— Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images When the SpaceX Starship rocket sailed above Earth on Thursday, NASA paid close attention. The space agency has already awarded at least $4 billion to the spaceflight company to develop the vehicle that will place its next set of Moonwalking astronauts to the lunar south pole later this decade. In April 2021, SpaceX won NASA’s $2.89 billion contract to create the lunar lander for NASA’s 30-day Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than September 2026, which would ferry two humans — includin ..read more

— CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket — and the largest flying object humans have ever built — on Thursday morning. The launch was the third flight test, and the first successful orbital flight, for Starship and its monstrous Super Heavy rocket booster. Starship suffered “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” which is the polite way to say it exploded, on its first two flights. No pressure for this one. Both Starship and the Super Heavy booster run on liquid oxygen and methane propellant, and it takes about 10 million pounds of propellant just to get S ..read more

— CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, successfully reached space for the second time on Thursday. After the mighty first-stage booster Super Heavy delivered Starship into Earth orbit, the rocket achieved many firsts. But it also fell short. The 397-foot-tall orbiter ended its test flight after flying longer and faster than ever before. It perished after entering Earth’s atmosphere during reentry and crashing into the Indian Ocean. Unlike the last flight test in November, Starship survived long after separating from Super Heavy. Starship then ..read more

— GREGG NEWTON/AFP/Getty Images Round two of NASA’s newest Moon project is now underway, following the successful launch of the Intuitive Machines-1 (IM-1) mission in the early morning hours of Thursday. IM-1 is now on a journey to reach the Moon on February 22, aiming to place a lander dubbed Odysseus on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite. If it does, the Houston-based company would become the first private lander on the Moon. In addition, the touchdown would usher in a special delivery service developed by NASA to make lunar trips more frequent and less expensive. A problem occurred l ..read more

— Anadolu/Anadolu/Getty Images Another commercial spaceflight company is about to try to land on the Moon, and this time, it’s carrying miniature art, digital archives, and NASA’s first prototype radio telescope for the Moon. Intuitive Machines hopes its Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, will launch to the Moon tonight aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Tonight’s launch attempt (well, technically very early Thursday morning) follows a couple of delays, first due to weather and then due to a problem with the lander’s propellant system. Here’s everything you need to know about the launch, the landi ..read more

— Apple Elon Musk claims he wants to help humanity settle Mars. What if he already had? In For All Mankind’s alternate timeline, the history of spaceflight in the 1990s and 2000s is utterly redefined by an independent space agency known as Helios. The parallels to SpaceX and Blue Origin are clear: a billionaire creates a vision for space exploration based on profit and supposed idealism. And although he’s very much not Elon Musk, Dev Ayesa — played by X-Men legend Edi Gathegi — is a pivotal and controversial figure in this parallel and somewhat better timeline. Everything that happens in the ..read more

— Inverse; Getty Images Space travel is hard. From building the rockets to braving the vacuum, surviving the radiation, and safely returning to terra firma, there are few things about it that don’t have a high potential to fail spectacularly. And yet when everything goes as planned — like when Curiosity touches down on Mars, the James Webb Space Telescope launches, or a spaceship grabs a sample of a hard-to-reach asteroid — space travel can seem easy, if not miraculous. But despite the best efforts of humans, the natural entropy of the space environment and the persnickety nature of rockets a ..read more

— TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images SpaceX attempted a second launch of its Starship rocket on Saturday morning. The rocket reached space for the first time today, but its Super Heavy booster, which propelled it to space, exploded shortly after separation from the rocket. The Starship rocket itself lost contact and is presumed to have exploded as well. The rocket is currently the world’s most powerful one ever built, and the company hopes it could carry astronauts back to the Moon and eventually to Mars. In the uncrewed test, which was the system’s second trial, the Starship rocket peaked at ..read more

— TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images On Saturday, SpaceX will attempt a new flight test of Starship, the most powerful rocket in the world. Their first test, conducted on April 20 of this year, saw Starship reach an altitude of 24 miles over the Gulf of Mexico, just offshore of the company’s “Starbase” launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. But the launch ended just four minutes after ignition, when Starship veered off course and began to tumble. The SpaceX team elected to activate the self-destruct detonators of Starship’s Autonomous Flight Safety System to blow up their unpredictable craft. T ..read more

— CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images This morning, a new NASA mission launched toward one of the Solar System’s strangest residents. Asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich object that may be a remnant of an ancient collision that rendered the heart of a now-dead planet bare. Or, it signals that the Solar System used to be more peculiar than once thought, with Psyche having grown out from a particularly metal-rich pocket. Astronomers don’t know much about this oddity in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a distance about three times farther than Earth is from the Sun. After a delay last week ..read more