Loren Grush
at 12:47 PM Feb 20 2015

The International Space Station is getting a makeover starting this week. On Friday, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts will conduct the first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure the outside of the station to create two new docking ports, Discovery News reports. The new ports will provide parking spots for spacecraft that will be visiting in the near future—namely, the commercial space taxis being developed by SpaceX and Boeing.

sarahfecht
at 12:02 PM Jan 26 2015

In early March, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will enter the orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres. “We're going to see a whole new world,” says Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director. Eight years since its launch, and four years after visiting the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, Vesta, Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two alien protoplanets in a single mission.

davemosher
at 10:22 AM Jan 19 2015

Early this morning, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, released images from the company's rocket landing attempt on Saturday. The photos show how the Falcon 9 rocket did indeed hit its intended landing platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And then it exploded.

logru712
at 11:56 AM Jan 11 2015
Space // 

At 4:47 a.m. this morning, SpaceX attempted what could have been a revolutionary feat: launching a Falcon 9 rocket and landing part of the vehicle on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The lunch was success, but the landing was a bit... rough.

logru712
at 08:20 AM Nov 26 2014

In the ongoing effort to lower the cost of commercial spaceflight, private companies hope to conquer a facet of rocket design NASA hasn't fully explored yet: reusable rockets. Up until now, all space rockets have used disposable launch systems, meaning they're designed to launch only once, and afterward, their parts are never recovered. The Space Shuttle was mostly reusable, but it still required an expendable -- and pricey -- external tank for lift-off. If a truly reusable launch system can be achieved, such a rocket could dramatically lower the cost of getting to space, since manufacturers wouldn't need to replace their rockets after each liftoff.

Loren Grush
at 08:58 AM Nov 6 2014
Space // 

In the wake of the explosion of Orbital Science’s Antares launch vehicle last week, many were quick to point fingers at the rocket’s main engine hardware. The Antares’ first-stage rocket engine is the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26, which is basically just a refurbished NK-33 - an engine made by the Soviets in the 1960s and 70s. Experts theorized that the five-decade-old engine design was most likely to blame for the destruction of the Antares, which exploded shortly after lifting off at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on October 28.

Eric Adams
at 09:17 AM Nov 4 2014

In 2004, I sat down in a flight simulator at Scaled Composites with test pilot and engineer Peter Siebold. He'd built the simulator—a precise replica of the cockpit in Scaled's radically unconventional SpaceShipOne (SS1). That ship was the predecessor of SpaceShipTwo (SS2), which broke apart over the Mojave Desert on Friday. Siebold was at the controls at the time of the accident, with Mike Alsbury as co-pilot

 
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