If successful , Israel will be the 4th country to land a craft on the moon , and the first time a privately funded organization does this (at a cost of mere 100$ million)
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No Man's Sky had a rough launch, to say the least, and most people expected the developers to distance themselves from it as much as they could. Instead, Hello Games has been steadily working No Man's Sky over the years, and the game managed to make a big comeback in 2018. Today, the developers...
Last October, three astronauts aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket survived an explosive, mid flight failure. The ancient, Soviet-designed Soyuz rockets are notoriously reliable, with only 1 other recorded manned launch failure in 1975, but the 2018 incident put the future of the International Space...
A group of researchers claim to have developed gallium nitride memory devices that can work at temperatures over 300 degrees Celcius (or 572 Fahrenheit, which is coincidentally about 572 Kelvin as well). As any overclocker already knows, silicon-based transistors don't work particularly well...
HP and SpaceX sent some servers with off-the-shelf Intel Xeon CPUs and Nvidia Tesla GPUs to the ISS in 2017, and as of 2018, those servers were fully operational. But, according to a recent BBC report, HP's "Spaceborne Computer" was schedules to come back down to Earth about 3 months ago, and...
Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency just confirmed that a probe sent from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft has successfully touched down on the surface of an asteroid. But unlike the previous bouncing probes that landed on Ryugu, this one fired a "bullet" into the asteroid's surface to collect some...
NASA landed their "InSight" probe on Mars in November last year, and it brought a suite of sensors and gizmos with it. Among other things, NASA wants to dig into the Martian soil with InSight, but deploying the equipment needed to do that is a painfully slow, and risky, process. But yesterday...
Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is famous for its work on the Manhattan Project and other ventures related to national security, intends to work with NASA to test asteroid deflection strategies. According to the YouTube video they just uploaded, the organizations want to hit Didymoon, a...
Curbed says the Houston-based startup Orion Span wants to build a fully modular space station that functions as a high end hotel. According to the company's plans, the hotel will be able to host up to 6 people for 12 days at a time. Trips start at a cool $9.5 million per person, but the company...
The New Horizons probe blew past "Ultima Thule" on News Year's Day in 2019, and managed to snap an image of the object on the way. Unfortunately, bandwidth is limited when the probe is so far away that radio signals take 6 hours to reach Earth, so scientists only got a partial, fuzzy image in...
IEEE Spectrum says that PointView Tech, a Facebook subsidiary, is building a laser satellite communication facility on the peak of Mount Wilson in California. The publication believes that the company is working on a laser communication satellite codenamed "Athena" and says the company has a...
China successfully made humanity's first soft landing on the far side of the Moon earlier this year. Fortunately, it's 2019, and we have cameras and transmitters far better than the ones bolted onto Apollo-era spacecraft, so China's National Space Administration just released a video of the Moon...
Earlier this year, Swarm Technologies got in trouble with the FCC for putting four tiny satellites into orbit without permission. Authorities and experts claimed that the tiny objects were too difficult to track, which makes them a danger to other satellites in orbit. Swarm was reportedly fined...
The Chang'e-4 team from China has successfully soft landed a combination lander-rover on the far side of the moon. Because the far side of the moon's view is blocked from Earth, a Queqiao relay satellite was launched in May 2018 to pass information from Chang'e-4 to Earth. The mission carried an...
In its close encounter with Ultima Thule on New Year's Day, the New Horizons probe successfully snapped some images of the asteroid. It will supposedly take weeks for the bulk of the data to make it to Earth and get processed, which isn't uprising, as bandwidth can't be particularly high...
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which launched way back in 2006 and took some gorgeous shots of Pluto in 2015, is set to make a close flyby of a Kuiper Belt object close to New Year's Eve. According to SpaceFlightNow, New Horizons will pass by Ultima Thule at 12:33AM EST, but the data will take...
Elon Musk's SpaceX has been granted a $28 million Department of Defense (DoD) contract per FA8650-17-S-9300 to research and experiment with establishing connectivity, operational, and special purpose experimentation with U.S. Air Force ground sites and aircraft. In phase two of the experiments...
Earlier this week, SpaceFlightNow reported that SpaceX made their first successful launch with a military payload. The Falcon 9 rocket carried a GPS satellite with the nickname "Vespucci" into orbit. Unlike most Falcon 9 missions, SpaceX didn't try to recover the rocket's first stage, as the...
Pictures of the water ice in the Korolev crater on Mars have been released by the European Space Agency. The icy interior of the crater is maintained by a phenomenon know as an 'ice trap'. This occurs naturally when "the air moving over the deposit of ice cools down and sinks, creating a layer...
Swarm Technologies Inc has been ordered to pay a $900,000 fine by the FCC for "unauthorized deployment and operation of satellites, unauthorized operation of earth ground stations, and other unauthorized operation and testing of radio frequency equipment." The FCC had denied Swarm Technologies'...
