Space

If there is one driving force in the commercial space industry it is economics.  The whole concept of reusable booster rocket emphasizes the importance of getting launch costs down.  SpaceX, the company leading the charge in trying to bring launch costs down, doesn’t just recover booster rockets however.  It also […]

One of the strangest predictions of general relativity is that gravity can deflect the path of light. The effect was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919. While the bending effect of the Sun is small, near a black hole light deflection can be significant. So significant that you need […]

NASA has rescheduled the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter to April 19th at 3:30AM ET, the agency announced Saturday.

One of the least known of NASA’s funding mechanisms is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.  This program, required by the Baye-Doyle Act of 1980, earmarks a piece of every US Federal agency’s budget (including NASA) for the development of small businesses to commercialize new technologies.  NASA’s SBIR program […]

NASA picked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to receive $2.9 billion to build a lunar lander as part of the Artemis mission to send humans to the Moon by 2024, the agency announced today. It’s a major vote of confidence in SpaceX from NASA — as no other company received money. The […]

Space research, like much else in capitalist societies, is driven by funding.  The biggest source of that funding for that space research is usually the US government.  Which is why, when US presidents release their budget proposals, the space community takes notice.  Especially because that budget affects NASA, the largest […]

NASA picked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to receive $2.9 billion to build a lunar lander, as part of the Artemis mission to send humans to the Moon by 2024, The Washington Post reported. It’s a major vote of confidence in SpaceX from NASA — as no other company received money.

Chinese Voyager-like missions could launch in 2024, making planetary flybys before focusing on heliosphere science.

Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) are finding new uses for the laser-based technology that sharpens telescope imagery – called adaptive optics – and it just might help mitigate the world’s growing space debris problem. Purpose-built lasers could give derelict satellites a slight ‘push’ of photons, imparting just enough […]