Space flight

In April, the Russian space agency launched the Bion-M craft which carried quite a few mice, gerbils, newts, snails and some microfauna into Earth’s orbit. The experiment was designed to test how weightlesness affect them and how these organisms adapt in the process. The craft returned back to Earth on May 19th in an otherwise [...]

Billions of dollars and decades worth of research have been invested in fusion propelling technology, so that one day we might breach current spaceflight limitations that offer little hope of straying too far from our planet. Researchers at Washington University have recently made great strides forward in this respect and have successfully tested each stage [...]

This afternoon a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts (two Russian and one American) is set for launch out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, destined for the International Space Station, at 4:43 p.m. The flight is set to be a historical one, as it will set a new milestone in space launches. Typically, all manned flights up [...]

SpaceX, a company that has made tremendous leaps forward in the past year alone, has recently completed yet another successful test of its reusable Grasshopper spacecraft. This isn’t the Grasshopper’s first test run, but this time around it bested it previous record after it hoped to an altitude nearly 24 stories high, hovered for 34 [...]

Space exploration is nowadays most often an international affair, and NASA‘s Orion project is not an exception. NASA signed an agreement in mid-December for the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide a service module for the Orion spacecraft’s Exploration Mission-1 in 2017. When the spacecraft will be launched, it will have attached the ESA-provided service [...]

After the thrilling success of SpaceX, which is currently the best option to ship equipment and supplies in and out of the International Space Station, another company tries to fill in some big shoes: Golden Spike announces plans to offer manned space flights to the surface of the moon by 2020. The private US company [...]

The Voyager probes have provided scientists with invaluable data for the past four decades as they circled our solar system’s outmost planets, and most importantly as they prepare to leave our solar system. Though expected to exit the solar system by the end of this year, Voyager-1 has yet to achieve this. The reason for [...]

Passionately considered by its founders as “the biggest breakthrough in propulsion technology since the jet engine”, a still in development reusable engine, which would allow commercial aircraft to travel at incredible speeds both in the atmosphere and sub-orbital space, promises to revolutionize the way we fly. A trip from London to Sydney could be made in under [...]

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have successfully tested out the prototype for a nuclear-reactor engine, meant to serve in the future as an  ”a simple, reliable space power system.” Although the experiment, dubbed Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions (DUFF), rendered only 24 watts of power, barely enough to power a common household light bulb, the system [...]

After no less than 48 hours of negotiating in Naples, Italy, the 20 European nations that support the European Space Agency (ESA) have finally agreed on a budget for the agency and a set of priorities which, while not delightful, doesn’t disappoint, despite the tight economic situation Europe is in at the moment. ESA’s activities, [...]