The commercial spaceflight company Orbital Sciences has delayed the launch if its first delivery mission to the International Space Station next week by at least one or two days due to expected frigid temperatures. Orbital Sciences was slated to launch its unmanned Cygnus cargo ship and Antares rocket toward the [...]
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 [...]
With a thunderous roar, a 224-foot rocket carrying a massive satellite launched from Cape Canaveral and blasted into outer space, hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean as it cut across the night sky. On Tuesday, Hawthorne rocket maker SpaceX lifted the SES-8 telecommunications satellite into geostationary transfer orbit -- nearly 50,000 [...]
