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"SpaceX launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch occurred at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. TESS was deployed into a highly elliptical orbit approximately 49 minutes after launch. Following stage separation, SpaceX successfully landed Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Rocket Lab, SpaceX takes over Los Angeles, Putin surrenders to Elon Musk, DJT and the National Space Council, the FCC whines about Space Regulation, and Long March 5 failure announced...

Media are invited to attend a news conference at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland at 9:15 a.m. EDT Wednesday, May 2, to discuss a recent experiment to demonstrate a new nuclear reactor power system designed for space. News conference audio and presentation slides will stream live on NASA’s website. Kilopower could provide safe, efficient and plentiful energy for future robotic and human space exploration missions to the Moon, Mars and destinations beyond. The experiment was conducted November 2017 through March 2018 at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). News conference participants include: James Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASA’s...

EarthNow is a new company looking to provide satellite imagery and live video in virtually real-time. Its unsettling pitch describes a network of satellites that can see any corner of the globe and provide live video with a latency of about a second. And a look at the startup’s top investors gives a lot of confidence that this thing is happening. On Wednesday, EarthNow announced that it will emerge from the Intellectual Ventures ISF Incubator to become a full-scale commercial business. Its first round of investors is comprised of a small group of complimentary powerhouses: AirBus, the SoftBank Group, Bill...

COLORADO SPRINGS — Future private space stations may be sponsored by major corporations, which prompted a spirited discussion during a panel on the future of low Earth orbit at the 34th Space Symposium here. “I don’t want the Taco Bell International Space Station,” said Erin MacDonald, modeling and simulation engineer for Engility’s Space and Mission Systems Group. “I think it goes against what the public perceives the space station is supposed to be like.” While the International Space Station is unlikely to be rebranded by Taco Bell or any other corporation, if a new commercial space station is “paid for...

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who Putin had placed in charge of Russia’s space effort, today said in a television interview that it makes no sense for them to try to compete with SpaceX in the launch market...

Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' 41 Mins Ago | 00:41 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donated $33 million in college scholarships for "dreamers" — childhood undocumented immigrants granted stay in the country under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. TheDream.Us, a nonprofit working toward college access for undocumented immigrants, said the donation from Bezos and his wife MacKenzie is the largest in the organization's history and will fund 1,000 scholarships. "My dad came to the U.S. when he was 16 as part of Operation Pedro Pan," Bezos said...

SpaceX is seeking permission to perform splashdowns of its Dragon spacecraft in the Gulf of Mexico, part of a shift in spacecraft recovery operations from the Pacific Ocean. In a draft environmental assessment prepared by the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX proposes to conduct up to six Dragon landings a year in waters off the Gulf coast, between Texas and Florida. The assessment, completed in March, was published in the Federal Register April 5. According to the report, the Gulf of Mexico would serve as a contingency landing site for both cargo and crewed Dragon missions should the primary landing zone...

Two independent investigations, made up of federal and industry officials, pointed to Northrop's payload adapter as the cause of the satellite's loss, the report said, citing people familiar with the probes. The payload adapter is a key part of deploying a satellite in orbit, connecting the satellite to the upper stage of a rocket. Zuma is believed to have cost around $3.5 billion to develop, according to the report. The satellite was funded through a process that received a lesser degree of oversight from Congress compared with similar national security-related satellites, industry officials said. ... The investigations tentatively concluded that...

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has published the first public photo of fabrication tooling intended to enable the construction of the first full-scale Mars spaceship prototype. The massive cylinder revealed in Musk’s Instagram post – while not an actual rocket component – is a mold that will be used to carefully craft the carbon composite structures that are expected to be liberally used throughout SpaceX’s Mars rocket boosters and spaceships. Building on a history of R&D with the contractor, SpaceX has likely procured this unique tooling from the Seattle-based Janicki Industries, previously known for their work on the jaw-dropping ITS oxygen...

