It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different, a re-entry of a redundant craft in which […]
Last week, the mainstream news was filled with headlines about K2-18b — an exoplanet some 124 light-years away from Earth that 98% of the population had never even heard about. Even astronomers weren’t aware of its existence until the Kepler Space Telescope picked it out back in 2015, just one of the more than 2,700 […]
Space X Starship firing its many Raptor engines. The raptor pioneered the new generation of methalox. (Image: Space X) Go back a generation of development, and excepting the shuttle-derived systems, all liquid rockets used RP-1 (aka kerosene) for their first stage. Now it seems everybody and their dog wants to fuel their rockets with methane. […]
NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman gives ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli a haircut in the Kibo laboratory on the ISS in 2011. (Credit: NASA) Although we tend to see mostly the glorious and fun parts of hanging out in a space station, the human body will not cease to do its usual things, whether it involves the […]
Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of A4 paper requires a lot of electricity. This is why they have been only used for applications where sustained thrust and extremely low fuel […]
The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed […]
When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The plucky little satellite made it to 1981 when a battery failure caused it to be written off as dead. Then, in 2002 it came back to life. The prevailing theory being that one of the […]
In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized. Rather […]
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander’s first look at the solar eclipse as it began to emerge from its Mare Crisium landing site on March 14 at 5:30 AM UTC. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace) After recently landing at the Moon’s Mare Crisium, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander craft was treated to a spectacle that’s rarely observed: a total […]
As part of the payloads on the Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) that recently touched down on the Moon, the Lunar GNNS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) has become the first practical demonstration of acquiring and tracking Earth orbital GNSS satellites. LuGRE consists of a weak-signal GNSS receiver, a high-gain L-band patch antenna the requisite amplification […]