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Following a deadly crash back in 2014, Virgin Galactic has been reworking and retesting their plane-based launch platform for the past few years. The company completed their second supersonic flight earlier this year, and according to Twitter, SpaceShipTwo made it all the way to space in a test...
The ISS suffered from an air leak earlier this year, and authorities later discovered that the leak was likely "man made." Fortunately, astronauts managed to patch the leak from the inside fairly quickly, but the actual inspection of the leak was delayed by the failure of a manned launch to the...
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just uploaded processed sensor recordings of "wind" on Mars. The vibrations from Insight's seismometer are very low frequency, but are still audible without having to be sped up, which makes them a great bass test for your PC. NASA also uploaded the raw sounds to...
On Monday, SpaceX successfully launched a rocket carrying 64 small satellites. While this doesn't top the 104-satellite record set by an Indian rocket last year, it did set the record for the highest number of satellites ever launched by a U.S. rocket. It was also SpaceX's 19th launch this year...
After a successful Soyuz launch early this morning, three astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station. Following a failed manned launch earlier this year, experts were worried about the future of the ISS, as the Soyuz rocket is currently the only platform capable of shuttling...
NASA's InSight Mars Lander is scheduled to touch down on the red planet at around 2PM CST today. The craft has traveled over 300 million miles over the course of 7 months, and with the planet in the sights of the spacecraft's cameras, engineers have already made the last major course corrections...
In a press release, NASA announced the landing site for the upcoming Mars 2020 Rover mission. The ancient, dry river basin outside the Jezero Crater is a science treasure trove, but NASA says that landing in the area was cost prohibitive until now. Scientists claim that signs of organic...
Following the failure of a manned launch to the ISS, the future of Earth's only manned space station has been brought in to question. The US. and Russia simultaneously launched unmanned resupply missions to the ISS over the weekend, and fortunately, both of them made it to the space station...
While enormous rockets like the Falcon Heavy and the BFR tend to dominate the headlines and the public's imagination, the New York Times asserts that the small rocket industry is experiencing a kind of renaissance. Tasks that previously required car-sized satellites can now be accomplished by...
The Parker Solar Probe left Earth and started barreling towards the Sun back in August, and NASA reports that it just recently survived its first close encounter with the Sun. The spacecraft came within 15 million miles of its surface, smashing the previous record of f 26.55 million miles set in...
Russia's Space Agency, Roscosmos, has been thoroughly investigating the botched launch of a mission to the ISS. According to a press release, a damaged sensor pin led to an "abnormal" separation of one of the boosters. Up until recently, the ancient Soyuz launch system was notoriously reliable...
SpaceX sent an HP supercomputer to the ISS over a year ago, and now, after an extensive testing period, that supercomputer is available for astronauts to use. According to HP, performing calculations onboard the space station instead of on ground-based stations will save precious time and...
In a piece on Spectrum, NASA detailed their plans to mine dust on heavenly bodies in our solar system, and turn it into rocket fuel. That already sounds difficult, but according to NASA "Swamp Works" team leader Kurt W. Leucht, mining on Mars is even harder than you'd think. For example, it...
Local, state-owned newspapers in Chengdu, China announced a plan to launch an artificial moon above the city in 2020. The satellite would reflect sunlight to an area between 10 and 80 kilometers in diameter, and shine 8 times brighter than Earth's own moon. The plan is to at least partially...
Mankind landed on the moon over 49 years ago. But in addition to making history, those brave astronauts created a myth that still persists to this very day. Many people still believe that NASA "faked" the moon landing, and Nvidia set out to prove them wrong using their raytracing technology...
KSP may be a great space flight sim, but it's not exactly realistic. If you've ever wanted to simulate a specific launch, developer Declan Murphy created a cool site to do it. Flightclub.io lets you input detailed staging information, specify launch sites, program events at specific times, then...
A Soyuz rocket carrying ISS crew members aborted a launch mid flight today. 2 minutes into the launch, as the boosters separated from the main vehicle, parts started flying off while translators monitoring the live feed yelled "booster failure!." The MS-10 capsule carrying the astronauts...
After another gyroscope failure, the Hubble Space Telescope went into a "safe mode" this weekend. Only 2 of the Hubble's 6 onboard gyroscopes are working now, and it needs at least 3 to function properly. While operators on the ground saw this kind of failure coming and planned for it, the lost...
Amazon announced a partnership with Iridium Communications, with the goal of developing a satellite network for Internet of Things devices called CloudConnect. Iridium CEO Matt Desh told CNBC that he intends to cover the "whole planet," and expects the service to launch in 2019. SpaceX is almost...
Today, Japan launched 2 small rovers at an asteroid from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. The original mission launched in 2014, and took some stunning fly-by shots of the Earth in 2015 on its way out. The 2 diminutive drones measure 18cm by 7cm, weigh 1.1kg each, and feature small motors to "hop"...