Enlarge / An artist's interpretation of Voyager 2, pointed to transmit data to Earth. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.

For the time being, NASA and the mission's scientists aren't panicking. In an update posted Friday, the space agency said Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation several times a year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth. It is scheduled to do so again on October 15, which should allow communication to resume. In the meantime, NASA said it does not anticipate the spacecraft veering off course.

Launched separately in 1977 on two different rockets, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have been true trailblazers for NASA and the world. Never before had a spacecraft visited four worlds in a single, grand tour as the two Voyager probes did in the 1970s and 1980s with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Artist concept of Demonstration for Rocket to Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) spacecraft, which will demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine. (credit: DARPA)

Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.

NASA announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the US Department of Defense to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027. The US space agency will invest about $300 million in the project to develop a next-generation propulsion system for in-space transportation.

"NASA is looking to go to Mars with this system," said Anthony Calomino, an engineer at NASA who is leading the agency's space nuclear propulsion technology program. "And this test is really going to give us that foundation."

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner is seen atop an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A difficult summer for the Starliner program continued this week, with Boeing reporting additional losses on the vehicle's development and NASA saying it's too early to discuss potential launch dates for the crewed spacecraft.

Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time. However, just weeks before this launch was due to occur, Boeing announced on June 1 that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the "soft links" in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable.

On Wednesday, as a part of its quarterly earnings update, Boeing announced that the Starliner program had taken a loss of $257 million "primarily due to the impacts of the previously announced launch delay." This brings the company's total write-down of losses on the Starliner program to more than $1.1 billion. Partly because of this, Boeing's Defense, Space, & Security division reported a loss of $527 million during the second quarter of this year.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A look inside the clean room where OSIRIS-REx's samples will be stored. (credit: NASA)

Christmas Day for scientists who study asteroids is coming in just two months when a small spacecraft carrying material from a distant rubble pile will land in a Utah desert.

The return of the OSIRIS-REx sample container on September 24 will cap the primary mission to capture material from an asteroid—in this case, the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid Bennu—and return some of its pebbles and dust to Earth.

It has been a long time coming. This mission launched seven years ago and has been in the planning and development phase for over a decade. To say the scientists who have fought for and executed this mission are anxious and excited is an understatement. But there is an additional frisson with OSIRIS-REx, as scientists are not entirely sure what they've been able to pull away from the asteroid.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / An Astranis satellite is seen in the company's factory. (credit: Astranis)

Astranis, a company seeking to provide Internet connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its "Arcturus" satellite was successfully deployed following a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began to send commands and update the flight software before raising Arcturus' orbit and slotting it into a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite linked up with an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska.

Sometime after this, however, the satellite experienced what Astranis characterized as an abrupt anomaly with a supplier's component on the solar array drive assembly. In an update on Friday, Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates to solar arrays to ensure they are always pointed at the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to remain fully powered at all times.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Falcon 9 launches 54 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 in Florida on Saturday. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.03 of the Rocket Report! Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. For decades this has meant a time to reflect on the glories of the past. But finally, with the Artemis Program, we can also look forward with hope about what is coming. That is something I am thankful for.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab recovers another booster. The launch company's Electron rocket boosted seven satellites for NASA, Space Flight Laboratory, and Spire Global on Tuesday. This was Rocket Lab's 39th launch overall, and after the primary mission Electron's first stage completed a successful ocean splashdown. Rocket Lab’s recovery team rendezvoused with the stage on the water, successfully bringing it onto a vessel using a specially designed capture cradle, the company said.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The Pew Research Center published the results of a new public survey on Thursday, the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The survey assessed Americans' attitudes toward space exploration and space policy issues.

Similarly to five years ago, the survey found that Americans broadly support the national space agency, NASA. Three-quarters of respondents had a favorable opinion of NASA, compared to just 9 percent with an unfavorable opinion.

However, as several previous surveys have found, the public has far different priorities for NASA than are expressed in the space agency's budget. In this new report, based on a large survey of 10,329 US adults, the highest support came for "monitor asteroids, other objects that could hit the Earth" (60 percent) and "monitor key parts of the Earth's climate system" (50 percent). Sending astronauts to the Moon (12 percent) and Mars (11 percent) lagged far behind as top priorities for respondents.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Commander of US Space Command General James Dickinson testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 8, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The leader of the United States Space Command, an Army general named James H. Dickinson, said Wednesday that megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink network have played an important role in Ukraine's efforts to deter an invasion by Russia.

