago, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center. After just over 31...