Sierra Nevada Corporation to advertise space spinoff on Saturday Night Live
Friday, 07 May 2021 11:00WASHINGTON — Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is taking a novel approach to publicizing the spinoff of its space business: buying ads linked to Elon Musk’s appearance on the television show “Saturday Night Live.”
SNC will run “pre-roll” ads on clips from Musk’s appearance on the show May 8 on YouTube.
Virgin Orbit schedules next LauncherOne mission for June
Friday, 07 May 2021 09:53WASHINGTON — Virgin Orbit has scheduled its next LauncherOne mission for June, carrying a mix of defense and commercial cubesats.
Virgin Orbit said May 6 that it will launch six cubesats on its next flight of its LauncherOne vehicle in June, flying out of the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Higher Power in space | Thomas Pesquet & Coldplay
Friday, 07 May 2021 09:00To celebrate the premiere of Coldplay's latest single 'Higher Power’, the band linked up for an extraterrestrial video chat with French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who is currently on a six-month mission on board the International Space Station. A specially recorded performance of Higher Power - featuring dancing alien holograms - was beamed up to Thomas, who gave the track its very first play on board the Station. The song’s premiere followed a conversation which took in similarities between life on tour and life on the Space Station, how planet Earth looks from space and its fragility;
China wants to send spacecraft to edge of solar system to mark 100th year of PRC
Friday, 07 May 2021 08:37Chinese scientists are evaluating the feasibility of a project to send spacecraft to the edge of the solar system, said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program. According to the project, the Chinese spacecraft will cover a distance about 100 times than that between the sun and Earth by 2049, when the People's Republic of China celebrates its 100th founding anniversar
BlackSky demonstrates growth and scalability with planned launch of additional satellites
Friday, 07 May 2021 08:37BlackSky, a leading provider of real-time geospatial intelligence and global monitoring services that recently announced a planned business combination with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp., has revealed it expects to launch two satellites on Rocket Lab's twentieth mission, "Running Out of Toes." The launch, which is scheduled to take place no earlier than May 15, 2021, will deploy BlackSky's
Coldplay beam new song into space in chat with French astronaut
Friday, 07 May 2021 07:43Coldplay gave new meaning to the idea of a single launch, playing new song "Higher Power" for the first time during a video link-up with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.
Pesquet spoke with the British group from the International Space Station.
"We sent you some music, because right now we aren't able to play for anyone on Earth, so we thought we would just play for you," singer Chris Martin said before playing the song late Thursday.
"This is the premiere for the whole... galaxy," he added, saying the song was about "trying to find the astronaut in all of us, the person who can do amazing things.
China says 'extremely low' risk of damage on Earth from rocket re-entry
Friday, 07 May 2021 07:19China said Friday the risk of damage on Earth from a rocket which fell out of orbit after separating from Beijing's space station was "extremely low", after the United States warned it could crash down onto an inhabited area.
Military experts in the US expect the body of the Long March 5B rocket to fall to the surface some time around Saturday or Sunday, but warned it was difficult to predict where it will land and when.
But Beijing downplayed the risk of any damage on Friday.
"The probability of causing harm to aviation activities or (on people and activities) on the ground is extremely low," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
China says 'extremely low' risk of damage from rocket debris
Friday, 07 May 2021 07:19China said Friday the risk of damage on Earth from a rocket which fell out of orbit after separating from Beijing's space station was "extremely low", after the United States warned it could crash down onto an inhabited area.
Military experts in the US expect the body of the Long March 5B rocket to fall to the surface some time around Saturday or Sunday, but warned it was difficult to predict where it will land and when.
But Beijing downplayed the risk of any damage on Friday.
"The probability of causing harm to aviation activities or (on people and activities) on the ground is extremely low," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
Earth from Space: Morbihan, France
Friday, 07 May 2021 07:00The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Morbihan – a French department in the south of Brittany.
Starliner completes full space station mission simulation
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35NASA and Boeing recently completed an integrated mission dress rehearsal of Starliner's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission to the International Space Station for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The campaign conducted largely inside Boeing's Houston-based Avionics and Software Integration Lab (ASIL) culminated in a five-day end-to-end mission simulation known as the ASIL Mission Rehea
"I felt really heavy:" astronauts describe returning to Earth on SpaceX capsule
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35Four astronauts just returned from the International Space Station described on Thursday their reentry into Earth's atmosphere and ocean splashdown after more than 160 days in space. A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the crew back to Earth splashed down off Florida early Sunday in NASA's first nighttime ocean landing in more than 50 years. "There was a point where I was just saying
Why Ingenuity's fifth flight will be different
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35Around the time of our first flight, we talked a lot about having our "Wright brothers moment" at Mars. And that makes a lot of sense, since those two mechanically-minded bicycle builders executed the first powered, controlled flight on Earth, and we were fortunate enough to do the same 117 years later - on another planet. But the comparisons shouldn't stop with a first flight. Ingenuity's
Volcanoes on Mars could be active, raise possibility of recent habitable conditions
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Mars shows that eruptions could have taken place within the past 50,000 years, a paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist David Horvath says. Most volcanism on the red planet occurred between 3 and 4 billion years ago, with smaller eruptions in isolated locales continuing perhaps as recently as 3 million years ago. But, until now, ther
Juice arrives at ESA's technical heart
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has come 'home' to ESA's technical centre in the Netherlands to undergo an extreme environment test in Europe's largest thermal vacuum chamber to prepare for its journey to the outer Solar System. The spacecraft arrived at ESTEC, ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre, from Airbus Friedrichshafen in Germany last week. It is now being unpa
Illuminating the Cosmic Dark Ages with a Lunar radio telescope
Friday, 07 May 2021 03:35The early-stage NASA concept could see robots hang wire mesh in a crater on the Moon's far side, creating a radio telescope to help probe the dawn of the universe. After years of development, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) project has been awarded $500,000 to support additional work as it enters Phase II of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. While not yet a NASA mission