According to the Seradata SpaceTrak launch and satellite database, the “final score” for launches in 2020 is 11 launch failures out of 114 orbital attempts. One of these was really a minor partial involving a pair of stuck Lemur satellites on a Vega (only about 3 per...
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity rocket plane was air-dropped on a suborbital test flight from its mother ship WhiteKnightTwo Eve (which lifted off from Spaceport America at 1524 GMT) from an altitude of 13km at 1615 GMT on 12 December. An attempted ignition was...
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...
With the UK Government about to impose a 14-day quarantine on arriving passengers from most other countries, UK airlines and airports, are protesting. Rather than a very disruptive quarantine airports and airlines would ideally prefer much less draconian measures on...
In a vote on 23 October, shareholders of SCH (Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp.) approved its merger with upcoming space tourism firm Virgin Galactic. Following the completion of the transaction, Virgin Galactic became a Delaware-based publicly traded company...
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...
