Blue Origin CEO and recent addition to the ranks of ‘astronaut’, Jeff Bezos, has offered to restore competition to NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) programme in an open letter to the NASA Administrator. In return for an HLS contract, Bezos has offered to cover the...
It is a time of renewal at the International Space Station as one long-standing module is removed to be replaced by another. At 1055 GMT, on 26 July, the Progress MS-16 cargo spacecraft removed the Pirs airlock module from the station in preparation for a de-orbit...
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is back online after a month of downtime due to a malfunctioning payload computer. The veteran telescope, launched to low Earth orbit in 1990, was brought back into service on 17 July when controllers switched over to a backup...
While NASA’s US$4.25 billion Europa Clipper unmanned exploration flyby mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa was always mooted as going on the NASA Heavy lift launch vehicle (HLV) SLS, and, in fact, was at one stage Congressionally obliged to do so, in the end...
The newest ISS module, known as Nauka, was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, by a Proton M at 1458 GMT on 21 July. The Proton rocket flying for the first time in almost a year utilised a 3-stage configuration as opposed to the more familiar 4-stage...
NASA selected two new missions to form part of its Discovery programme on 2 June. These missions lie on the smaller end of the scale for NASA, but will still be funded to the tune of US$500 million each. The winning candidates have been in competition since 2019 when...
