Seth Kurkowski

Both the House and Senate passed the Consolidated Appropriations Bill for 2021 this week, and while the biggest topic is the new COVID relief measure, this is a consolidation of several appropriation bills including the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill that oversees the Arecibo Observatory.

Last night China launched its Long March 8 rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea. This was the rocket’s maiden flight with the goal to make China’s launch services program more appealing to outside customers and in the future compete with SpaceX on reusability.

Science YouTuber Scott Manley sat down with Rocket Lab CEO to talk about their year of launches while playing the popular space simulation game Kerbal Space Program.

While delivery of new methane powered engines for United Launch Alliance was expected to occur this year, Blue Origin pushed back the delivery date to next year due to more time needed to solve issues with the engine’s turbo pump.

Solid state batteries are considered the “holy grail” of technology for electric vehicles, but it has been hard to development on a large enough scale to be viable. Solid Power in Colorado is attempting to change that.

NASA has released tips for how to take photos of the Christmas Star, otherwise known as the Jupiter and Saturn “Great Conjunction”, tonight as it reaches its peak for how close they will appear.

Victor Glover, a NASA astronaut and current resident of the International Space Station, spent time taking questions from students about training to be an astronaut and what it is like living and working in space.

After the launch of SpaceX’s second 7th-time-flown booster and a seemingly perfect landing, the booster returned to Port Canaveral yesterday looking well scorched (as expected) and leaning (not exactly expected). This is the second booster that has seemed to have a rougher than normal return from its landing zone in recent weeks.

SpaceX was met with disbelief in 2011 when they announced plans to vertically land Falcon 9 rocket boosters. This was largely thought to be impossible, and some industry titans bet SpaceX wouldn’t achieve it. Almost a decade later, SpaceX still amazes us with their rocket booster landings.

The most crowd pleasing and recently less common are Return To Launch/Landing Site (RTLS) landings, and the next is set to happen tomorrow. SpaceX is positioned to complete the next Falcon 9 first stage booster RTLS landing on December 17 as part of the NROL-108 mission.

Minister Navdeep Bains announced today that two Canadian astronauts will fly on two crewed Artemis flights starting with the first astronaut on NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the Moon since Apollo 17.

After nine years of designing, building, and testing, Airbus’ European Service Module (ESM) has finished its Acceptance Review and was formally handed over to NASA on December 11. Now it is officially NASA’s property and they will be in charge of keeping it ready for when it will fly.

Lead by the University of Texas at Austin, a team of engineering students from several universities across the country will look into changing how we place sensors on hypersonic aircraft to learn more about how they fly.

JAXA recovered its Hayabusa 2 mission return capsule on December 5, and today they were able to confirm they did recover samples from the asteroid Ryugu.

After sitting on the pad for over a year and undergoing multiple launch attempts since late August, ULA’s Delta IV Heavy lifted off on Thursday carrying a classified payload known only as NROL-44.

Today a total solar eclipse will pass over parts of South America, displaying a marvelous show as the Moon slowly crosses in front of the Sun. This is the only total solar eclipse of 2020, and NASA will be providing coverage on their main channel completely in Spanish.