Sometimes it’s good to be a competitor, and sometimes it’s nice to be a launch provider. SpaceX gets to be both and profit off its competitors. Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Limp said the company is also open to SpaceX’s capabilities to launch its Project Kuiper satellites.

When spacecraft reenter, they need a heat shield to protect them from the immense friction and heat of speeding through the atmosphere. Usually, these are rigid structures, but ULA plans to use an inflatable heat shield to protect the engines of their Vulcan rocket and recover them for reuse. They’ll be testing out that type of heat shield next month.

One of the options Starlink customers have been waiting on, for quite a while, is the ability to use Starlink terminals while in motion. With Starlink Maritime the company released the ability to use the high-speed internet while in motion out at sea, but at last, there is an official option for customers who want to mount a Starlink terminal on top of their RV or other vehicles for in-motion use.

It’s not often that we discuss the launch of a mega constellation other than Starlink, but over the weekend, OneWeb became the first commercial launch on India’s largest rocket. This was also the company’s return to launching since it broke ties with Russia over the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

On February 23, 2022, an OSHA Inspection was opened after a SpaceX employee was injured during a test of the Raptor V2 engine. The incident left the employee in a coma for months. Though the incident resulted in a rather disastrous outcome, these hazards are not unknown or unusual for spaceflight testing.

After roughly six months aboard the International Space Station, the Crew-4 astronauts have returned to Earth, splashing down off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida on Friday, October 14.

It’s already been about a month since Astra’s closing price on NASDAQ went below the $1 limit, which triggers some issues with the powers that be in New York. Since then, the stock price has continued to decrease in value as failed launches have led the company to shift to a new rocket design.

SpaceX is still a long way away from putting crew on their Starship rocket and launching it into space, but the company just announced the first two people who will be joining the company’s second spaceflight around the Moon.

Arianespace is making great strides in the push to launch the Ariane 6. In a recent blog post, they shared a video of a test firing of the second stage.

“‘Twas a dark and very stormy night, November 14-15, 1994…” is how the legal brief begins its description of events that led to the largest maritime salvage operation at the time. Space shuttle external tank 70 (ET-70) was aboard the barge Poseidon when Tropical Storm Gordon decided to make this trip from New Orleans to Cape Canaveral anything but ordinary.

Rocket Lab just completed its 8th successful launch of the year. “It Argos Up From Here” saw their Electron rocket put ARGOS-4 into orbit for the NOAA.

Uneventful is the best way to describe it, and that’s what we’ve come to expect from SpaceX missions. Under beautiful skies and wonderful temperatures, SpaceX launched the Crew 5 mission to the International Space Station. Aboard the capsule Endurance, the crew includes Commander Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada of NASA, Koichi Wakata of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, the only female cosmonaut and the first Russian to fly from the US in a renewed seat exchange program.

In a press conference Thursday, NASA announced it is looking into the possibility of partnering with SpaceX to boost the legendary Hubble Space Telescope into a more stable orbit – something many people joked about but didn’t think would ever be real.

Towards the start of this year, NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center assessed the previously flown Dragon Capsule heat shield structure for potential corrosion damage ahead of its flight on Crew-4. They found that corrosion degradation would occur up until launch, but signed off on the reuse of the structure.

After delaying the decision several times, NASA managers finally gave the okay to roll Artemis 1’s massive SLS rocket back to the protection of the Vehicle Assembly Building before damaging winds from Hurricane Ian arrive.

In an interview with Newsweek, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson made a rather interesting comment about the agency’s two Commerical Crew partners’ progress. The once anti-commerical Senator praised SpaceX for its progress and threw shade at Boeing for still not completing its test flights.

On Blue Origin’s 23rd flight of New Shepard, NS-23, the uncrewed capsule ignited its abort system to get clear from the New Shepard rocket as flame appeared around the rocket main engine as the rocket crossed 28,000 feet.

In what could be straight out of a sci-fi film, NASA is gearing up to deliberately crash a spacecraft into a moonlet of a near-Earth asteroid in an attempt to change its motion and, ultimately, direction through space. Read on as I break down how this could not only be NASA’s but humanity’s most crucial experiment yet.