"We are seeing for the first time what a megaconstellation means to the world," Dickinson said. "That provides such resiliency and redundancy in terms of maintaining satellite communications in this example. That is powerful, and the department is moving in that direction."

Dickinson made his remarks at the Aspen Security Forum. As leader of the Space Command, Dickinson is responsible for the command and control of all US military forces in outer space. He said Starlink had facilitated communications among Ukraine's armed forces and that other commercial companies had provided essential observation services through means such as synthetic aperture radar, which can observe at night and through clouds.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Garrett Reisman, center, has plenty of experience living without gravity. (credit: NASA)

A little more than 15 years ago, astronaut Garrett Reisman was among a crew of seven who launched into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle remained attached to the Space Station for nearly two weeks, but when the orbiter departed, it left Reisman behind for an extended stay.

During his time at the station, Reisman would often pass through the Harmony module, which serves as a corridor connecting laboratory modules built by NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies. Sometimes, he would look up and see a small placard that said, "To CAM." The arrow, however, pointed out into space.

"When I was up there on the space station, there was still the sign that says, 'To CAM,'" Reisman said in an interview. "But there's just a closed hatch. It was tragic. It was just kind of taunting me when I saw that because I think that could have been one of the most important scientific discoveries that we made."

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / An LVM-3 rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on Friday. (credit: R.Satish BABU / AFP)

India took the first step toward its second attempt to land on the Moon on Friday with the launch of its Chandrayaan-3 mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern part of the country.

The spacecraft launched on the LVM-3 rocket, the heaviest lift vehicle in India's fleet. Liftoff came nearly three years to the date of the launch of the Chandrayaan-2 mission to the Moon. That launch successfully placed a spacecraft into lunar orbit, but a landing attempt was unsuccessful. The Indian space agency, ISRO, lost communication with its Vikram lander at about 2 kilometers above the lunar surface due to a software problem. It subsequently crashed into the Moon.

So the Indian space agency decided to learn from its mistakes and try again. The Chandrayaan-3 mission has eschewed the lunar orbiter, as the Indian spacecraft remains operational after three years. So this launch consisted of a propulsion module, a new Vikram lander, and a small rover named Pragyan.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The fate of a mission to return samples from Mars hangs in the balance. (credit: NASA)

The US Senate on Thursday slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface.

NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away.

"The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket completes a "flight readiness firing." (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance has identified the root cause of a failure that destroyed the upper stage of its Vulcan rocket in late March. According to the company's chief executive, Tory Bruno, the Centaur V upper stage failed due to higher-than-anticipated stress near the top of the liquid hydrogen propellant tank and slightly weaker welding.

Bruno outlined the nature of the failure and steps the company is taking to remediate it during a teleconference with space reporters on Thursday. He said United Launch Alliance is working toward flying the heavy lift Vulcan rocket on its debut mission during the fourth quarter of this year.

Tank failure

The Centaur V upper stage was destroyed during pressure testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on March 29. Bruno said this was the 15th test in a series of 45 tests to qualify the Centaur stage for all potential mission profiles. However, about halfway through the test the hydrogen tank started leaking, and over the course of four and a half minutes the leak expanded.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The first-anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI))

To commemorate the first year of scientific operations by the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA has released a stunning new image of a stellar nursery.

The photo is gorgeous. It could easily hang in a museum, as if it were a large canvas painting produced by a collaboration of impressionistic and modern artists. But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. The detail revealed in this image of about 50 stars is truly remarkable, a distillation of all that Webb has delivered over the last 12 months and all that it promises to do over the next 10 or 20 years.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / India's Chandrayaan-3 lunar spacecraft undergoes accoustic testing. (credit: ISRO)

As anyone who has been paying attention to space exploration knows, the Moon is red-hot. Up to half a dozen missions may launch to the lunar surface in the next six months, heralding a new era of Moon exploration.

It has not always been so. Following the Space Race in the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA and the Soviet Union backed off their Moon exploration programs. NASA sent probes to the far-flung corners of the Solar System, and the US space agency and Russian space program focused their human activities in low-Earth orbit, constructing and inhabiting a series of space stations.

There have been three primary drivers of renewed interest in the Moon. The first was the discovery and confirmation in the 1990s and early 2000s that water ice is likely to exist at the lunar poles in permanently shadowed craters. The presence of abundant water, providing oxygen and hydrogen resources, has given space agencies a new reason to explore the poles.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / An artist impression of exoplanet LTT9779b orbiting its host star. The planet is around the size of Neptune and reflects 80 percent of the light shone on it.

