Space engineers have set up the rocket which will carry the Olympic flame to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch of Soyuz TMA-11M is scheduled for Thursday. The Soyuz spacecraft will be boosted by a Soyuz-FG rocket from the first launch pad of the Cosmodrome, the [...]
Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus spacecraft ends its mission today with a blazing reentry over the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand, carrying more than a ton of trash from the International Space Station. Astronauts aboard the space station loaded the unmanned Cygnus with 2,850 pounds of refuse before using the station’s [...]
Despite the two-week old government shutdown and NASA’s official online presence going completely dark, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have still been tweeting away and sharing some pretty spectacular snapshots. During the shutdown, NASA has kept Mission Control lights on at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, making [...]
In short: he's in trouble. In the film Gravity, which opens this month, two astronauts are on a spacewalk when an accident hurtles them into the void. So what would actually happen if you went, in NASA's terminology, "overboard"? NASA requires spacewalking astronauts to use tethers (and sometimes additional anchors). [...]
