NASA is beginning the process to procure more commercial crew flights as it looks to extend the International Space Station through the end of the decade, including the opportunity for new entrants to join the program.

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Europe’s own satellite navigation system, Galileo, has become the world’s most precise, delivering metre-level accuracy, available anywhere on Earth. It is also saving lives, relaying distress calls for search and rescue. Today there are 26 Galileo satellites in orbit 23 222 km over our heads; the first of them were launched on 21 October 2011, with nine more launches in the following years. The satellites in space are supported by a globe-spanning ground segment. The system as a whole is set to grow, with the first of 12 ‘Batch 3’ about to join the current satellites in

Washington DC (UPI) Oct 20, 2021
NASA and U.S. aerospace experts urged Congress on Wednesday to invest more quickly and heavily in development of nuclear-powered spacecraft Wednesday to stay ahead of such competitors as China. The space agency believes spacecraft powered by a nuclear thermal rocket reach Mars in just three to four months, which is about half the time required by traditional, liquid propellant rockets.

Long Beach CA (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
Rocket Lab USA reports it will attempt a controlled ocean splashdown and recovery of the first stage of an Electron rocket during the company's next launch in November. The mission will be Rocket Lab's third ocean recovery of an Electron stage; however, it will be the first time a helicopter will be stationed in the recovery zone around 200 nautical miles offshore to track and visually observe a

Washington DC (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
Variety, nutrition, and taste are some considerations when developing food for astronauts. For NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, students, chefs, small businesses, and others whipped up novel food technology designs to bring new solutions to the table. NASA has selected 18 U.S. teams to receive a total of $450,000 for ideas that could feed astronauts on future missions. Each team will rece

Washington DC (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
Rhea Space Activity (RSA) has been selected by the United States Air Force (USAF) AFWERX program for a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award to continue its effort in the development of an enhanced Lunar Intelligence (LUNINT) Dashboard in support of Space Domain Awareness (SDA). The award marks an essential next-step for RSA's SDA program. During its recently completed P

Boston MA (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars. Now astronom

Vandenberg AFB CA (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
Just two days after leaving the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, in a specialized container carefully strapped to the deck of a semi-trailer truck, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft arrived in California - its final stop here on Earth. The truck, spacecraft and a small motorcade of APL engineers and technicians pulled into Vandenbe

Beijing (XNA) Oct 21, 2021
Chinese researchers have studied the lunar samples brought back by the Chang'e-5 mission and dated the youngest rock on the Moon at around 2 billion years in age, extending the "life" of lunar volcanism 800-900 million years longer than previously known. The study, conducted mainly by a research team at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was p

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Oct 21, 2021
As NASA expands its quest to discover exoplanets - planets beyond our solar system - it also grows its toolbox. Over the summer, a new tool called NEID (pronounced NOO-id) delivered its first batch of data on the nearest and best-studied star, our Sun. The NEID spectrometer, which will help locate and characterize new worlds, observes the sky from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.