Vertical says it remains on track to start flight tests in early 2022 as it targets certification for the VA-X4 in 2024 and entry-into-service in 2025.
Rolls-Royce says it has generated more than a megawatt of power in ground runs of a hybrid-electric engine on a testbed which is designed to pave the way for future development of a hybrid-electric regional propulsion system.
DART separated from its Falcon 9 second stage just less than 56 min. after launching, a milestone followed by signal acquisition by the APL mission operations center 70 min. after liftoff.
The eldest daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to venture into space, will fly on the Blue Origin suborbital spacecraft named after her father, the company said on Nov. 23.
Lockheed Martin on Nov. 23 announced the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (NGG) Block 0 program passed its system-level critical design review, keeping pace for the first launch in 2025.
Otto Aviation has completed the first phase of testing of its unconventional Celera 500L and says flights of the full-scale aerodynamic prototype demonstrated the aircraft’s low fuel consumption.
Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the $11 billion, U.S.-led successor to the Hubble observatory, is being delayed at least four days to no earlier than Dec. 22 to allow time for additional analysis following a mishap during processing the telescope for launch in French Guiana.
Space, missile and cyber electronics rollup BlueHalo announced its latest acquisition Nov. 23 with a deal for Asymmetrik, a boutique software provider to the U.S. intelligence community.
In South Korea Volocopter and Kakao Mobility are to study the feasibility of operating UAM services, a technology that Seoul wants to see commercialized by 2025.
Astra Space, a California-based startup staking a claim in the burgeoning small-satellite launch business, completed a successful flight test of its Rocket 3.1 booster on Nov. 20, a mission backed by the U.S. Space Force.
Voyager Space, a private equity-backed holding company of new-space upstarts such as Nanoracks, announced Nov. 22 it has acquired a majority stake in Space Micro, a satellite communications specialist for NASA and the U.S. military.
Flight services provider DroneUp and Walmart have agreed to launch on-demand package deliveries by drone at three Walmart stores in northwest Arkansas, the companies announced Nov. 22.
Dubai has launched a program to enable drone transportation by creating an infrastructure to test unmanned aircraft in designated areas and develop legislation to enable their implementation.
The 10 years that separate the first hover flights of the Volocopter VC1 and eMagic Aircraft’s eMagic One illustrate the advances made in a decade by electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing technology.
Chinese electric vertical takeoff and landing startup AutoFlight has identified European technology investor Lukasz Gadowski as the source of the $100 million Series A investment announced in September.
A newly discovered data dump by the U.S. Air Force last August discloses the first details about the progress in flight test of the secretive Lockheed Martin AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile.
The U.S. military needs to catch up to China and Russia in offensive hypersonic weapons development quickly, while focusing on new ways to defend against the threat of missiles that have made the world a much more complicated place, the Space Force’s No. 2 officer said.
Solar-powered aircraft developer Skydweller Aero has partnered with Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica to explore the use of its long-endurance unmanned aircraft to expand cellular coverage.
Flytrex’s delivery system uses a multicopter drone that flies autonomously beyond line of sight and hovers to safely lower the package by wire to the customer in the ground.
The mission is a bold attempt to demonstrate whether a spacecraft traveling at high velocity can slam into an asteroid with enough kinetic energy to knock it off course—an ability that could one day enable humanity to counter objects that pose an impact threat to Earth.
China’s AVIC Aerodynamics Research Institute says it has completed construction of a new hypersonic wind tunnel that is reportedly able to simulate speeds from Mach 4 to Mach 8.
