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An Arianespace Vega rocket carrying two satellites failed to reach orbit yesterday after experiencing a catastrophic failure eight minutes into the launch. Officials are attributing the loss of the rocket to a “series of human errors.” Vega Flight VV17 started off well, with the 98-foot-tall (30-meter) rocket departing the Guiana Space Center at 8:52 p.m. ET. The first three stages, all powered by solid-fuel, did their job, propelling the vehicle and its cargo over the Atlantic ocean toward space. It was when the liquid-fueled upper stage kicked in that things went sideways. According to satellite launch company Arianespace, the trouble...

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine and delivered it to NASA. Claimed to be safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket, the concept could help realize the goal of using nuclear propulsion to revolutionize deep space travel, reducing Earth-Mars travel time to just three months. Because chemical rockets are already near their theoretical limits and electric space propulsion systems have such low thrust, rocket engineers continue to seek ways to build more efficient, more powerful engines using some...

These are the faces on the other end of Jeffrey Toobin’s zoom call

A strange space object approaching Earth is about to get captured by our gravity and become a new, temporary “mini-moon.” The object, which is dubbed 2020 SO, could be an asteroid. Or it could be part of the Surveyor 2, a robotic spacecraft launched to the moon on Sept. 20, 1966, according to the science and nature website EarthSky.org Traveling at the extremely-slow-for-space speed of 1,880 miles per hour, the object was seen last week by astronomers in Hawaii, and it’s on course to be captured by Earth from October 2020 until around May 2021, according to EarthSky. Astronomers here...

A Chinese Long March 4B rocket successfully launched a new Earth-watching satellite Monday (Sep. 7) but the booster's spent first stage narrowly missed a school when it fell back to Earth, witness videos show. The Long March 4B rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China, at 1:57 p.m. local time (1:57 a.m. EDT, 0557 GMT). It carried the powerful Gaofen 11 (02) Earth observation satellite, an optical observation satellite capable of returning high resolution images, showing features as smaller than 3 feet (1 meter) across. Few details of the satellite were made available. Footage of...

A rare daytime rocket attack hit Baghdad's Green Zone on Sunday, security sources said, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met top Iraqi officials. At least two rockets hit outside the US embassy in the high-security zone, the sources told AFP. Diplomats based in the neighborhood said they could hear sirens blaring for around an hour after the attack. The embassy's C-RAM rocket defense system was not triggered, possibly because the missiles' trajectory meant they would not strike within the compound. The heavily fortified Green Zone has come under repeated rocket attacks in recent months. In late January, three...

The Chinese regime failed a rocket launch on July 10—the fifth unsuccessful attempt that Beijing has publicly acknowledged over four months—in its bid to further its space ambitions. The maiden launch of Kuaizhou-11, China’s largest solid carrier rocket to date with the strongest carrying capacity, failed upon its liftoff at a launch base in Inner Mongolia, causing the loss of two communication satellites it was carrying. The incident marked Beijing’s fifth rocket launch failure since March this year. Chinese authorities said they are still looking into the causes. The regime had originally planned for Kuaizhou-11’s launch as early as the...

Test flight at 1000 psi

Shelling of Tripoli's airport hit fuel tanks and damaged passenger planes after forces loyal to Libya's renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar fired dozens of rockets into Tripoli. Six people were killed and dozens of others wounded in the attacks, the interior ministry said in a statement, which included as many as 80 rocket strikes.

A Chinese rocket carrying a new communications satellite for Indonesia has failed to reach orbit in a launch gone awry, the second failure for China's space agency in less than a month, state media reported today (April 9). The Long March 3B rocket lifted off today at 7:46 a.m. EDT from China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, where the local time was 7:46 p.m. on Thursday night, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The rocket was carrying the Palapa-N1, also known as the Nusantara Dua, a next-generation satellite for broadband and broadcast communications built for...

