Spacecraft

SpaceX and NASA said today that May 19 is the new launch date for the first-ever attempt to send a private company's rocket to the International Space Station.

Intended as a demonstration flight, the mission is designed to give NASA and SpaceX information that will help them plan future missions to the space station. Weather scrapped the previous attempt at the launch, which had been scheduled for May 7.

Unless weather or other factors intervene, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft will launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on May 19. On May … Read more

The anniversaries this week of the first man in space and the launch of NASA's first space shuttle missions come at time when commercial spacecraft are ushering in a new era of space flight.

Thursday was the 51st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbit around the Earth, an event that shocked the world and ratcheted up the speed of the Cold War-fed space race.

And 31 years ago on April 12, the space shuttle Columbia lifted off, the inaugural flight of NASA's shuttle program which drew to a close last year.

Astronauts from different countries on the … Read more

NASA revealed the first unique views of the far side of the moon today.

The images were captured by a video camera on one of NASA's twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecrafts on January 19. In the video (see below), the spacecraft flies towards the lunar south pole exposing the moon's north pole.

"The far side of the moon is extremely rugged," said Maria Zuber, a principal investigator on the project. "The surface also contains many impact craters which are preserved features from asteroids that hit the moons surface after it formed.&… Read more

Zac Manchester is taking this whole private space exploration idea into his own hands. A Cornell graduate student in aerospace engineering, Manchester hopes to raise enough money to launch 100 chip-size satellites into space.

He and some collaborators have created a DIY satellite called Sprite, which Manchester calls the "world's smallest spacecraft." The devices measure the size of a couple of postage stamps, and pack solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a microcontroller onto a single silicon microchip.

Manchester's goal? He's trying to raise $30,000 on Kickstarter so he can send as many Sprites into orbit as possible to demonstrate that they can be safely launched and operated. … Read more

In The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote, "Space is big--really big--you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Space's roominess is good news for us rapidly multiplying humans, because it seems logical that we should one day want to expand into our solar system--and possibly further. But because of our frail and squishy bodies we need some heavyweight protection to leave the cozy home comforts of our bijou atmosphere, … Read more