Zac Hall

It’s too early to mark your calendars and start planning for the Artemis 1 launch yet, but Chris Gebhardt reporting for NASASpaceflight has ruled out this year and the first three months of next year:

Our footage of the Core Stage of NASA’s Space Launch System on the B-2 Test Stand at Stennis Space Center gives you an idea of the scale of the tank, and the commentary from Maurie Vander and Barry Robinson is even more insightful.

Vander is Chief of Operations Division of NASA’s Engineering & Test Directorate, and Robinson is the SLS Core Stage Test Project Manager.

SpaceX isn’t the only American company promising private citizens trips to space in the near future. Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, is currently developing a reusable suborbital rocket system called New Shepard.

While neither spaceflight is operational for private citizens (or NASA astronauts for that matter) yet, SpaceX and Blue Origin are promising very different versions of going to space for potential paying customers.

Could manufacturing products in microgravity environments prove to be a competitive advantage? That’s the question Adidas wants to answer with its BOOST Orbital Operations on Spheroid Tesellation investigation.

The running shoe company is sending its experiment to the International Space Station in March as part of SpaceX’s CRS-20 mission, the 20th commercial resupply service mission, for NASA.

This giant orange thing is the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System, a super heavy-lift launch vehicle currently being built and tested, before it takes flight on the Artemis I mission.

A future version of this hardware will be used to take the first woman and next man to the Moon during this decade as part of a long-term strategy to eventually reach Mars.

Before that, NASA will conduct an uncrewed test flight of Space Launch System to send the Orion spacecraft around the Moon. This giant orange rocket is the exact hardware that will be used for Artemis I, formerly called Exploration Mission-1, as early as later this year:

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Vice President Mike Pence are speaking to NASA employees at Langley Research Center about National Space Council Directives, Artemis, and more.

While we may be at least a year away from learning the names of the first four SpaceX private astronauts to fly in space, we do know the first seven space tourists Space Adventures has sent into orbit.

You wouldn’t know it from reading their website this morning, but Space Adventures is working with SpaceX to send four private citizens to space. The announcement garnered enough attention to overload spaceadventures.com servers and force the website to crash for several hours.

Building on the success of Crew Dragon’s first demonstration mission to the International Space Station in March 2019 and the recent successful test of the spacecraft’s launch escape system, Space Adventures, Inc. has entered into an agreement with SpaceX to fly private citizens on the first Crew Dragon free-flyer mission. This will provide up to four individuals with the opportunity to break the world altitude record for private citizen spaceflight and see planet Earth the way no one has since the Gemini program.

Space Adventures, a 22-year-old space tourist firm based in Virginia, has already sent seven clients to space using Russian hardware. The story here will be an American first if Space Adventures secures clients and SpaceX proves successful at launching crewed vehicles into space.