spacecraft

During the Apollo missions to the Moon, a critical task for NASA was determining the spacecraft's position. To accomplish this, they devel...

Space mining company AstroForge plans to fly a spacecraft next year that will test its ability to operate fully autonomously using artificial intelligence.

Robots and rovers in deep space sometimes need to make their own decisions

Satellites power our internet, GPS, weather forecasts, defense systems—and they’re all at risk.

In what seems like an alternate universe in hindsight, Russia and the European Space Agency began discussing collaboration on next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago. Under the agreement , Europe would have provided a service module to power a crew capsule carrying up to six passengers. Europe ultimately decided not to pursue a crewed spacecraft project at the time, and Russia's state-backed space corporation, Roscosmos, chose to move ahead with a crewed spacecraft on its own. This project—always seemingly more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware—has gone under various guises over the years: PPTS (Perspektivnaya Pilotiruemaya Transportnaya Sistema / Prospective Piloted Transport System): The initial conceptual project name used in 2009 PTK NP (Pilotiruyemy Transportny Korabl Novogo Pokoleniya / New Generation Piloted Transport Ship): The official technical designation used until 2016 Federatsiya (Federation): The official name chosen following a public contest and announced in January 2016 Orel / Oryol (Eagle) : A new name adopted in September 2019 when Roscosmos was under the control of Dmitry Rogozin Actual hardware tests, maybe? Beyond the name changes and a flood of renderings, after nearly 20 years of work, then, is anything actually happening with the Eagle spacecraft? Read full article Comments

Imagine starting a space company in October 2019 with the aim of changing the world. Then, a few months later, a global pandemic shuts the world down. "Little did we know what the world had in store for us," said Trevor Bennett, an engineer who co-founded Starfish Space after a few years at Blue Origin. "But that's kind of become part of our story, showing some resilience along the way." At Blue Origin, he saw, up close, the ambitions of billionaires to build big rockets and put massive numbers of satellites into orbit. Bennett and his co-founder, another engineer from Blue Origin named Austin Link, began to think about the implications. How would humanity deal with that increased volume of satellites in orbit? Could low-Earth orbit be preserved? Read full article Comments