Air traffic was disrupted across Florida when a SpaceX Starship, a prototype of the spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars, disintegrated during its latest test flight. For the second consecutive time, the upper stage of the most powerful rocket ever built malfunctioned. It started spinning out of control after…
Athena didn’t crash. But what did happen to it? Hours after the 15-foot-tall robotic spacecraft arrived at the moon’s surface, closer to the lunar south pole than any spacecraft has been, it remained unclear whether its touchdown was smooth enough to perform its intended work, or if it toppled over in the process, potentially limiting…
NASA is aiming to send astronauts back to the moon, because that is what President Trump set as the destination of the agency’s human spaceflight program during his first term. On Dec. 11, 2017, Mr. Trump signed what the White House called Space Policy Directive 1, which stated that “the United States will lead the…
March 6, 2025, 9:45 a.m. ET Odysseus captured this image about 35 seconds after pitching over during its approach to the landing site last year.Credit…Intuitive Machines Odysseus, Intuitive Machines’ first lander, landed on the moon in February 2024. But not perfectly. The spacecraft was almost doomed before it even left Earth. Safety switches on laser…
Starship — the spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars — is preparing for its eighth test flight. This trip to space, on Monday, will largely be a do-over of the seventh flight, which launched in January. In that test, Starship’s mammoth booster, or the bottom of the rocket, successfully…
The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface. The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday. When…
Tesla became the latest part of Elon Musk’s business empire to make it clear that criticism of the chief executive is unacceptable by firing a manager last month after he objected to a post on social media by Mr. Musk that referred to Nazi leaders. Jared Ottmann, a manager and engineer who worked with Tesla’s…
The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this…
The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure. A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and…
Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time? When the spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down on the moon last February, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially…