Tag Archives: Private Spaceflight

The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface. The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday. When is the landing and how …

The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date …

The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure. A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and form of water across the …

Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time? When the spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down on the moon last February, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially operated lander to reach the …

Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, is laying off roughly 10 percent of its work force, according to an email that was sent to staff on Thursday and that was viewed by The New York Times. The cuts, which could affect about 1,000 roles, follow several years of rapid growth and the successful launch last month of …

NASA’s second thoughts about VIPER opened an opportunity for someone else to book that ride to the moon. Just because its cargo was canceled did not mean Astrobotic’s journey was off — it remains scheduled for later this year. And on Wednesday, a small startup named Venturi Astrolab Inc. announced it had claimed that opportunity to accelerate its own lunar …

In a post on X on Tuesday evening, Elon Musk said President Trump had asked his rocket company SpaceX to bring home “as soon as possible” two NASA astronauts who have been on the International Space Station since June. SpaceX, in fact, is already scheduled to bring those two astronauts home, but no earlier than late March, along with two …

In a post on X on Tuesday evening, Elon Musk said President Trump had asked his rocket company SpaceX to bring home “as soon as possible” two NASA astronauts who have been on the International Space Station since June. SpaceX, in fact, is already scheduled to bring those two astronauts home, but no earlier than late March, along with two …

During his Inaugural Address on Monday, President Donald J. Trump again promised to launch American astronauts to Mars. Seated nearby, Elon Musk, a political benefactor of Mr. Trump who founded SpaceX in the hope that it would one day be able to send colonists to Mars, beamed with enthusiasm and offered two thumbs up. The gargantuan Starship rocket that Mr. …

The urgent radio calls by the air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration office in Puerto Rico started to go out on Thursday evening as a SpaceX test flight exploded and debris began to rain toward the Caribbean. Flights near Puerto Rico needed to avoid passing through the area — or risk being hit by falling chunks of the …