Tag Archives: Private Spaceflight

The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new arena: satellite internet. Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the …

Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. …

The broadcast journalist Gayle King and the singer Katy Perry were set to make a brief trip into space on Monday on a flight operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. It would be the first time an all-female crew has been to space since 1963. Their flight, on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, was scheduled to take off …

What do you wear for your first trip to space? If you are like most people, probably whatever spacesuit or astronaut outfit the company (or government agency) you are flying with provides. However, if you are Lauren Sánchez — journalist, pilot, children’s book author, philanthropist and fiancée of Jess Bezos — the second-richest man on the planet, you have another …

NASA will prioritize sending American astronauts to Mars, President Trump’s nominee to lead the space agency will tell a Senate committee on Wednesday. The nominee is Jared Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, who is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. As someone who has led two private astronaut flights to …

Four private astronauts ended a mission in a SpaceX vehicle on Friday by splashing down in waters near Oceanside, Calif. It was the first time the company had brought people back to Earth in the Pacific Ocean, after six years of its Dragon capsule splashing down off Florida in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. The Fram2 mission …

After a stay aboard the International Space Station that unexpectedly stretched to nine and a half months, the NASA astronaut Suni Williams is back to doing something she enjoys on Earth. “I actually went out and ran three miles yesterday,” Ms. Williams, who returned to Earth two weeks ago, said on Monday during a news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space …

A spiral of light illuminating the night sky captivated observers in Britain and much of Europe on Monday. Its cause: a SpaceX rocket, experts said, after the glowing spectacle ignited widespread curiosity and speculation about its origin. The ethereal display, seen from England to Eastern Europe, resembled a glowing celestial whirlpool in images posted on social media, where users reported …

NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could. Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over. But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace …

They set off to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months. On Tuesday, two NASA astronauts who had been in orbit since June, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, splashed down in calm, azure waters off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, concluding a saga that had captivated the country since last summer. Ms. Williams and …