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China will send a new team of astronauts to its space station on Thursday (Apr 24) as it marches towards its ambition of becoming a space power to rival the dominance of the United States. Beijing has pumped billions of dollars into its space programme in recent years in an effort to achieve what President Xi Jinping describes as the Chinese people's "space dream". The world's second-largest economy has bold plans to send a crewed mission to the moon by the end of the decade and eventually build a base on the lunar surface. It will mark its latest milestone...

At 9:31 a.m. EDT yesterday, Katy Perry, in full hair and makeup wearing a designer cobalt blue bodysuit, was ready to make history. As she boarded flight NS-31 to make an 11-minute roundtrip journey to the edge of outer space, she endeavored to “put the ass in astronaut.” Which is so cool and brave to admit, given that she’s probably the first person ever to say those words in that particular order.

On a clear evening this January, flights out of Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale suddenly ground to a halt. The culprit wasn’t weather or a software glitch — it was a rocket launch. SpaceX’s Starship, the largest spacecraft ever built, had lifted off from Texas and exploded mid-flight, raining 100 tons of debris at over 13,250 miles per hour over the Caribbean. The FAA swiftly issued an unprecedented order: a temporary freeze on air traffic at four major Florida airports. Then another Starship exploded on its next test launch in March. According to FAA data reported by Reuters, the disruption...

Though men were the first to reach for the stars, science has proven definitively that women are far better suited to the task. Consider the evidence. Here are ten reasons women make better astronauts than men: They look so cute in their little space outfits: Science has proven that girl astronauts look way cuter in little space outfits. Men could never pull this off. Space is a vacuum and women love vacuums: For cleaning. If you time the mission right, they're all in good moods and super cooperative: But if your timing is off... God help you. They need...

Six women, including pop star Katy Perry, are scheduled to be launched into space for about 11 minutes on Monday on a Blue Origin rocket, a lift-off that would mark the first all-female spaceflight since 1963, according to the company. The window for the latest New Shepard rocket launch is expected to open on Monday morning at about 8:30 a.m. CDT, according to Blue Origin. long with Perry, the crew includes Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiance, Lauren Sanchez, who is also a helicopter pilot. Journalist Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist and civil...

An huge asteroid that was briefly feared to strike Earth now has a nearly four percent chance of smashing into the Moon, according to new data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The asteroid, thought to be capable of levelling a city, set a new record in February for having the highest chance -- 3.1 percent -- of hitting our home planet than scientists have ever measured. But the odds that it will instead crash into Earth's satellite have been steadily rising. After the Webb telescope turned its powerful gaze towards the asteroid last month, the chance of a Moon...

NASA says Boeing's Starliner – dubbed the Calamity Capsule – could fly again, but not before the end of 2025 or start of 2026. The CST-100 Starliner capsule returned to Earth last year with its tail between its legs. It was the capsule's first crewed mission, but the flight was dogged with issues, including problems with thrusters. Managers eventually decided that the safest course of action was to leave the crew on the International Space Station (ISS). The vehicle made a successful landing without a crew, and in the months since, NASA and Boeing tried to work out what went...

"With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control," the U.S. Space Force's Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein told the 16th annual McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia on March 18. "That's what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another."Guetlein's stark comment about China signals a break with the past. "This marks the end of the Western-American-liberal dream of nations leaving wars on Earth so...

Is it a plane? Is it a satellite? Is it a galaxy? Is it aliens? A strange blue spiral lit up the skies over Europe on Monday night (March 24), causing residents of the U.K. and other European countries like Croatia, Poland, and Hungary to flood social media with photos and videos, along with requests to identify this weird light. Some users even speculated that the spiral could be the work of aliens! Space.com can reveal the identity of the object behind this spectacular event, and unfortunately (possibly reassuringly), rather than being the work of extraterrestrial visitors, it's a bit...

On March 18, 1965, the world saw the first person to venture outside a spacecraft, floating in the vastness of space. This is the story of how two cosmonauts almost died several times while performing this historical move. First spacewalk by Alexei Leonov On March 18, 1965, at 10 a.m. Moscow time, the Soviet spacecraft Voskhod-2 with a crew consisting of Pavel Belyaev and Alexei Leonov launched from the base in Baikonur (modern-day Kazakhstan). At 11:35 a.m., Alexei Leonov left the airlock of the ship and became the first man to perform a spacewalk. He spent 12 minutes and 9...

