On Saturday, the US Air Force is expected to launch its secret space plane, X-37B, for a long-duration mission in low Earth orbit. The robotic orbiter looks like a smaller version of the space shuttle and has spent nearly eight of the past 10 years in space conducting classified experiments for the military. Almost nothing […]

During the design process, NASA and its contractors also had to agree on a flight test program that would demonstrate that each spacecraft works as intended. For some tests, NASA let the companies decide how they would be conducted. For example, SpaceX and Boeing had to prove that, in the event of an emergency, their […]

In 2016, White and his team at NASA published the first peer-reviewed experimental evidence that appeared to show the EmDrive actually producing thrust. The results of White’s experiment and the theory behind it remain controversial. No one can agree about whether the device actually produced thrust or how to explain it if it did. But […]

On Tuesday China’s Long March 5B rocket successfully launched from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island, which extends into the South China Sea. The rocket carried an uncrewed trial version of its next-generation spacecraft—with a mass of nearly 22 tons—successfully into orbit. ARS TECHNICA This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source […]

For most aerospace engineers, an explosion in a rocket engine is a disaster. But for Kareem Ahmed, it’s the entire point. As the director of the Propulsion and Energy Research Laboratory at the University of Central Florida, Ahmed has spent the last few years developing a next generation rocket engine that uses controlled explosions to […]

On Monday, the US Department of Defense officially released three videos depicting encounters between Navy pilots and unidentified aerial phenomena. These events occurred in 2004 and 2015, but the videos didn’t publicly surface until the New York Times included them with a front page story about the Pentagon’s “mysterious UFO program” in 2017. The Navy […]

Later this summer, physicists at the Argonne and Fermi national laboratories will exchange quantum information across 30 miles of optical fiber running beneath the suburbs of Chicago. One lab will generate a pair of entangled photons—particles that have identical states and are linked in such a way that what happens to one happens to the […]

On the evening of March 28, a small automated observatory on the Andean steppe in northwestern Argentina watched a previously undetected comet drift through the solar system nearly 500 million miles away. New comets are rare enough—astronomers only add a few dozen to the official tally each year—but this particular bit of space rock came […]

It’s a lot to ask of a mission, but Turyshev believes the necessary technologies have matured enough to make it possible. Reusable rockets have drastically reduced the cost of space access. Small satellites are regularly used for sophisticated deep space missions. The Voyager spacecraft are alive and well in interstellar space. Solar sails have unfurled […]

On Thursday, a Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station is scheduled to depart from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakhstan desert. The coronavirus pandemic means there won’t be the usual crowds of wellwishers lining the streets to see the astronauts on their way, but the flight is a historic one. It […]

The model doesn’t just help you get from the office to Taco Bell: Ships and planes—civilian and military—also rely on it. “One of NGA’s biggest customers is the military,” says Paniccia. “If you’re sailing across the ocean in an aircraft carrier, it’s very important you know where you are and you’re not going into enemy […]

There’s a new headstone in the satellite internet graveyard today. This one belongs to OneWeb, which, according to a report in the Financial Times, is preparing to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protections and lay off most of its 500 staff. The report states that OneWeb began preparing to file for bankruptcy after it failed […]

In October 2017, an asteroid-hunting telescope in Hawaii detected something unusual. A cigar-shaped object about twice the size of the Eiffel Tower was booking it past Earth at nearly 60,000 miles per hour—and appeared to be accelerating. Known as ‘Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning “scout,” the object had the characteristics of both a comet and […]

Over the last 20 years, the army of SETI@Home screensavers has parsed billions of signals collected at Arecibo and selected those that seemed the most likely to have been generated by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Once the program parsed this data, it was shipped off to Berkeley where the data was further processed to filter out […]

In the United States it’s easy to take cell reception for granted. With few exceptions, you can use your phone to text, call, and get online from pretty much anywhere in the country. Yet about 2 billion people around the world live in areas that lack mobile coverage, mostly far from major cities, which makes […]

Frogs are reflecting and satellites are detecting, but first: a cartoon about self-driving without a license. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Amphibians glow. Humans just couldn’t see it—until now New research in […]

Maier’s post tapped a vein among some nonbinary scientists, who felt the sting of being overlooked. After all, if you’re a nonbinary person, it’s hard to read that line and not feel like you are not significant, yourself. “Part of me is like, ‘This is normal,” says Rasmussen, who is disappointed but not surprised by […]

Of all the unfortunate places to be when you discover you have a blood clot, the worst has got to be 250 miles up in the sky, zooming around the world at 17,000 miles per hour aboard the International Space Station. But in a study published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, […]