NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The countdown to Mars kicked off earlier this year on July 30 when NASA’s Perseverance rover blasted off on a ULA Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s newest Martian rover will arrive in less than two months on February 18 to begin its search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a sizeable next-generation space telescope set to be launched sometime in 2021. As the launch window approaches, the telescope has gone through a series of tests to ensure its space readiness. The most recent of those tests involved unfolding the telescope’s sunshield.

A couple of weeks ago, NASA announced a cadre of astronauts selected to participate in the agency’s Artemis program. Those same astronauts will now get the opportunity to test out the Orion spacecraft hardware with a new simulator that recently arrived at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Launch of the Apollo 8 mission (December 21, 1968)

On the morning of December 21, 1968, a 36-story-tall Saturn V rocket towered over Cape Kennedy, now known as Cape Canaveral. Thousands of onlookers gathered to view the historic event on the nearby beaches. Sitting atop the lumbering Saturn V was the Apollo 8 spacecraft, ready to carry the first humans around the moon.

After a few weeks of trial and error, NASA says it has completed the wet dress rehearsal test step for the core stage of Space Launch System, the agency’s rocket to the Moon and beyond. This is the final step before NASA and Boeing engineers fire the core stage in place for eight minutes to collect data.

There’s a great space debate happening over how U.S. policy toward China should be handled when the Biden administration takes office next month. Should NASA work in cooperation with China’s space agency if the other nation is willing, or should China’s progress in space be viewed as competition?

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that a Delta II rocket display will soon be coming to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The rocket, which flew its last mission in 2018, will stand as a tribute to its almost 30 years of service.

On November 15, at 7:27 p.m. EST, an international crew of astronauts launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission was called Crew-1, and onboard was Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi, all headed to the International Space Station.

Development for NASA’s X-59 aircraft has been in full swing for the last couple of months following a pause due to COVID. Now that things are ramping up again, NASA is awarding contracts to aerospace companies to assist in the development. The latest of these contracts has just been awarded to Lockheed Martin.

Earlier this month it was reported that NASA’s Orion spacecraft to the Moon had a dead backup channel on a Power and Data Unit communication card. The Verge shared an internal document that showed multiple approaches to address the failed redundant channel, and the option to fully restore it was estimated to take up to a year. NASA has now issued a decision on how it will move forward with the Orion spacecraft ahead of its first uncrewed mission around the Moon.

Today, NASA has announced that it will be moving into the next phase of its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. This move would bring the mission into “Phase A,” the phase in which many crucial decisions will be made.

NASA has publicly announced that it will get behind a new Space Policy Directive that was recently issued by Donald Trump. Called Space Policy Directive-6 (SPD-6), it calls for nuclear systems to power future missions in space as well as future spacecraft.

NASA’s Launch Services Program is designed to help launch uncrewed rockets that deliver spacecraft into orbit or farther out into the universe. The latest company to benefit from the program is Blue Origin, as NASA has announced that the company will be awarded a Launch Services II contract.

Many of you have probably never heard the name Nicole Jordan despite her being instrumental in the recent Crew-1 mission. She was the mission manager for the launch, bringing together all the different departments to make sure that it went off without a hitch, which, thanks to her, it did.

NASA’s Near Earth Object Surveyor spacecraft currently has its development on standby as it awaits a Key Decision Point (KDP) B review. The review has been postponed until the spring of 2021 due to future budget uncertainties.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft has been in the news quite a bit lately because of the essential role it will soon play in sending astronauts to the moon. However, most don’t realize that Orion is 15 years old and has gone through a complex and expensive development, even coming close to being canceled at one point.

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.