Space

NASA announced Wednesday that it is targeting as soon as late August for the first flight of the massive Space Launch System rocket, though agency officials stressed that the dates are tentative and dependent on teams completing remaining work. “It’s not an agency commitment,” Jim Free, N

NASA's big mission to hunt for water on the moon has slipped by another year, to 2024, due to the agency requesting further testing of the lander that will deliver the payload to the lunar surface. NASA selected Astrobotic as the commercial partner to develop the lander for this mission in 2020

Relativity Space, a 3D-printed rocket startup that's planning its first orbital test launch this year, said Tuesday that it is planning to send a Mars lander and rover vehicle made by Impulse Space to the red planet as early as 2024. With the announcement, both companies aim to drastically push

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. In this issue: The first images from James Webb Space Telescope are here Lunar Outpost eyes up moon markets News from ABL Space Systems, Skyrora and more By the way…we’re right around the corner from TC Sessions: Robotics, a full-day digital gathering

The United Arab Emirates will pour more than $800 million into space initiatives through a massive new fund, with the first investment going toward the establishment of a remote sensing satellite constellation. That constellation, called “Sirb” (the Arabic word for a flock of birds), will use s

After a little over a month of delays, NASA and SpaceX are ready to launch a resupply mission to the International Space Station, which includes more than 5,800 pounds of supplies, equipment and scientific investigations. The mission was previously scheduled to launch on June 10, but was delayed af

“This is going to be the largest market in human history.” Justin Cyrus, co-founder and CEO of Lunar Outpost, is referring to the space economy: The slew of activities that could take place around or on the moon, in the orbital space around Earth or beyond. Lunar Outpost, a company that is deve

NASA unveiled full-color images from the $11 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Tuesday, marking the first of what is sure to be many releases from the super powerful optical instrument. But even taken by themselves, these five images mark a massive achievement and the culmination of a 26

Rocket Lab is attempting to demonstrate its speediest launch cadence yet, with two back-to-back missions for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) scheduled to fly 10 days apart. The first mission, dubbed “Wise One Looks Ahead” or NROL-162, is due to launch no earlier than July 12 at 1

NASA has just revealed the James Webb Space Telescope’s first set of images, from an awe-inspiring deep field of galaxies to a minute characterization of a distant exoplanet’s atmosphere. But how does a spacecraft a million miles away get dozens of gigabytes of data back to Earth? First

SpaceX’s Starship program encountered a setback after a test ended in a fiery explosion at its Boca Chica development facility in Texas on Monday night. The test was being conducted using a prototype version of the Super Heavy booster the space company is developing, which is designed to prov

The James Webb Space Telescope is one of NASA’s, and the space community in general’s, most exciting missions in the past decade, and the enormous observation platform’s first image, of distant galaxies actually behind our neighboring galaxies, was just revealed to the public on a

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. By the time you read this, we’ll be less than 24 hours away from the release of the first images captured by James Webb Space Telescope. In this issue: CAPSTONE loses, then reestablishes, communication with Earth Rocket Lab offers next-day shipping to space N

Nanoracks and Tokyo-based space startup Gitai are teaming up for a second technology demonstration on the International Space Station, a mission that could bring the Japanese startup one step closer to commercializing its autonomous in-space robotics. The two companies will be testing Gitai's a