Space

While working on the giant Long March 9, China comes up with a Moon-landing plan that would use established launcher technology.

Upgrades are underway for carrier aircraft as Stratolaunch prepares to offer hypersonic test capability from 2022 onward.

The Streamlined Launch and Reentry Licensing Requirements final rule allows commercial space operators to acquire a single license to conduct multiple launches from multiple sites.

Introduced in April, the “Honey, I shrunk the NASA payload” global crowdsourcing competition is moving on to “Honey, I Built the NASA Payload, The Sequel.”

Fourteen U.S. companies are to receive an estimated $370 million in NASA “Tipping Point” agreements intended to advance technologies needed to achieve a sustained human presence on the Moon during the 2020s and support the human exploration of Mars thereafter.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) hopes to begin developing an upgrade for the H3 medium space launcher in 2022, only a year after the first flight, with the aim of driving payload up and unit costs down.

Both companies will serve as prime contractors for the definition phase of the European Large Logistics Lander, supporting NASA's Artemis human lunar missions.

The first countries to sign bilateral Artemis Accords agreements with the U.S. are Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

Stockholm is planning to make investments in the planned launch site, near Kiruna in the north of the country, that would enable smallsat launch as early as 2022.

Ask the Editors: The gentle encounter is to last less than 16 sec.—and potentially only 5 sec.

Chinese engineers have designed and tested equipment for aerial recovery of space launcher main engines, which they regard as offering advantages over powered descent by fully reusable first stages.

Rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts have been living aboard the orbital outpost for 20 years. Here are some other numbers behind the milestone.

Fifteen-nation program marks 20 years of continuous human presence in low Earth orbit.

In this special edition Check 6 Tech Talk, we speak to Elizabeth Turtle, the principal investigator of NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission.

The reserve could support perhaps 1,100 lunar personnel living and working permanently in the cislunar realm to grow a future $3 trillion annual space economy, ULA president and CEO Tory Bruno says.

The seven-year-old startup targeting end-of-life and debris-removal services for low Earth orbit satellites and beyond has landed $51 million in new venture capital from several investors.

It was the seventh flight of the booster and capsule, and the program’s 13th launch since the first New Shepard system debuted in April 2015.

The SLS’s four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines will ignite for a full-duration, 8-min. firing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi

NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have selected a new technology for planetary sample collection and return for future missions to the Moon and Martian moon Phobos.

In the Lunar Gateway's current form, “Russia is likely to refrain from participating in it on a large scale,” the head of Russia's space agency says.

The company is investigating an unexpected pressure rise in a Merlin 1D engine turbomachinery gas generator.

Inmarsat has confirmed the commercial service introduction of GX5, the company’s newest, geostationary satellite to date.

Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of CNES, tells Aviation Week’s Thierry Dubois about the agency’s progress on reusable launchers and other programs in conjunction with International Astronautical Congress 2020.

The U.S. Space Development Agency is looking for a company to launch an initial set of 28 communications and missile tracking satellites to low Earth orbit beginning in September 2022.

NASA is allocating $19.3 million for 21 studies on the physical and psychological issues astronauts will face as the agency prepares to return to the Moon’s surface in 2024 and advance to Mars in the 2030s.