NASA's Artemis I launch likely slipping to August with retry of pad test in June
NASA officials gave an update Thursday on the status of the Artemis I moon rocket launch saying it likely is targeting early- to mid-June before it rolls back out to the launch pad for a wet dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson suggested last week that August would be the earliest for a launch attempt, and NASA's Jim Free, the associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, confirmed that.
"As we've been saying, we'll set that official launch date after we get through wet dress," Free said. "But you know based on some of historical challenges from similar programs over the years and the schedule performance we've seen thus far, we are looking at a couple of launch periods through the August time frame."
One of the previously announced launch windows runs from July 26 to Aug. 9.
NASA rolled the Space Launch System rocket topped with the Orion spacecraft to KSC's Launch Pad 39-B back in mid-March and attempted to run through a simulated countdown along with the filling and draining the core and upper stages with 730,000 gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
Matthias returns to Cologne
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Matthias returns to Cologne NASA's Crew-3 astronauts splash down in Gulf of Mexico
After a 24-hour delay to be sure of weather conditions in the Atlantic Ocean, NASA's Crew-3 returned to Earth on Friday with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Florida.
NASA's Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn and Germany's Matthias Maurer splashed down in their Dragon Endurance capsule at 12:43 a.m. EDT.
"We're glad to be back," Chari told the Spac Deep Blue Aerospace completes kilometer-level rocket launch and landing test
A Chinese launch startup sent a small rocket test stage up to an altitude of one kilometer Friday before a performing a powered descent and vertical landing.
Astra prepares for TROPICS launch campaign
Small launch vehicle developer Astra says it is ready to perform a series of launches for NASA once it receives a license for those missions.
The post Astra prepares for TROPICS launch campaign appeared first on SpaceNews.
FAA and NTSB discussing roles in commercial spaceflight investigations
Two federal agencies in a turf battle over commercial spaceflight investigations say they are now talking with each other to better define their roles and responsibilities.
The post FAA and NTSB discussing roles in commercial spaceflight investigations appeared first on SpaceNews.
Briton, Belarusian held at Kazakh spaceport: Roscosmos
A British man and a Belarusian woman have been detained at the Russian spaceport of Baikonur in Kazakhstan, Russia's space agency Roscosmos said on Saturday.
On Saturday evening, "a report was received from the space centre concerning the detention of British citizen Rich Benjamin and Belarusian citizen Zelupa Alina", Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said on Telegram.
The two were apprehen NASA's Ingenuity in contact with Perseverance after communications dropout
On Thursday, May 5, mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory received confirmation that the agency's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter had re-established communications with the Perseverance rover. Earlier in the week, the rotorcraft had missed a planned communications session with the rover - for the first time in over a year of operations on the Mars surface. Ingenuity relies on Perseve Asteroid treasure in the Hubble archive
With a sophisticated combination of human and artificial intelligence, astronomers uncovered 1701 new asteroid trails in archival data of the Hubble Space Telescope spanning the past 20 years. While about one third could be identified and attributed to known objects, more than 1000 trails probably correspond to previously unknown asteroids. These unidentified asteroids are faint and likely small Chinese scientists find potential in lunar soil to generate oxygen and fuel
Chinese material scientists have found the soil on the moon may potentially be able to generate oxygen and fuel, a find that signifies more tantalizing possibilities of utilizing lunar resources to further human exploration on the moon or beyond.
The researchers with Nanjing University showed that the lunar sample brought back by China's Chang'e-5 probe contains active compounds that can c 
