One U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts departed the International Space Station for a safe descent to Earth in remote Kazakhstan late Oct. 21, leaving the orbiting science lab staffed by three crew for at least three weeks as NASA and its Commercial Crew Program partners continue efforts to kickoff regularly scheduled crew launches.
Flying autonomously more than 208 million mi. from Earth, NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made brief successful contact with the boulder-strewn surface of the asteroid Bennu, according to data from the probe received by the mission operations and science teams on Oct. 20.
Firefly Aerospace, which plans to debut its Alpha small satellite launch vehicle this year, has signed contracts with Spire Global and Geometric Space Corp. for multiple flights.
NASA and the European Space Agency have signed contracts with privately owned Nanoracks to use the company’s Bishop airlock, which is due to be delivered to the International Space Station next month.
Satellite network operators Inmarsat and Hughes Network Systems announced a “strategic collaboration” on Oct. 20 to provide in-flight connectivity designed for commercial airlines in North America.
With the arrival of 60 more Starlink satellites into orbit on Oct. 18 and another 60 due to launch this week, SpaceX intends to roll out public trials of its high-speed internet service before year’s end.
The modest sample of pebbles and soil that NASA’s Osiris-Rex sample return mission will attempt to gather from the asteroid Bennu may hold important clues to how life arose on Earth and perhaps other planetary bodies.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is supporting the Space Development Agency by building a hardware and software testbed for optical communications to enable interoperability between different satellites.
NASA has selected Intuitive Machines to launch and deliver a drill and mass spectrometer payload to the Moon by December 2022 to seek out seek out and attempt to harvest subsurface water ice at the lunar south pole for the first time.
There is promising new science on the horizon as NASA’s nimble Osiris-Rex sample return spacecraft prepares for a daring brief encounter on Oct. 20 with its distant target, the primitive asteroid Bennu.
The lack of an appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed into law by the president is forcing the U.S. Space Force to slow down some of its work.
India’s space agency has confirmed expectations that it will resume launches in November, saying it was catching up on work after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Japanese space researchers are studying concepts for a reusable orbiter with a mass of up to 5 metric tons for deployment by the Epsilon light space launcher.
The Streamlined Launch and Reentry Licensing Requirements final rule allows commercial space operators to acquire a single license to conduct multiple launches from multiple sites.
Introduced in April, the “Honey, I shrunk the NASA payload” global crowdsourcing competition is moving on to “Honey, I Built the NASA Payload, The Sequel.”
Fourteen U.S. companies are to receive an estimated $370 million in NASA “Tipping Point” agreements intended to advance technologies needed to achieve a sustained human presence on the Moon during the 2020s and support the human exploration of Mars thereafter.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) hopes to begin developing an upgrade for the H3 medium space launcher in 2022, only a year after the first flight, with the aim of driving payload up and unit costs down.
Both companies will serve as prime contractors for the definition phase of the European Large Logistics Lander, supporting NASA's Artemis human lunar missions.
