Space

To connect the masses, megaconstellations will need mega antennas mega cheap. Antenna makers need mega orders to make that happen. Projects like LEOSat’s planned constellation of 84 broadband satellites in low Earth orbit are driving investments in flat panel antenna technology. Credit: Thales Alenia Space When an entrepreneur building a constellation of low Earth orbit

There’s a lot of stuff out there in the dark, far-flung reaches of the early Universe that we’re only just starting to discover. But this one’s a real doozy – the early formation of a huge supercluster of galaxies, located 11 billion light-years away – just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang. It’s the

Bruno: The Air Force is “looking into the future and the flexibility they might need.” CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. — United Launch Alliance employees on Wednesday were celebrating another flawless Atlas 5 mission, placing an Air Force communications satellite into a customized geosynchronous transfer orbit after coasting for more than three hours. It

“It was a very clean launch,” said Brig. Gen. Douglas Schiess, commander of the 45th Space Wing CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. — A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket powered by five boosters blasted off Space Launch Complex 41 Wednesday at 12:15 AM EST. “It was a beautiful launch, a very clean launch,”

Last week, NASA astronaut Air Force Colonel Nick Hague faced death as he and his commander, Alexei Ovchinin, plummeted to Earth following an aborted Soyuz launch. Outside, the world held its breath as the spacecraft returned in what NASA called a “ballistic descent mode“. Inside the tiny capsule, according to Hague, things got pretty rough.

WASHINGTON —  A Swedish company with plans for a geostationary communications satellite announced Oct. 16 a contract with SpaceX for a Falcon Heavy launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2020. Ovzon of Solna, Sweden, has not yet purchased the satellite, but paid Eutelsat $1.6 million earlier this year to move one of its

WASHINGTON — The NASA astronaut who was on the aborted Soyuz mission to the International Space Station says he has “complete confidence” in the Russians despite this launch failure and other problems, and looks forward to flying again on the spacecraft. In his first public interviews since the aborted flight of the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft

A wee baby star at the tender age of just 2 million years has revealed itself to be quite the precocious little cosmic object. Astronomers have discovered it has not one, but four planets in the protoplanetary disc of dust and gas that surrounds it – and they are all gargantuan, with the biggest coming

WASHINGTON — Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft who backed the winning entry in a suborbital spaceflight competition and later funded development of a massive air-launch system, passed away Oct. 15. In a statement, Vulcan Inc., Allen’s holding company, said that Allen, 65, passed away Oct. 15 in Seattle from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The launch of the Air Force AEHF-4 satellite aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket will be Brig. Gen. Schiess’ first national security mission as the commander of the world’s busiest spaceport. CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. — The launch early Wednesday of a U.S. Air Force $1.8 billion communications satellite will be

WASHINGTON — Eric Béranger, former chief executive of satellite constellation venture OneWeb, has left the company entirely, OneWeb confirmed Oct. 15. “Eric has moved on to pursue new opportunities,” OneWeb spokesperson Katie Dowd said by email. Dowd did not respond to subsequent questions about his departure. Béranger, who was named OneWeb’s CEO in July 2016,

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he believes launches of crewed Soyuz spacecraft will resume “on schedule” after last week’s launch failure, avoiding the possibility of leaving the International Space Station without a crew. In a series of clips from an Oct. 12 press conference in Moscow, posted to the administrator’s Twitter account Oct.

Elon Musk is hell-bent on colonizing Mars. That’s the spirit with which he founded SpaceX, his rocket company, in 2002. Musk was frustrated that NASA wasn’t doing more to get people to the red planet – and concerned a backup plan for humanity wasn’t being developed (for when Earth becomes an uninhabitable wasteland). Since then,

Updated 6:30 p.m. Eastern with reaction. LAS CRUCES, N.M. — The Senate confirmed James Morhard to be NASA’s deputy administrator late Oct. 11. In a voice vote without debate, the Senate confirmed Morhard’s nomination to be the agency’s second-in-command. The Senate Commerce Committee had favorably reported the nomination, also on a voice vote, Sept. 5.

An estimated 530 million people around the world had their eyes on NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong as he took one “giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969. Armstrong cemented his role in history that day, becoming the first person to step foot on the Moon. Today, walking on the lunar surface is an honour only 11

MOSCOW — Details surrounding the dramatic abort of the Oct. 11 Soyuz MS-10 launch are coming into focus as accident investigators collect debris from the Kazakh steppe and begin work on analyzing the cause of the failure. Roscosmos now says one of the Soyuz rocket’s four strap-on boosters failed to properly separate and nicked the

For almost two centuries, scientists have theorized that life may be distributed throughout the Universe by meteoroids, asteroids, planetoids, and other astronomical objects. This theory, known as Panspermia, is based on the idea that microorganisms and the chemical precursors of life are able to survive being transported from one star system to the next. Expanding on

Defense officials have been sounding alarms about what they describe as a glaring national security vulnerability — a new class of ultrafast weapons being developed by China and Russia that would overpower U.S. missile defenses. Detecting and tracking hypersonic missiles is a tough problem the Pentagon is trying to figure out how to tackle. A

It’s been a big week for NASA. First the much-loved Hubble Space Telescope entered “safe mode” after one of the gyroscopes that points it in the right direction failed. Then there was a mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday morning, resulting in the (safe!) emergency landing of cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and astronaut Nick

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — With the International Space Station likely to have only a three-person crew for an extended period, researchers expect there will be less time devoted to research. The Oct. 11 failure of a Soyuz rocket two minutes after launch, forcing the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft to abort and make an emergency landing, leaves