NASA’s tiny Lunar Flashlight moon probe may be in trouble in deep space

NASA’s newest tiny lunar probe is battling a thruster glitch on its way to the moon. The spacecraft, called Lunar Flashlight, launched last month on a mission to seek out water ice on the moon. The probe was also expected to test a new “green” propellant during its four-month voyage to the moon, but its thrusters have a problem, NASA said on Thursday (Jan. 12).  “While the smallsat is largely healthy and communicating with NASA’s Deep Space Network, the mission operations team has discovered that three of its four thrusters…

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SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket spotted from space by satellite (and poses for epic photos, too)

The biggest rocket ever built was just spotted from space. SpaceX stacked its huge Starship vehicle earlier this week, placing the Ship 24 upper-stage spacecraft atop the Booster 7 first stage at the company’s Starbase site, near the South Texas city of Brownsville. Together, the Ship 24-Booster 7 duo stands about 395 feet (120 meters) tall, making it bigger than NASA’s iconic Saturn V moon rocket and the agency’s new Space Launch System, which recently launched the Artemis 1 moon mission. Starship is plenty big enough to be spotted from…

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Missing the moment history happens: The media and ‘NewSpace’ (op-ed)

Rick Tumlinson, Founder of SpaceFund, Earthlight Foundation, Space Frontier Foundation and New Worlds Institute. More often than not, at the moment when history happens, it’s hard to see.  While barely showing up in the montages of 2022 run by every media organization on the planet, I believe that last year, this year, and the next few to follow will be seen as the beginning of what the Washington Post calls “The New Space Age.” (Of course, as the guy who coined the term, I prefer “NewSpace Age,” but I’ll take…

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