NASA says that its mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche will no longer be able to launch in 2022 after engineers were unable to verify the readiness of the spacecraft’s software. What could amount to being a few weeks or months behind schedule will have major ramifications for the mission, extending its cruise phase –…
SpaceX has transported the most powerful rocket booster ever assembled to its Starbase orbital launch site (OLS) and used giant robotic arms to install it. It’s not the first such trip for Starship’s Super Heavy first stage in general, nor for this specific booster, which is known as Booster 7 or B7. Booster 7 first…
SpaceX’s latest record-breaking Falcon 9 booster has returned to port after completing its 13th launch and landing. Falcon 9 B1060 lifted off for the first time in June 2020 with the US military’s third next-generation GPS III satellite safely cocooned inside a payload fairing. Unlike B1054, which the US Air Force required SpaceX to expend…
On June 6, 2022, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved a permit for a SpaceX construction project called “Project Echo.” The construction is located in Bastrop County, Central Texas, where Elon Musk’s other companies—including The Boring Company and Neuralink—have established a presence. Bastrop County property records revealed that Gapped Bass LLC—which is closely tied…
Relativity Space has shipped both stages of its first 3D-printed Terran-1 rocket to a launch pad it recently finished constructing at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), leaving the startup just a few steps away from its first orbital launch attempt. As Relativity CEO Tim Ellis himself noted, the company is about two years…
A week after rolling a different ‘test tank’ from its South Texas Starship factory to nearby launch and test facilities, SpaceX has moved a second test tank to the pad. Hearkening back to a period in 2020 where SpaceX built and tested six different Starship test tanks in a period of six months, the company…
Recently, news broke that some SpaceX employees have written an open letter criticizing CEO Elon Musk’s behavior on Twitter. The employees have been terminated by the private space firm, with SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell explaining the rationale behind the company’s decision. The open letter argued that SpaceX is not living up its “No Asshole” and zero-tolerance sexual…
Reuters reports that SpaceX has proposed modifying a second Florida launch pad to support Crew Dragon missions after NASA raised concerns about the threat posed by plans to launch Starship out of the only pad currently certified for Dragon. After more than a year of downtime, SpaceX restarted the construction of an orbital Starship launch site at NASA’s…
CEO Elon Musk claims that SpaceX could be ready to attempt Starship’s first orbital launch as early as July. While SpaceX has been making slow and steady progress preparing the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster nominally assigned to that launch debut, the odds that even just one of those two stages will be…
NASA and SpaceX have delayed Cargo Dragon’s CRS-25 space station resupply mission another two weeks after the company narrowed down the cause of the spacecraft’s rare leak. Instead of the mission’s original June 7th target, which was eventually pushed back to June 10th and then June 28th when SpaceX discovered signs of a possible fuel…