A few more details regarding SpaceX’s Red Dragon mission to Mars emerged during a quarterly meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, which was held in Cleveland on July 26th. As reported in SpaceNews, NASA estimates that it will spend roughly $32 million over four years supporting the mission, which SpaceX hopes to launch in 2018. SpaceX […]
If anyone happened to waiting for the Democratic party to take credit for the amazing success enjoyed by NASA’s COTS/Commercial Resupply Program under the Obama Administration, using it as an example of what public /private partnerships can accomplish, they are likely to be sorely disappointed. Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last night alongside his […]
What a week in space. It began of course, with SpaceX launching a Dragon spacecraft to ISS for the 9th time, and landing a Falcon 9 first stage at Cape Canaveral for only the second time. It also featured a speech and curious non-endorsement by former astronaut and first female Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins at […]
Space is rarely an important topic during most presidential election, but at least this year it is being mentioned. Former astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission is scheduled to speak on Wednesday evening. It will be interesting to see if her comments match the tone towards public/private partnerships the […]
On a beautiful Florida evening just one calendar day shy of a full moon, SpaceX provided some illumination of its own, recording a flawless liftoff and landing of its Falcon 9 rocket during the course of launching its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for the NASA CRS-9 mission. Liftoff took place on […]
All systems are go as SpaceX and NASA are counting down to the launch of a Falcon 9 booster and Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. Liftoff is scheduled for 12:45:23 AM EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. In a rare occurrence, a number of Kennedy Space Center […]
After completing a successful static test fire on Saturday morning, SpaceX is ready to begin the countdown in earnest to Sunday evening’s planned launch of its Dragon spacecraft on the CRS-9 mission. And while the robust little spaceship will be loaded with nearly 5,000 lbs of research and support equipment for the orbiting outpost, none […]
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters concludes that in addition to whatever ice reserves the dwarf planet Ceres may harbor under its surface, (and they could be substantial, including even a subsurface ocean) the largest body in the main asteroid belt has also likely accumulated quite a bit of water ice in permanently shadowed […]
It is in many ways high summer for NASA’s fleet of robotic spacecraft deployed throughout the solar system. On Monday evening, as the fireworks were lighting up the night sky across much of the United States, the space agency’s latest probe, Juno, arrived in orbit around Jupiter. Coming nearly five years after it launched from […]
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has entered Jupiter’s magnetic field on its way to a July 4th orbital insertion around the solar system’s largest planet. The Juno spacecraft, which launched on August 5th, 2011 will spend 20 months looking deep into the gas giant’s atmosphere, hopefully yielding a treasure trove of information regarding its origins, and inner […]
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