NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC
Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, is finally setting some ambitious timelines, saying it plans to conduct an uncrewed Moon landing in as little as a year from now, deploying a demonstration version of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander. This ramps up the space rivalry big time, putting…
House and Senate appropriators have released NASA’s final spending bill for the fiscal year 2024, focusing on the Artemis program’s goal of returning astronauts to the Moon.
NASA
NASA still has plenty of cool projects afoot in the real world—did you hear about that asteroid-redirecting test?
MethaneSAT / Environmental Defense Fund
An ambitious NASA project designed to test satellite refueling in space, known as OSAM-1, has been discontinued after significant technical, cost, and scheduling difficulties. The cancellation comes in the wake of an October 2023 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General that cited “poor performance” by Maxar,…
Four astronauts are scheduled to ride on board the Orion spacecraft in September 2025 for NASA’s first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. But before the Artemis crew can strap into Orion, the space agency still needs to resolve an issue with the spacecraft’s side hatch that could prevent the astronauts…
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview
In our top science stories this week: Writer Ed Cara looks back at the terrifying prion disease known as Mad Cow; researchers discover seamounts taller than the Burj Khalifa; and the journal that published a horrifying diagram of ‘rat dck’ explains what went wrong. —Rose Pastore