WASHINGTON — Blue Origin is on track to perform the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle July 20, carrying company founder Jeff Bezos and three others on a suborbital spaceflight.

At a July 18 news conference, company officials said they had successfully completed a flight readiness review for the NS-16 mission that will carry Bezos, his brother Mark, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen.

Washington (AFP) July 17, 2021
Jeff Bezos sets his sights on a new frontier in space in the coming days after building a gargantuan business empire which has in many ways conquered the Earth. His journey into space aboard a reusable rocket built by his firm Blue Origin comes just two weeks after he stepped aside as chief executive of Amazon, which grew from a garage startup into one of the world's most formidable business

Rome, Italy (SPX) Jul 19, 2021
Thales Alenia Space, Joint Venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), and Axiom Space of Houston, Texas (USA), have signed the final contract for the development of two key pressurized elements of Axiom Space Station - the world's first commercial space station. Scheduled for launch in 2024 and 2025 respectively, the two elements will originally be docked to the International Space Station

Canberra, Australia (SPX) Jul 19, 2021
Faster space manoeuvres and safer, more sustainable, propellants may soon be possible thanks to a new three-year partnership between The Australian National University and French propulsion company ThrustMe. Led by the ANU Research School of Physics, the joint research program will explore how electrothermal plasmas can help advance space propulsion technology. ANU researcher Associa

Beijing (XNA) Jul 19, 2021
China carried out the maiden flight of the prototype of a reusable suborbital aerospace plane in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Friday, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, the country's major space contractor. The unnamed prototype was lifted by a carrier rocket at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and flew for a certain period of time before maki

London, UK (SPX) Jul 19, 2021
Space scientists, spoken word artists and filmmakers teamed up to create a new short film, 'Beyond Visible Noise', that will launch at the National Astronomy Meeting on Tuesday 20 July. Dr Martin Archer of Imperial College London will describe how scientists and poets worked together to take the incredibly weak sound waves found in space and convert them to the audible content that features in t

Amsterdam, Netherlands (SPX) Jul 19, 2021
An international team of astronomers have become the first in the world to detect isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. It concerns different forms of carbon in the gaseous giant planet TYC 8998-760-1 b at a distance of 300 light years in the constellation Musca (Fly). The weak signal was measured with ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile and seems to indicate that the planet is relat

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 19, 2021
NASA has returned the science instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope to operational status, and the collection of science data will now resume. This will be the first science data collected since the payload computer experienced a problem on June 13, which placed the instruments in a safe configuration and suspended science operations. "Hubble is an icon, giving us incredible insight in

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope returned to science operations July 17 after a hiatus of more than a month as controllers successfully switched the orbiting observatory to a backup payload computer.

NASA said the instruments of the 31-year-old telescope are now operational nearly five weeks after a payload computer, which commands those instruments, malfunctioned.

TAMPA, Fla. — Malaysian operator Measat has likely lost control of an aging satellite that has been drifting westward in geostationary orbit for nearly a month, according to analysts at space tracking company ExoAnalytic Solutions.