The spacecraft that will carry the next crew of astronauts to the International Space Station has arrived at the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft is scheduled to launch no earlier than March 12 and will shuttle the Crew-10 astronauts aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The arrival of the module at the Florida launch pad signifies progress for SpaceX, which experienced delays getting it ready for launch. ... Crew-10 is currently set to launch at 7:48 p.m. EDT on March 12. It will chase the orbiting ISS for roughly 14 hours...

Donald Trump has announced his intention to build a gigantic anti-ballistic missile system to counter Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons, and he is recruiting Elon Musk to help him. The Pentagon has long dreamed of constructing an American “Iron Dome.” The technology is couched in the defense language—i.e., to make America safe again. But like its Israeli counterpart, it would function as an offensive weapon, giving the United States the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response. This power could upend the fragile peace maintained by decades...

For the first time, we’re seeing an image from the record-breaking US military space plane while in Earth orbit. Over the weekend, the US Space Force shared a photo taken by the spacecraft X-37B during its most recent secret mission. It’s the first operational image shared while the space plane is in orbit. The image shows part of the space plane, the blue marble of Earth and the darkness of space. “An X-37B onboard camera, used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, captures an image of Earth while conducting experiments in HEO in 2024,” the US Space...

The chance that an asteroid capable of wiping out a city will hit Earth in eight years has been cut in half to around 1.5 percent, according to new calculations from NASA. The drop in odds had been widely anticipated by the global astronomical community, which now broadly expects the probability the asteroid will hit Earth on December 22, 2032 to fall down to zero. For more than 24 hours, the asteroid did have the highest probability of hitting Earth -- 3.1 percent -- of such a big space rock in modern forecasting. Updated calculations posted by NASA late Wednesday...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to President Trump’s latest rebuke, calling out Trump for living in a Russian “disinformation space.” “Unfortunately, President Trump, I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelensky told reporters early Wednesday. His claim follows Trump’s news conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday evening, where he criticized the Ukrainian leader and claimed his approval ratings were low. Zelensky also pressed Trump and U.S. officials to “be more truthful.” The request follows a high-stakes...

CEDAR PARK, Texas - Among the starry nights of Central Texas this week is a little bit of home. A company out of Cedar Park launched a spacecraft on the SpaceX Falcon 9 on Wednesday. The launch from Cape Canaveral was a success. "The work is just getting started, and we've got an exciting mission in front of us, about sixty days in front of us, and we're digging in hard in all that work," said Scholtes.

Tonight is the first launch attempt for Blue Origin's New Glenn orbital glass rocket. This is Blue Origin's first orbital attempt. They've been to the edge of space with their New Shepherd rocket.

Space travel has always hit a wall with slow speeds and massive fuel needs. Gravitic propulsion systems offer a game-changing solution by using gravity itself as a driving force. This blog breaks down 10 major advances in gravity-based space tech, from T. Townsend Brown's early work to today's cutting-edge research at aerospace labs. Ready to explore how we might zip through space without burning tons of rocket fuel? Scientists started exploring gravitic propulsion back in the 1920s through wild experiments with high-voltage capacitors and electromagnetic fields. T. Townsend Brown's work at the Gravity Research Foundation sparked major interest when he...

The distant galaxy has all the structure of a modern spiral galaxy (the object next to it is another galaxy in the foreground). Image credit: Xiao et al., arXiv 2024 (CC BY 4.0) It has been just over three years since JWST was launched into space and in that time, the telescope has dramatically expanded our understanding of the distant universe. Among the important findings is the discovery of very young galaxies that already looked like their more senior counterparts in the local universe, and a recent study has shown a spiral galaxy that already had everything modern ones do...

Two US astronauts stranded for months on the International Space Station will remain there at least until late March, NASA said Tuesday as it announced another delay in the mission to bring them home. Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the ISS in June aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, and were due to spend eight days on the orbiting laboratory. But problems arose with the Starliner's propulsion system during the flight there, so NASA opted for a big change in plans. After weeks of intensive tests on the Starliner, the space agency decided to return it to Earth...