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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...

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...

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...

"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.

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...

SpaceX will build its "BFR" spaceship at a new facility in the Port of Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced yesterday (April 16). The company plans to use this ambitious new vessel — whose acronym name stands for "Big Falcon Rocket" (or a less-family-friendly version of that name) — to send people to Mars by 2024 and set up a colony on the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has said that the BFR could also send people to the moon, launch satellites to low Earth orbit, clean up orbital debris...

Two independent investigations have now placed the blame for the failure of the classified Zuma satellite to reach orbit on Northrop Grumman, not SpaceX...The investigations tentatively concluded that onboard sensors did not immediately communicate to ground systems that the satellite did not separate from the rocket, according to the Journal. Unbeknownst to officials at the time, the planned return of the rocket’s upper stage — a method of disposal to avoid adding space debris around the Earth — brought the satellite back down with it. By the time the satellite separated from the rocket it was too late, putting Zuma...

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...

NASA's next exoplanet-hunting spacecraft will take to the skies one week from today (April 9), if all goes according to plan. TESS will spot exoplanets via the "transit" method, noting the tiny brightness dips that result when a planet crosses the face of its host star from the spacecraft's perspective. This is the same strategy employed by NASA's famed Kepler space telescope, which has found about two-thirds of the 3,700 known exoplanets to date. But Kepler's finds are mostly faraway worlds at least several hundred light-years from Earth. TESS will aim to find planets close enough to be investigated in...

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...

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...

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...

Imagine your least-favorite world leader. (Take as much time as you need.) Now, imagine if that person wasn't a human, but a network of millions of computers around the world. This digi-dictator has instant access to every scrap of recorded information about every person who's ever lived. It can make millions of calculations in a fraction of a second, controls the world's economy and weapons systems with godlike autonomy and — scariest of all — can never, ever die. This unkillable digital dictator, according to Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is one of the darker scenarios awaiting humankind's future if...

Podcast in 2 Parts: "SpaceX Supremacy," & "ESA/Roscosmos Rehearsal for Mars Landing 2020."

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....

Op-ed | Moon Direct: How to build a moonbase in four yearsby Robert Zubrin — March 30, 2018SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut Feb. 6, is the foundation of author Robert Zubrin’s “Moon Direct” plan for affordably returning humans to the moon within four years. Credit: SpaceX This op-ed originally appeared in the March 26, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.The recent amazing success of the Falcon Heavy launch offers America an unprecedented opportunity to break the stagnation that has afflicted its human spaceflight program for decades. In short, the moon is now within reach.Here’s how the mission plan...

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....

...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...