Lifting-off from the Van Horn facility, Texas, at 1335 GMT 13 October a Blue Origin New Shepard booster completed its seventh consecutive mission. Whilst this flight was the seventh for this booster in particular, it marks the thirteenth overall for the “New...
On behalf of the US Department of Defense, the US Air Force has awarded launch contracts as part of the National Security Space Launch (Phase 2) programme to two launch providers: the United Launch Alliance (ULA) and SpaceX. These are set to take place between 2020...
It can be said that NASA’s human spaceflight programme has suffered too many changes of leader in the past year. In July 2019, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine effectively fired by demotion the long-serving – but reluctant to change – William H. (Bill) Gerstenmaier...
The Presidential directive to put humans on the Moon by the end of 2024 is concentrating the mind of NASA’s leadership. To some extent NASA’s hands have been bound by past equipment choices with the ever-present problem of having very limited funds to enact such a...
While US Vice President Mike Pence’s nationalistic speech managed to annoy the international audience at the 70th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Washington D.C., the Amazon and Blue Origin supremo had a much better reception. As part of an on...
As the 50th celebration of the Apollo 11 astronaut moon landing gets underway, some less well-known aspects of the mission have been revealed. One was that during the late 1950s the UK briefly considered starting a project to mount its own Apollo-11-style human lunar...