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SpaceX Rockets
SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight Monday, striving to make it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time. Starship the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built thundered into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas. The booster was programmed to peel away and drop into the Gulf of Mexico, with the spacecraft skimming space before descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was being recovered. It was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk intends to use to send people to Mars. NASA's need is more immediate. The space agency cannot land astronauts on the moon by decade's end without the 403-foot (123-meter) Starship, the reusable vehicle meant to get them from lunar orbit down to the surface and back up. Instead of remaining inside Launch Control as usual, Musk said that for the first time, he was going outside to watch much more visceral. The previous test
Two start-ups Pixxel Space and Dhruva Space launched satellites successfully onboard SpaceX's Falcon-9 rocket on Wednesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The launch of three Firefly satellites of Pixxel marked the completion of the first phase of the start-up's constellation of six hyperspectral satellites that would have a closer and clearer look at the Earth. "All 3 Fireflies successfully deployed," Awais Ahmed, founder and CEO of Bengaluru-based Pixxel Space said in a post on X. Pixxel had launched three Firefly satellites in January this year. Hyderabad-based Dhruva Space is also launching its first commercial LEAP-01 satellite carrying payloads from Australia-based Akula Tech and Esper Satellites. LEAP-01 is the first hosted payload mission carried out by DhruvaSpace for two Australian firms. "Our earlier launches showed what was possible; this one shows what's next. Expanding to six Fireflies will transform hyperspectral imaging from isolated snapshots into
Nearly two months after an explosion sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos, SpaceX launched another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday, but lost contact minutes into the test flight as the spacecraft came tumbling down. The 403-foot (123-metre) rocket blasted off from Texas a little before sunset. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost with the spacecraft as it went into an out-of-control spin. The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour and couldn't release the mock satellites into space as planned. The spacecraft reached nearly 90 miles (150 kilometres) in altitude before trouble struck. It was not immediately clear where it came down. Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now, SpaceX
NASA's two stuck astronauts may come back to Earth a little sooner than planned. The space agency announced Tuesday that SpaceX will switch capsules for upcoming astronaut flights in order to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home in mid-March instead of late March or April. That will shave at least a couple weeks off their prolonged stay at the International Space Station, which hit the eight-month mark last week. Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges, NASA's commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said in a statement. The test pilots should have returned in June on Boeing's Starliner capsule after what should have been a weeklong flight demo. But the capsule had so much trouble getting to the space station that NASA decided to bring it back empty and reassigned the pair to SpaceX. Then SpaceX delayed the launch of their replacements on a brand new capsule that needed more prepping, which added more time to Wilmore and Williams' mission. With even more work s