NASA Mars rover Perseverance gently drops its drone helicopter Ingenuity to the ground. A full flight test of the drone is due to take place in April – probably around 8 April. This will become the first aircraft to have worked extra-terrestrially excepting the...
Just like London buses, three Mars missions all seemed to arrive at the same time. While this was mainly due to planetary alignments favouring certain launch and thus arrival dates, inexpert media commentators reported that a “race” had happened and that the United...
NASA has selected the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to provide launch services for the agency’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO), the foundation elements of the Lunar space station dubbed Gateway. After integration on Earth,...
With just over one quarter of the funding it needed from Congress (US$850 million versus the US$3.2 billion requested) for its Human Landing System (HLS) – a lunar lander for its Artemis programme – NASA has been forced to delay the programme. The three...
For very different reasons, two major space agencies confirmed in January that they were losing their leaders with another declaring that its departing leader was about to leave early. First up was the departure of Jim Bridenstine, current Administrator of NASA....
NASA might have said that it wanted a minimum of 250 seconds’ worth of engine firing plus gimbal movements to attain whether the SLS core stage was safe to launch, but it did not get it at the test firing at the Stennis Space Center, Mississippi, USA. In the...
