A robotic lunar lander developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines became the first private spacecraft to land on the moon Thursday. The Odysseus lunar lander’s victory was the first U.S. landing on the moon in over 50 years, and faced some difficulties in its trip to the lunar surface, with Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus calling … Read more
Would you like to be stuck in a box with three other strangers for a year, pretending to be on Mars? Yeah? OK, weirdo, I’ve got good news for you. NASA is looking for a handful of people to do just that. Daytona 500 Champ William Byron On Teamwork And Strategy Here’s what’s going on. … Read more
The private race to space basically has two main parties right now, there’s the Elon Musk-backed SpaceX, which regularly ferries supplies and satellites around for Nasa, and the Jeff Bezos-funded Blue Origin, which is the space travel agent of choice for the rich and famous. Now, there’s a third private space flight firm that’s almost … Read more
Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how … Read more
Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission’s loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA’s longest-lived spacecraft. The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected … Read more
Robin McKie is the science editor of the Observer. Over the last 42 years, he’s covered everything from advances in genetics and new discoveries in physics to the urgent scientific issues raised by the Covid pandemic. But one topic excites him more than any other: space – and, more specifically, the moon. He tells Michael … Read more
Descrease article font size Increase article font size A highly anticipated lunar orbit and a return to the moon by humans after more than 50 years are being pushed back. NASA announced on Tuesday that it will delay the launch of the Artemis II mission that was slated for November 2024 to September 2025 to … Read more
Billionaire Elon Musk on Sunday adamantly denied using illegal drugs, after the Wall Street Journal published a scathing report detailing purported concerns among some high-level company executives about the SpaceX and Tesla CEO’s alleged illegal drug use. The Journal reported Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, including at … Read more
The International Space Station is due for decommission in the 2030s. NASA is currently evaluating how to go about retiring the station: options include letting it burn up in the atmosphere or pushing it into a graveyard orbit. There’s another option that doesn’t involve disposing of the ISS at all, which would extend the life … Read more
