For about as long as engineers have talked about beaming solar power to Earth from space, they’ve had to caution that it was an idea unlikely to become real anytime soon. Elaborate designs for orbiting solar farms have circulated for decades—but since photovoltaic cells were inefficient, any arrays would need to be the size of […]
A rocket built by Indian start-up Skyroot has become the country’s first privately developed launch vehicle to reach space, following a successful maiden flight earlier today. The sub-orbital mission is a major milestone for India’s private space industry, say experts, though more needs to be done to nurture the fledgling sector. The Vikram-S rocket, named […]
NASA’s Artemis-1 mission launched early in the pre-dawn hours this morning, at 1:04 a.m. eastern time, carrying with it the hopes of a space program aiming now to land American astronauts back on the moon. The Orion spacecraft now on its way to the moon also carries with it a lot of CubeSat-sized science. (Some […]
The world’s largest camera sits within a nondescript industrial building in the hills above San Francisco Bay. If all goes well, this camera will one day fit into the heart of the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. For the last seven years, engineers have been crafting the camera in a clean room at […]
Planning for the return journey is an integral part of the preparations for a crewed Mars mission. Astronauts will require a total mass of about 50 tonnes of rocket propellent for the ascent vehicle that will lift them off the planet’s surface, including 31 tonnes of oxygen approximately. The less popular option is for crewed […]
A recent United Nations provision has banned the use of mercury in spacecraft propellant. Although no private company has actually used mercury propellant in a launched spacecraft, the possibility was alarming enough—and the dangers extreme enough—that the ban was enacted just a few years after one U.S.-based startup began toying with the idea. Had the […]
Earth’s moon is the target of more missions than at any time since the Apollo era, by both space agencies and commercial entities. NASA, for example, has plans to visit the moon using both robots and humans, and is also considering—with international collaborators—a small orbiting outpost in the next decade. This facility, known as the […]
A top military official says there’s a simmering shadow conflict playing out in space, with U.S. satellites coming under regular attack. But what does an attack on a spacecraft look like, who is committing them, and how can operators protect themselves? General David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations at the US Space Force, […]
Late last year, Japanese robotics startup GITAI sent their S1 robotic arm up to the International Space Station as part of a commercial airlock extension module to test out some useful space-based autonomy. Everything moves pretty slowly on the ISS, so it wasn’t until last month that NASA astronauts installed the S1 arm and GITAI […]
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. At the heart of every successful space mission is a sophisticated and capable computer system. In the 1960s, relatively basic computing systems took humankind to the moon. More recently, the Parker probe has reached the scorching outskirts of our […]