AlphaRocketry

  Multiple private spacecraft will be ferrying NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon just a few years from now, if all goes according to plan. In April 2021, NASA picked SpaceX to build the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program, which is working to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the decade. But SpaceX apparently won't have the moon-landing market cornered: NASA announced today (March 23) that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander. "This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe," Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a statement today. "We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in thei...

Russian defense ministry officials said the country used a new hypersonic missile in an attack on Ukraine on Friday, marking its first use in combat.  The hypersonic missile, called Kinzhal ("Dagger" in Russian), was used in an attack on a large underground warehouse in southwestern Ukraine, accokrding to Bloomberg News, which cited that Russia's claim had yet to be independently verified. Hypersonic missiles are weapons designed to fly at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5, which is about 3,800 mph (6,100 kph). Their speed and ability to maneuver themselves to a target makes them extremely difficult to track and shoot down. The United States, Russia, China and North Korea have been developing hypersonic weapons, some of which are launched into space, in pursuit of long-range flight and maneuverability.   Russia's Kinzhal hypersonic missile, is an air-to-ground weapon carried on Russian MiG-31K fighter jets and has a reported range...

Astronomers have spied three whole systems of exoplanets being born around one binary star. SVS 13 is a binary star system 980 light-years away, and the complex structures of dust around it are shedding light on how planetary systems are born in these fascinating environments. Since a large proportion of stars is bound up in multiple-star systems, this has implications for our understanding of planet formation and evolution. "Our results have revealed that each star has a disk of gas and dust around it and that, in addition, a larger disk is forming around both stars," says astronomer Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Spain and the ALMA Regional Centre at the University of Manchester in the UK. "This outer disk shows a spiral structure that is feeding matter into the individual disks, and in all of them planetary systems could form in the future. This is clear evidence for the presence of disks around both st...

A star met a gruesome end, resulting in a stunning photo. The image on the left was taken by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in August 2014, before the supernova occurred. The image on the right was taken in December 2021 with ESO's New Technology Telescope, showing a bright spot in the lower left corner of the image, suggesting a supernova occurred in the time between these two photos were taken. (Image credit: ESO/Inserra et al., Amram et al.) A new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) captures a stunning view of the Cartwheel galaxy following a recent stellar explosion.  Located roughly 500 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor, the Cartwheel galaxy is a spiral galaxy that merged with a smaller neighboring galaxy several million years ago, resulting in its unusual, two-rin shape.  Using the ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) in Chile, astronomers photographed the C...

China is planning for its next-generation crew launch vehicle for missions to its space station and the moon to have a reusable first stage. The new rocket would allow a reusable launch option for sending astronauts or cargo to China's new Tiangong space station, while a larger version would allow China to send crew on lunar and deep space missions. It will also be capable of carrying a new, larger spacecraft than the Shenzhou currently used by the China National Space Administration for crewed missions, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country's main space contractor. The rocket currently goes by the cumbersome placeholder name of "New-Generation Manned Launch Vehicle." After completing its launch role, the first stage will restart its engines to help it decelerate, using grid fins for guidance, much like the pioneering Falcon 9 rockets flown by SpaceX. However the landing phase will feature "tethered landing device...

The decades-old space partnership between Russia and the West may be going up in smoke, another victim of the invasion of Ukraine.   Early Thursday morning (March 3), London-based company OneWeb announced that it's suspending launches of its satellites from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.  The decision came after Russia's federal space agency, Roscosmos, announced it would not launch 36 OneWeb internet satellites as planned on Friday (March 4) unless OneWeb guaranteed that the craft would not be used for military purposes and the United Kingdom government agreed to divest itself from OneWeb, which it helped buy out of bankruptcy in 2020 Roscosmos has also halted launches of Russian-built Soyuz rockets from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. And Roscosmos chief Dimitry Rogozin announced Friday that his agency will no longer sell rocket engines to United States companies, saying, "Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks....

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has destroyed a "large" part of its own space history, with reports now confirming the fate of an enormous aircraft that was originally built to transport Soviet space shuttles. Once the world's largest flying machine by both wingspan and weight, the Antonov An-225 "Mriya" ("Dream") was parked in an open-air hangar undergoing repairs at Hostomel (or Gostomel) airport, located to the northwest of Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, when Russia launched its attack against the country on Thursday (Feb. 24). Four days later, the news came that the one-of-a-kind aircraft was no more. "The biggest plane in the world, "Mriya" (The Dream), was destroyed by Russian occupants on an airfield near Kiev," the official Twitter account for the country of Ukraine reported on Sunday. The Antonov Company, which since 2001 has operated the AN-225 as a heavy-lift cargo freighter, also took to Twitter to say it ...