Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese billionaire who signed up for a lunar orbit flight aboard SpaceX's Starship back in 2018, has cancelled his trip. The reason, he said in a series of posts on X, is that Starship is still in development and the "dearMoon" launch may not occur until well into the 2030s.
After yesterday’s launch of the first crewed Starliner mission was scrubbed, NASA, Boeing and ULA made the decision to wait a few days before making another attempt.
The first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has once again been called off, this time after an automatic hold was issued by the ground launch sequencer less than four minutes before liftoff. As a launch commentator explained during NASA’s livestream, the ground launch sequencer is the computer that takes over the terminal count and essentially launches the rocket. “The reason for that hold is not known at this time,” he said. Starliner’s next chance to fly is tomorrow at 12:03PM ET, but whether it does will depend on the outcome of the team’s investigation into today’s issue.
The hits keep on coming with NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope. According to the space agency, the JWST just found the most distant known galaxy ever. The catchily-named JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy is said to have formed just 290 million years after the big bang, but it features some unique properties that are at odds with that notion.
A SpaceX testing stand at the company's McGregor, Texas facilities went up in flames during a test of its Raptor 2 engines on the afternoon of May 23. According to NASASpaceflight, the engine had an anomaly that caused vapors to seep out and lead to a secondary explosion.
The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule still hasn’t launched more than two weeks after its originally scheduled liftoff date, and there's going to be at least another week of waiting and uncertainty before it does.
Blue Origin is back in the space tourism game. Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company successfully flew six paying customers to the edge of space and back this morning, breaking its nearly two-year-long hiatus from crewed missions. This was Blue Origin’s seventh trip with humans on board. The mission — a quick jaunt to cross the Kármán line, or the boundary of space, about 62 miles above Earth — lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30AM ET.
The strongest geomagnetic storm in 20 years made the colorful northern lights, or aurora borealis, visible Friday night across the US, even in areas that are normally too far south to see them. And the show may not be over.
Watch along today as NASA's Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test finally — most likely — blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA should start streaming its coverage at 6:30PM ET on its YouTube channel, with the official launch set for 10:34PM ET.