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, posted a picture Sunday of what what he described as the “main body tool” for his company’s BFR interplanetary spaceship. BFR—which reportedly stands for “Big F---ing Rocket,” will be designed to withstand planetary entry on Earth, "Mars and beyond,” TechCrunch reported. Space.com reported that BFR's “chief aim” is to make colonizing Mars economically feasible. "We're actually building that ship right now," he said in an interview last month. "I think we'll probably be able to do short flights, short sort of up-and-down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year." Shortly...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly losing support amongst his peers in Silicon Valley following Facebook’s latest user data scandal. Bloomberg reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been left with few defenders in Silicon Valley following his company’s latest user data scandal. Amongst Zuckerberg’s biggest critics in the tech industry is Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, while many other Silicon Valley firms have fallen silent in the wake of the Facebook user data scandal, a stark contrast to how tech firms usually react when one of their own is attacked. When other major...

Even long cons can only run for so long. Elon Musk’s electric car con may be on the verge – finally – of coming unglued. This week, he’ll be forced to reveal actual production numbers for the first quarter of the year which are expected to fall well short of what he promised investors – and buyers, who ponied up deposits based on those promises. Last year, Musk breezily assured both groups that an improbable 5,000 Model 3s – Tesla’s first “mass-produced” electric car – would be rolling off the production line in Fremont, CA each week. He’s come as...

Webb’s new delay epitomizes the systemic incompetence of Washington. Despite being 13 years behind schedule and costing eight times more than originally planned, NASA and its contractors still couldn’t get things right....

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) It’s not because you’re a woman. It’s because you’re so incredibly tiresome. – The Pantsuit Princess, dressed in her favorite Dr. Evil attire, complained to an audience that she is tired of being told by fellow Democrats to stop running around the world blaming everyone but herself for her loss in the 2016 election. The Fainting Felon whined that “no one ever told a man (who’d lost a presidential election) to go away.” She then cited Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain and Mitt Romney as examples. Of course, as with literally...

9 minutes into an otherwise routine Falcon 9 launch of 10 Iridium Next communications satellites from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, SpaceX cut the feed. The video blackout was intentional because of "restrictions" from a U.S. government agency known for its own live views of Earth from space. Those restrictions, Space.com has learned, apparently hinge on a recent NOAA assertion that the cameras on SpaceX's Falcon 9 second stage can qualify as a "remote sensing space system," which would require a provisional license from the U.S. agency if SpaceX wanted to show the live video and still launch on time....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tesla Inc shares fell sharply again Wednesday, reeling from a credit downgrade by Moody's Investors Service, federal probes of a fatal crash and concerns about Model 3 production. On Tuesday, Tesla tumbled 8.2 percent to its lowest close in almost a year after the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation into a fatal crash and vehicle fire in California on March 23. On Wednesday, a second federal regulator, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), said it was sending a team to California to investigate the crash. On Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Tesla’s...

...since the beginning of the 21st century the U.S. government has struggled to create and maintain a viable launch industry...Even as the federal government struggled with this problem, a fledgling crop of new American private launch companies have emerged in the past decade, funded initially by the vast profits produced by the newly born internet industry. These new companies have not been motivated by national prestige, military strength, or any of the traditional national political goals of the federal government. Instead, these private entities have been driven by profit, competition, and in some cases the ideas of the visionary individuals...

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is the latest to jump on the #DeleteFacebook bandwagon. In response to a question from a Twitter user about deleting SpaceX's Facebook page, Musk replied on Friday: "I didn't realize there was one. Will do." He then deleted the SpaceX page, as well as the Tesla page.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. While we have a long way to go before robots become self-aware, any robot that comes to know it's a robot could kick off the machine uprising that so many science-fiction dystopias warn about. Fortunately, there might be another way — at least according to renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. My Heart Is Human, My Blood Is Boiling, My Brain I.B.M. "Robots are pretty stupid now. However, eventually they'll be as smart as a mouse, then a rat, then a rabbit, then a cat, then a dog. By the end of the century,...