Launch of Expedition 43 / Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls It’s not a five year mission, and it certainly isn’t going anywhere “no-one has gone before,” but NASA’s longest manned space mission got underway on Friday with the liftoff of a Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft carrying veteran American astronaut Scott Kelly, and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady […]
On Wednesday, March 25, NASA announced that it had reached a decision regarding which option the agency is to pursue as part of its Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. In what came as no great surprise to those who have been following the space agency’s painful struggle to come up with an achievable mission plausibly […]
Curiosity Self Portrait / Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Two noteworthy news stories from Mars. First, NASA’s diminutive but never say die rover Opportunity, which initially began its three month primary mission on the Red Planet 11 years ago, has now traveled a cumulative distance of 26.2 miles. Over the course of that journey, the distance of […]
Image Credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation Sierra Nevada Corporation is keeping the “chase” in its Dream Chaser space plane. On March 17th, the company revealed its proposal for an unmanned version of Dream Chaser intended to compete for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services 2, or CRS-2 contract. Unlike the version put forward under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, […]
Image Credit : Mars One Mars One is addressing the criticism coming its way from a number of sources. In the below Youtube interview, the organization’s founder Bas Landorf challenges a recent piece by Australian reporter Elmo Keep, while conceding that the time frames for both a Mars orbiter/lander as a well as possible first […]
Delta Heavy / Image Credit United Launch Alliance An Innerspace Editorial: In what seems to be becoming something of an annual affair, it was SpaceX versus United Launch Alliance Round earlier this week in Washington D.C. Last year, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and ULA’s Michael Gass squared off against each other in a highly contentious Senate […]
Image Credit: NASA Photo / Tom Tschida SpaceX is not the only organization making significant strides in autonomous landing technology. NASA.gov as a has a good writeup on the results of tests conducted last December using Masten’s Zombie low altitude rocket to simulate Mars landings. The key difference here is that by using the imaging […]
For Mars One, the hits just keep on coming. Coming on the heels of an MIT study which predicted would-be colonists would doe of hypoxia by the 68th day of a notionally permanent relocation to the Red Planet, and more recent reports that plans for a 2018 surface lander and orbiter have been shelved, Mars […]
One More Time: Dream Chaser / Sierra Nevada Corporation Sierra Nevada Corporation formally introduced the latest variant of its oft proposed but thus far underloved Dream Chaser space plane on Tuesday, March 17th. It is intended to compete for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services 2, (CRS2) contract to serve the International Space Station. Unlike the manned […]
Own it! : Image Credit / Swiss Space systems Swiss Space Systems has found a rather unique way to offer customers of its parabolic flights the opportunity to become investors. According to the company’s latest newsletter: “We’re offering S3 ZeroG flights at an exceptional price for a flight campaign taking place in Switzerland in the […]
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