2023 shaped up to be an amazing year for space missions, from NASA’s return of fragments of a faraway asteroid to India landing on the moon’s south pole.
And now it seems the world’s space agencies and billion-dollar private firms are already looking forward to an even more prolific year.
Among them are NASA, which is finally returning to the moon after 40 years, and Blue Origin which is sending an all-female crew into orbit.
There’s also the chance of
The billionaire boys’ space race is officially ‘GO’ for launch.
NASA announced Friday that it has awarded a group headed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to get NASA’s Artemis V team to the moon in 2029.
This second contract follows Blue Origin’s bitter loss in its first Artemis III and Artemis IV NASA bid, after it came up short to Bezos’ billionaire rival Elon Musk and his SpaceX rocket company in 2021.
Combined, the contract brings
Not content with winning the billionaire space race and experiencing the feeling of weightlessness himself, Sir Richard Branson wants to conquer low-Earth orbit and make it his own.
The Virgin founder plans to carry out his first space tourism mission from the US later this year and has grand visions of tapping into the £4 billion satellite industry, in part with the help of the new £20 million Spaceport Cornwall.
But those aspirations were dealt a bitter blow on Monday
In December of 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back. But in the half-century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.
While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires
When he first returned from space, William Shatner was overcome with emotion. The actor, then 90 years old, stood in the dusty grass of the West Texas desert, where the spacecraft had landed. It was October 2021. Nearby, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who had invited Shatner to ride on a Blue Origin rocket, whooped and popped a bottle of champagne, but Shatner hardly seemed to notice. With tears falling down his cheeks, he described what he had witnessed, his tone
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—The south pole of the moon is a stunning place. Towering mountains are bathed in perpetual sunshine, and the lunar dust, fine as powder, gleams in unfiltered light. Plunging craters exist in permanent shadow and hide pockets of ice in their gray rock, the water frozen and undisturbed for as long as 3 billion years.
It is here, somewhere along this silent terrain, that NASA wants to land a new crew of astronauts. Like those who came before,
NASA is on the hunt for a second lunar lander – to be used as an alternative to SpaceX Starship – as the agency steps up its plans for longer-term exploration of the moon.
The agency said it will send the first woman and first person of color to the surface of the moon in a SpaceX vehicle, but added that future missions will be split between the Elon Musk-owned firm and whoever wins the bid to build the alternative.
Blue Origin wants to follow up its three flights last year by blasting more than twice the number of people into space in 2022.
Jeff Bezos’ space tourism company has so far flown 14 people to space across three flights, including the Amazon founder himself and Star Trek actor William Shatner.
CEO Bob Smith said he expects to ‘easily double’ that figure this year, but if Blue Origin is to do that it would likely need to have a second
In the coming decades humans will be visiting space more frequently, and will be doing so in luxury, thanks to a number of new space station concepts, including a ‘business park’ by Blue Origin and a Voyager space hotel.
More than 600 people have been into space since Yuri Gagarin made the first solo orbit of the planet on April 12, 1961, with more than 250 of them visiting the International Space Station (ISS).
Unfortunately, the ISS is starting to
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was set to launch its third space tourism flight on Thursday, but forecasted winds has pushed the mission to Saturday, December 11.
Liftoff from Launch Site One is now targeted for 9:45am ET from Launch Site One in the West Texas town of Van Horn.
This flight will include six passengers, who include Good Morning America co-host Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley — the eldest daughter of Alan Shepard, who was the first American to
