Retired astronaut Mark Kelly, who commanded the second-last space shuttle mission — and spent months at the side of his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, while the congresswoman recovered from a near-fatal shooting in 2011 — has joined a venture to send tourists 100,000 feet up to get their own space-style view [...]
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA astronauts will fly as “space flight participants” aboard commercial spaceships being developed to taxi crews to and from the international space station, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Office of Commercial Space Transportation has determined. “NASA astronauts do not meet the definition of ‘crew’ as [...]
If China’s just-launched Chang’e 3 lunar probe (quaintly known as the Jade Rabbit) drops its robotic rover down on the Moon’s surface in mid-December as scheduled, it will be the first soft landing on our nearest celestial neighbor in 37 years. It also kicks off a resurgence of interest in [...]
For decades, the space race was seen as being mostly about national pride. Getting there first mattered most, whereas pushing the frontiers of science and technology took a close second. The first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, was proclaimed by the Kremlin as Citizen of the World and [...]