It has been about three decades since the first confirmed exoplanet was discovered. In the following 30 years, using a variety of telescopes and instruments on the ground and in space, astronomers have cataloged more than 5,000 planets around other stars.

As part of this process of scientific discovery, astronomers have confirmed that our Milky Way galaxy teems with billions of planets. They exist around many (if not most) stars, and they come in all sizes and flavors. There are very large and very small planets and very hot and very cold ones. There are more than a few that could harbor life as we know it on Earth.

After this initial wave of discovery, powered by such NASA survey missions as the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, second-generation instruments like Europe's small Cheops satellite have sought to characterize the nature of these exoplanets. Launched less than three years ago on a Soyuz rocket, the Cheops instrument has delivered some valuable insights on planets orbiting other stars.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The final Ariane 5 launch vehicle liftoff for flight VA261 as seen from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on Wednesday. (credit: ESA/S. Corvaja)

Welcome to Edition 6.01 of the Rocket Report! Due to the fact that we are up to Edition 6, it means that Ars has been publishing this newsletter for five years. I genuinely want to thank everyone for their contributions over the years, whether you've submitted a story (Ken the Bin for MVP?) or just passed the newsletter along to a friend to subscribe. Also, starting next week our new space hire, Stephen Clark, will alternate publication of the newsletter with me. Hopefully, there will be no missed issues going forward.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic flies commercial mission. The space tourism company founded by Richard Branson launched three Italian researchers and three company employees on the suborbital operator’s first commercial flight to the edge of space on June 29, Ars reports. The spacecraft rocketed to an altitude of more than 279,000 feet, higher than the 50-mile height recognized as the boundary of space by NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The Ariane 5 has been a workhorse since 1996 for the European Space Agency. (credit: ESA/Arianespace)

Wednesday update: Unfavorable upper-level winds scrubbed a launch attempt of the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket on Tuesday from the European spaceport in French Guiana.

However, Arianespace said Wednesday that the forecast for today is marginally better, and so the rocket is being prepared for liftoff at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). This will be the final launch for the Ariane 5 rocket, which flew for nearly as long as NASA's Space Shuttle. It will leave Europe without guaranteed access to space for at least the next year.

Original post: The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / This illustration shows a concept for a proposed NASA Sample Retrieval Lander, about the size of an average two-car garage, that would carry a small rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle to the Martian surface. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

During his final months as the chief of NASA's science programs last year, there was one mission Thomas Zurbuchen fretted about more than any other—the agency's ambitious plan to return rocks from Mars to Earth. He supported the Mars Sample Return mission and helped get it moving through the agency's approval process. But the project threatened to devour the agency's science budget.

"This was the thing that gave me sleepless nights toward the end of my tenure at NASA and even after I left," said Zurbuchen, who left NASA after seven years leading its Science Mission Directorate at the end of 2022. "I think there's a crisis going on."

Now, Ars has learned, the problem may be even worse than Zurbuchen imagined.

Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket takes flight early on Thursday morning carrying the NROL-68 mission. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 5.43 of the Rocket Report! I am thrilled to announce that Stephen Clark is joining Ars Technica to cover space alongside me. You've already read some of his fine work here in the Rocket Report, as he has been the long-time editor of Spaceflight Now. But now, starting Monday, he'll be writing frequently for Ars and periodically authoring the Rocket Report. Accordingly, after next week, there will no longer be any breaks in this newsletter except for the year-end holidays.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

North Star moves from LauncherOne to Electron. Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space has signed a multi-launch deal with Rocket Lab after Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy scotched plans to deploy its space situational awareness satellites this summer, Space News reports. Rocket Lab will launch the venture’s first four satellites this fall on an Electron rocket, NorthStar said this week. Spire Global is providing the satellites, each the size of 16 CubeSats.

Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Musk versus Zuckerberg in a cage match? Probably not. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images ( David Paul Morris | Nathan Laine))

The Internet is aflame this morning with the prospect of a cage match between two of the tech industry's most prominent and controversial leaders. Ready to rumble in the red corner is Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. And in the blue corner, we have the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

As the BBC and multiple other outlets have confirmed, Zuckerberg was entirely serious when he accepted Musk's offer of a cage match by saying "send me location." On Wednesday evening, Musk then replied with "Vegas Octagon." This was a reference to the fenced-in area used for Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Las Vegas.

Given the humorous nature of Musk's other responses to the proposed fight, such as "I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus', where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing," it seems probable that he is not overly serious. While Musk has the definite advantage in size, he is 12 years older than Zuckerberg, and the Facebook founder frequently trains in mixed-martial arts.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments