Tag: Human Spaceflight

Soviet-era cosmonaut Vyacheslav Zudov, whose failed docking with a Russian space station ended with the first and only emergency splashdown in a Soyuz spacecraft, has died at the age of 82. Zudov’s death on Wednesday (June 12) was reported by Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space corporation. “[His] two-day spaceflight became, without exaggeration, dramatic,” read a statement from the space agency. “The landing of ‘Radon’ (the call sign that the cosmonaut chose for himself) turned out to be no less dangerous.” The Soyuz 23 descent module, dragging its parachute, is lifted by…

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Boeing’s first crewed Starliner mission, that ferried astronauts to the International Space Station, will need to wait a little longer before returning its crew to Earth.  On June 5, the Crew Flight Test (CFT) for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launched with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board; the spacecraft docked at the International Space Station (ISS) the next day. The mission’s objective was to complete a full on-orbit shakedown of the spacecraft, and it was originally set to last about a week. Now, the pair won’t return home…

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Come 2026, NASA plans to land humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. Times have changed, as can be gauged from the new rockets, spacecraft and spacesuits.  To prepare for the Artemis 3 moon-landing mission, in late April two astronauts donned Axiom Space’s new spacesuits and for the first time tested out a mock version of the vehicle that will get them to the moon. Scientists and engineers say the test — the first of its kind since the Apollo era — provided feedback on how well…

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The handwritten journal pages of Israel’s first astronaut have been added to the country’s national library in Jerusalem, more than 20 years after they were found among the debris from the NASA tragedy that claimed his life. Ilan Ramon wrote most of the diary while he was in orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia, serving as an STS-107 payload specialist on the winged spacecraft’s last, ill-fated flight. The found pages document Ramon’s day-to-day life in space, from his hygiene routine to the research he performed on behalf of NASA and…

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Boeing is now targeting June 1 for the first crewed launch of its Starliner capsule, though that date is far from set in stone. The flight date for the mission, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), has been in considerable flux recently. It had been scheduled to lift off on May 6 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, but that try was called off about two hours before launch due to a misbehaving valve in the rocket’s upper stage.  ULA…

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Blue Origin’s nearly two-year human spaceflight drought is over. Jeff Bezos‘ aerospace company launched its NS-25 mission today (May 19), sending six people — including the United States’ first-ever Black astronaut candidate — on a brief trip to suborbital space aboard its New Shepard rocket-capsule combo. It was Blue Origin‘s first space tourism launch since August 2022. That previous mission went well, but the company’s next flight, an uncrewed research jaunt that launched a month later, did not: New Shepard suffered a serious anomaly, causing the destruction of the first-stage…

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Ever have one of those nightmares where you forget your pencil, or some key item, before a big test? Astronauts flying to the moon face that situation in spades: Once everything is on the spacecraft and they’re on the way, there’s no way to add to or change anything on the Orion spacecraft. So the Artemis 2 crew practiced a “day in the life” of their moon mission, expected to fly there in 2025, to see if there were any little items they may have forgotten. The astronaut quartet literally…

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As we move closer to the greatest revolution of all time, the opening of the High Frontier of space to humanity, some assert this is somehow a bad thing. Based on inaccurate understandings of history and misplaced projections of those misunderstood times to the future, they are spreading ridiculous and possibly dangerous ideas that what is happening in what I call the Space Revolution is a repeat of the conquests and colonization of history. Wrong. Aside from the fact that we are not taking space from anyone, this time, for…

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Boeing’s Starliner capsule has left the launch pad. Starliner and its rocket ride, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V, rolled off the pad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today (May 8), heading to an assembly building at the site so scientists can replace a misbehaving valve in the launcher’s upper stage. The duo could be back soon, however: They’re scheduled to launch no earlier than May 17, kicking off Starliner’s first-ever astronaut mission, a trial run to the International Space Station (ISS) called Crew Flight Test (CFT).…

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CAPE CANAVERAL — Starliner will wait at least four more days for its first crewed launch. Boeing’s new commercial spacecraft, Starliner, waved off its first launch attempt late tonight (May 6) due to a problem with an “oxygen relief valve on the Centaur Stage on the Atlas V,” NASA posted on X. Atlas V, the flight’s rocket manufactured by United Launch Alliance, has flown missions since 2002 with a 100 percent success rate, but this is its first mission with astronauts. “The engineering team has evaluated the vehicle is not…

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