Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lunar lander – which is already circling the moon – will touch down on the lunar surface on Sunday, March 2! But before that EarthSky will get an exclusive insider look at the mission and the lander. At 12:15 p.m. CST (18:15 UTC) on Thursday, February 27, Firefly’s future … Read more
An annual safety report to NASA has both praise for the agency and also underscores a number of cautionary woes, including the space agency’s undertaking of the Artemis back-to-the-moon with humans campaign. The annual report from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has been released. The report observes that NASA has made impressive progress. Challenges … Read more
In September 2004, NASA’s Genesis return sample capsule tumbled from the sky and slammed into the Utah desert in a remote part of the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, shattering the delicate solar wind collectors it carried. The upshot of that downfall: new scientific insights following over 20 years of painstaking work by researchers sorting … Read more
Artemis 2 crewmembers Jeremy Hansen (from left), Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch will have to wait a few additional months before they fly around the moon and back. Credit: James Blair/NASA For the second time this year, NASA has pushed back its timeline to land the first Americans on the Moon since the … Read more
The Artemis moon landings are delayed again due to technical difficulties. This time, the problem is with the Orion spacecraft heat shield. NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the new landing dates are in April of 2026 for Artemis II and sometime in 2027 for the first human landing during the Artemis III mission. The … Read more
We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see the first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era lift off. NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it’s delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, … Read more