Category: The Moon

Our moon

SpaceX loses Starship rocket stage again, but catches giant Super Heavy booster during Flight 8 launch (video)

NeRD

Starship’s eighth flight was a lot like its seventh. SpaceX launched the eighth test flight of its Starship megarocket today (March 6), sending the 403-foot-tall (123 meters) vehicle aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). Seven minutes later, Starship’s huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, returned to Starbase for a dramatic catch by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. It was the third time that SpaceX has demonstrated this jaw-dropping technique. SpaceX’s Starship launches on its eighth test…

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Hope is all but lost for private asteroid probe in deep space — ‘the chance of talking with Odin is minimal’

NeRD

The first-ever private asteroid mission appears to be over, just a week or so after it left the ground. California startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on Feb. 26, on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission toward the moon. Odin ran into trouble just a few hours later, however, and AstroForge has pretty much given up hope of recovering the 265-pound (120-kilogram) probe. “The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue,”…

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Varda space capsule returns to Earth in 1st commercial landing in Australian Outback (photos)

NeRD

Varda Space has successfully landed a reentry capsule in Australia, delivering critical data that could advance in-space manufacturing and hypersonic technologies. California-based startup Varda’s Winnebago-2 (W-2) capsule launched along with 130 other payloads on Jan. 14 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, on the Transporter 12 rideshare mission. After six weeks in orbit, the capsule made a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, landing Feb. 28 at Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, which is operated by Southern Launch. W-2 contained a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and…

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Hubble Telescope discovers a new ‘3-body problem’ puzzle among Kuiper Belt asteroids (video)

NeRD

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered that a system of asteroids in the distant Kuiper Belt may be triplets, not twins as previously suspected. If so, the stable trio of icy space rocks would be just the second example of three gravitationally bound space rocks found in the Kuiper Belt, the doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies that lurks out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The discovery could also challenge our understanding of how Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) form. An illustration of the 148780 Altjira system of two or maybe three…

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The US will ‘plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond,’ Trump tells Congress

NeRD

President Donald Trump told lawmakers that U.S. astronauts will one day carry the American flag to Mars and beyond during a speech before the joint session of Congress late Tuesday (March 5). “We are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science, and we are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond,” Trump told Congress during his speech to a joint Senate and House of Representatives on Tuesday night. “And through it all, we are going to rediscover…

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Touch down on the moon with private Blue Ghost lander in this amazing video

NeRD

Blue Ghost had its eyes wide open during its epic moon landing last weekend. On Sunday (March 2), Blue Ghost — built and operated by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace — became just the second private spacecraft ever to soft-land on the moon, coming to rest in the near side’s Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region. We can now relive Blue Ghost’s historic descent, thanks to stunning footage captured by the lander. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander captured this shot of its own shadow on the moon just after…

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‘Stuck’ NASA astronauts on ISS grilled on Earthly politics as long 9-month mission nears end. ‘From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all.’

NeRD

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are getting ready to wrap up their surprisingly long — and unexpectedly controversial — orbital stay. The two NASA astronauts arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in June on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. They were supposed to stay at the station for just a week or so, but Starliner experienced thruster problems on the way up, and NASA extended the mission multiple times to investigate. Finally, in late August, the agency announced that Starliner would come back to Earth uncrewed,…

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See Earth shine like a Blue Marble in this stunning photo by Japan’s private Resilience moon lander

NeRD

The private Resilience moon lander now has a target touchdown date. The Tokyo-based company ispace, which built and operates Resilience, announced Monday (March 3) that it’s eyeing June 5 for the spacecraft’s lunar touchdown attempt. The current plan calls for Resilience to land that day at 3:24 p.m. EST (2024 GMT) near the center of Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”), a basaltic plain in the moon‘s northern reaches. But that’s not set in stone. An image of Earth taken by the private Resilience lunar lander on Feb. 18, 2025. (Image…

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NASA delays launch of SPHEREx and PUNCH missions to March 6

NeRD

NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions will need to wait a little longer before heading to space. After delaying the launch of these missions three times — they were originally slated to take to the skies on Feb. 27 — the space agency has postponed liftoff once again for SPHEREx and PUNCH. Both payloads will still be launching aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket selected for the task, which had most recently targeted Tuesday (March 4) for launch. Now, the pair will remain Earth-bound until Thursday (March 6). They’ll liftoff from…

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SpaceX calls off Starship Flight 8 launch test due to rocket issues (video)

NeRD

The next Starship megarocket to fly is stuck on Earth for a little while longer. SpaceX aimed to launch the eighth test flight of Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — from its Starbase site in South Texas on Monday evening (March 3). That didn’t happen, however. The company encountered issues with both of the vehicle’s elements — its Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage — and called the launch off after holding the countdown clock at T-40 seconds. SpaceX’s Flight 8 Starship rocket stands…

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