The US Congress’ House Appropriations Committee is set to disappoint NASA over its budget request. NASA originally requested US$25.3 billion for the Fiscal Year 2021. Instead, the committee has decided to award US$22.6 billion to the administration, about the...
Having previously eschewed using the Lunar Gateway space station as a half-way stop for its human carrying landing system, NASA has selected three teams to build human landers/ascent craft to land astronauts on the Moon as part of the Artemis programme. The target...
On 24 March, the European Space Agency (ESA) put its long range space missions: the Cluster quartet, ExoMars TGO, Mars Express and Solar Orbiter, into Safe Mode “Hibernation” on 24 March to limit the number of personnel it would need at its operations centre. This was...
Doug Loverro, new head of NASA’s human exploration directorate, has decided that the Gateway lunar space station concept, while good for longer-term operations, is not needed, and may actually slow initial human lunar landings currently planned for 2024. Thus, the...
On 19 February 2020, JAXA, alongside the Japanese government approved the development of the MMX mission. MMX – Martian Moon eXploration – is a sample return mission targeting the Martian moon, Phobos. The mission has a planned launch date of September...
While Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the Blue Origin-led “National Team” et al., have submitted their own bids to build the next human carrying lunar lander(s) for NASA, while its bid has been in for months, a new entrant into the competition was formally...