A daredevil has died after crashing in a homemade rocket he had launched himself while filming a program. "Mad" Mike Hughes, 64, died on Saturday near Barstow, California, after a rocket that he had built and crashed into the ground on private property at approximately 1:52 p.m. on Saturday near Highway 247, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "In a cosmic quest to explore the final frontier on a shoe-string budget, Mike Hughes and Waldo Stakes have built a steam powered rocket that will launch "Mad Mike" 5,000 feet into the air," said an article on the Science...

A man died in what authorities described as a rocket crash in the desert in Barstow on Saturday afternoon. The deadly crash was reported just before 2 p.m. on a private property along Highway 247, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in a written statement. "A man was pronounced deceased after the rocket crashed in the open desert during a rocket launch event," the statement said. Medical help was already on-site, but the pilot could not be saved. Authorities did not identity the pilot pending positive identification by coroner's officials. Witnesses and news reports indicted the launch was an...

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket will launch the Solar Orbiter spacecraft for NASA and the European Space Agency tonight. It will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during a 2-hour launch window that opens at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT on Feb. 10).

(snip) a cryptic startup called SpinLaunch starts suborbital test flights of a rocket that is launched using an enormous centrifuge. Here's the gist: A centrifuge the size of a football field will spin a rocket around in circles for about an hour until its speed eventually exceeds 5,000 miles per hour. At that point, the rocket and its payload will feel forces 10,000 times stronger than gravity. When the centrifuge finally releases the rocket at launch speed, it should, practically speaking, fly through the stratosphere until it fires its engines at the periphery of our atmosphere. (snip) SpinLaunch hopes its...

Two of Russia’s nuclear radiation monitoring stations went silent two days after a mysterious explosion that led to a radiation spike in northern Russia earlier this month. Russian officials say at least five nuclear engineers were killed during a rocket test involving “isotope power sources” on a platform in the White Sea, leading to outside speculation that the accident involved a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Four international stations designed to monitor nuclear activity had detected “an event coinciding with the [Aug. 8] explosion in Nyonoksa, Russia,” the world’s main nuclear test-ban body said on Aug. 10. The Dubna and Kirov stations...

No one was injured when an A-10C Warthog "unintentionally released" a phosphorus smoke rocket about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, the Air Force said. The Air Force is investigating after a jet accidentally fired a rocket into the desert about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, on Thursday.The Air Force said the jet, an A-10C Thunderbolt II, popularly known as the Warthog, "unintentionally released a single M-156 rocket" at about 10:40 a.m. while on a training mission.MORE AT LINK  

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon, the space agency has a very big piece of history it's looking to offload. The historic Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Alabama played a central role in developing the Saturn rockets that powered the Apollo rocket program, and apparently it had one of the earliest models just lying around after all these years. According to documents and emails obtained by CNET, MSFC "has excessed a Saturn 1 Block 1 Booster portion of a Saturn rocket stack up."

Seconds after the engine fired up, SpaceX stopped its first attempt to fly its prototype “Starship” rocket more than a few feet off the ground at the company’s facility in Boca Chica Beach, Texas on Wednesday. The prototype rocket did not lift off from the ground, as SpaceX engineer Kate Tice noted while hosting a surprise livestream of the test. The rocket’s engine started but the prototype did not move and an enduring flame shot skywards near the top of the rocket. SpaceX was intending to “hop” the vehicle in a short flight of about 65 feet in the air....

One small holograph for man. One giant holograph for the Washington Monument. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with a life-size projection of the Saturn V rocket on the Washington Monument on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The Saturn V rocket is now iconic for carrying the Apollo 11 crew to the moon in 1969. The projection-mapping-artwork will occupy 363 of the Monument's 555 vertical feet. On Friday and Saturday, the semi-centennial show will switch to a 17-minute film that recreates the Apollo 11 launch.

NASA says there’s a chance SpaceX can launch two astronauts aboard the company’s Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year if SpaceX can make fixes that caused a catastrophic test failure. On April 20, the Crew Dragon slated for the in-flight abort test exploded on a test stand at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station an instant before a planned static firing of the capsule’s eight Super Draco abort engines. No one was injured, but the Demo 1 capsule was destroyed. Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said the capsule originally intended to carry the first...