All posts tagged "Astronomyandastrophysics"

ORLANDO, Fla. — A commercial company’s lunar lander launched from Kennedy Space Center last week successfully made it into the moon’s orbit on Wednesday ahead of its Thursday attempt to stick the landing. Houston-based Intuitive Machines posted on social media that its Nova-C lander named Odysseus, which blasted off from KSC on Feb. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9, had performed a 408-second main engine burn that put it into a successful lunar orbit of an altitude of about 57 miles. “Odysseus is now closer to the moon than the end-to-end distance driving across Space City, Houston, TX,” the company ......

ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA was riding a high after the overall success of Artemis I when the uncrewed rocket made a test run to the moon and back in 2022, so the message remained full steam ahead to push for a crewed Artemis II flight in 2024 and the return of humans to the moon in 2025. But under the surface were issues, and the sheen of success hit reality, prompting NASA to delay Artemis’ first human spaceflight until no earlier than September 2025, and then pushing the moon landing until at least one year later. A big driver of that delay was a NASA-driven, lessons-learned initiative that is clo......

ORLANDO, Fla. — While NASA is rooting for SpaceX to achieve Starship success so it can land humans on the moon, the U.S. military has plans of their own for the massive rocket that could include launches from Florida’s Space Coast. Elon Musk’s next-generation rocket currently in development at SpaceX’s southeast Texas facilities is gearing up for its third suborbital test flight as soon as this month after its first two ended in explosions last year. It’s part of the company’s long-term plans for a completely reusable spacecraft with more payload capacity into space than any other rocket ever.......

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced it was laying off 530 on staff or about 8% of its workforce on Tuesday after expected congressional budget cuts kneecapped one of its biggest endeavors, the Mars Sample Return mission. The Pasadena, California, institution is one of NASA’s major science mission hubs, the home to the majority of Mars missions, including the Perseverance rover currently collecting soil and rock samples as part of that mission. JPL Director Laurie Leshin said fiscal wrangling in Washington has led to an expected budget for that mission of only $300 million, less than a t......

A NASA satellite that will look at the tiniest parts of the air and ocean is set for an overnight launch from the Space Coast after a years-long path to the launch pad that staved off repeated attempts by the Trump administration to cancel the mission. The Plankton, Aerosol Cloud Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite was on the chopping block of Trump’s annual proposed NASA budgets several times as he sought to steer funds away from some climate-focused missions and shift money to deep-space efforts. Now the nearly $1 billion PACE satellite sits atop a Falcon 9 rocket ready for liftoff from Cape Ca......

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX carved its way through cloudy skies on the Space Coast, sending up a four-man crew on a private mission to the International Space Station. The quartet rode on the Crew Dragon Freedom, making its third trip to space atop a Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A at 4:49 p.m. Eastern time on the Ax-3 mission for Houston-based Axiom Space. The first-stage booster made its fifth flight, coming back for a landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 1, sending a sonic boom across parts of Central Florida. “The four of us that are lu......