Firefly Aerospace’s first mission to the moon is nearly ready to fly. The company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Monday (Dec. 16) for integration with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the robotic probe — as well as the private Japanese moon lander Resilience … Read more
Pearl Young, second from left, at the NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1927. Credit NASA Langley Archives Thirteen years before any other woman joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – or the NACA, NASA’s predecessor – in a technical role, a young lab assistant named Pearl Young was making waves in the agency. Her legacy … Read more
It is robotic moon machinery on steroids. Tagged as the Endurance sample return mission, it would collect bits and pieces from key lunar locations for later retrieval by future astronauts in NASA’s Artemis program. Furthermore, high-value collectibles snagged from those distant spots would be hauled back to Earth by astronauts. NASA has begun blueprinting the … Read more
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire, philanthropist and private astronaut to lead NASA. What do we know about the potential next administrator of America’s space agency? Isaacman, born in Union, New Jersey in February 1983, is worth an estimated $1.8 billion, according to Forbes. He accrued this fortune from his payment-processing … Read more
NASA performs first aircraft accident investigation on another world by Staff Writers Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 13, 2024 Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and AeroVironment are completing a detailed assessment of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s final flight on Jan. 18, 2024, which will be published in the next few … Read more
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter rests on the sandy dunes of the Red Planet’s surface following a crash during its final flight in January. Credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FAA oversee investigations of aircraft accidents in U.S. airspace. But what happens when a crash occurs hundreds of millions of miles … Read more
Artificial intelligence is being developed to provide a robotic brain for a future NASA mission to land on the icy surface of one of the solar system’s ocean moons, such as Europa or Enceladus. The autonomous software is being developed by teams of researchers who are making use of a robotic arm, mimicking that belonging … 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