Category Archives: Spacex

SpaceX's next astronaut launch for NASA will take place in just three weeks, if all goes according to plan.

Feb. 22 is the target launch date for Crew-8, which will send four people to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month stay, NASA announced on Wednesday (Jan. 31). That's more specific than the last update we got, which identified "late February" as the target.

Crew-8's Crew Dragon capsule will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard the Dragon will be Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps of NASA and Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Dominick will command Crew-8, while Barratt will serve as pilot. Epps and Grebenkin will be mission specialists.

Related: SpaceX launches Crew-6 astronaut mission to space station for NASA

Crew-8 will employ the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, which already has four astronaut missions to the ISS under its belt. The spacecraft also flew the Demo-2 test mission in 2020 SpaceX's first-ever crewed flight Crew-2 in 2021, Crew-6 in 2023 and the private Ax-1 mission in April 2022.

Crew-8's Falcon 9 rocket, by contrast, will be flying for the first time.

"The booster recently completed stage testing and will undergo final assembly in the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A ahead of the Dragon and Falcon 9 mate," NASA officials wrote in an update on Wednesday. "Once all rocket and spacecraft system checkouts are complete, the integrated stack will be rolled to the pad and raised to vertical for a static fire test prior to launch."

Another SpaceX mission is scheduled to lift off from Pad 39A before Crew-8 does: IM-1, the first flight of Intuitive Machines' robotic Nova-C moon lander.

IM-1 will fly atop a Falcon 9 during a three-day window in mid-February, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX and Intuitive Machines, which is based in Houston, haven't told us which dates that window covers. But we do know that any launch during the window will result in a lunar landing attempt on Feb. 22, the same day that Crew-8 aims to lift off.

As its name suggests, Crew-8 is the eighth operational astronaut mission that SpaceX will fly to the ISS for NASA. The most recent one, Crew-7, arrived at the orbiting lab last August and will come back to Earth in a few weeks.

Crew-9, whose crewmembers NASA just revealed, will launch this August, if all goes according to plan.

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SpaceX, NASA targeting Feb. 22 for launch of Crew-8 astronaut mission - Space.com

A private lunar lander has taken another step toward its historic moonshot.

The robotic Nova-C spacecraft was encapsulated inside the payload fairing of its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket today (Jan. 31) to prep for liftoff, which is right around the corner.

"As our combined teams closed the two fairing halves, I saw the lunar lander for the last time on Earth," Trent Martin, vice president for space systems at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, which built the lander, said during a call with reporters this afternoon.

Launch, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida's Space Coast, will occur during a three-day window in mid-February, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX and Intuitive Machines have not yet announced what those dates are, though Martin said today that Nova-C's lunar landing try will take place on Feb. 22 regardless of which day it takes flight.

If launch cannot occur during the February window, the next opportunity will come in March.

Related: Moon mining gains momentum as private companies plan for a lunar economy

The coming mission, called IM-1, aims to put Nova-C down near an impact crater called Malapert A, which lies within 10 degrees latitude of the moon's south pole. This area is of great interest to scientists and exploration advocates, for it's thought to harbor large amounts of water ice.

IM-1's Nova-C lander, which Intuitive Machines named Odysseus, is carrying six NASA science instruments via the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS for short. CLPS aims to leverage private robotic landers to help gather science data that will pave the way for a permanent human presence on and around the moon, which NASA is working toward with its Artemis program.

IM-1's NASA instruments include a laser-based descent and landing sensor, a camera system designed to capture in great detail the plume created by Odysseus' lunar touchdown and a new type of "space-age fuel gauge," which will use sensors to measure the amount of propellant left in the lander's tanks a challenging task in the microgravity environment.

"Future spaceflight missions using cryogenic propellants can potentially take the guesswork out of monitoring propellant reserves and save fuel by using this technology," Debra Needham, program scientist in the Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office at NASA headquarters, said in today's briefing.

Odysseus is also carrying six commercial payloads on IM-1, for a variety of customers. You can learn more about the mission via Intuitive Machines here.

Nova-C won't be the first CLPS-supported lunar lander to lift off. That distinction went to Astrobotic's Peregrine spacecraft, which launched Jan. 8 on the first-ever mission of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket.

Vulcan Centaur performed well, but Peregrine suffered a crippling fuel leak shortly after deploying from the rocket's upper stage. The lander's handlers managed to keep it operating in deep space for 10 days, eventually steering it to a controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 18.

So Odysseus could become the first private spacecraft ever to ace a lunar landing. Success would keep the moon milestones rolling in; on Jan. 19, the robotic SLIM lander survived its rocky landing attempt, making Japan just the fifth country to put a probe on the moon's surface. The other four nations are the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.

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SpaceX gearing up to launch Intuitive Machines private moon lander in February - Space.com

NASA has named the four astronauts who will fly to the International Space Station on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission this summer.

The Crew-9 quartet consists of cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and three NASA astronauts: Zena Cardman, Nick Hague andStephanie Wilson, NASA revealed in an announcement on Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 31).

Cardman will command the mission, Hague will be its pilot and Wilson and Gorbunov will serve as mission specialists.

Crew-9 will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast no earlier than this August. A final target date has not yet been announced.

Related: International Space Station Everything you need to know

Crew-9 will be the first spaceflight for both Cardman and Gorbunov, who were selected by their nations' space agencies in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Hague has two space missions under his belt, including a long-term trip to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019. That flight lifted off about five months after an aborted ISS launch, during which a rocket problem forced the Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to make an emergency landing. (Both were unhurt.) Hague has spent a total of 203 days in space.

Wilson has racked up a total of 42 days off Earth across three orbital missions, all of which flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery. The most recent of those three flights, STS-131, launched in April 2010.

As its name suggests, Crew-9 will be the ninth operational astronaut mission that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA using the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.

It will overlap briefly with Crew-8, whose four astronauts are scheduled to launch toward the orbiting lab no earlier than Feb. 22.

Continued here:

NASA names astronauts for SpaceX's Crew-9 mission to the ISS - Space.com

ORLANDO, Fla. Starlab Space, the joint venture developing the Starlab commercial space station, has selected SpaceXs Starship to launch the station on a single flight.

Starlab Space, a joint venture of Voyager Space and Airbus Space and Defence, announced Jan. 31 it reached an agreement with SpaceX to launch the Starlab station on Starship. The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement or a projected launch date, although a spokesperson for Starlab Space said the company was confident that Starlab would be launched before the decommissioning of the International Space Station, currently scheduled for 2030.

SpaceXs history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab, Dylan Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Voyager Space, said in a statement. SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship.

Voyager and Airbus announced Jan. 9 that they had finalized the Starlab Space joint venture that the companies announced the previous August. Voyager had been working with Airbus since last January on the design of Starlab after ending an earlier partnership with Lockheed Martin.

The companies designed Starlab to be launched on a single flight. The station features a large habitation and laboratory module with a smaller service module attached to it for power and propulsion.

The size of Starlab made it unlikely that it could launch on anything other than Starship. In a presentation at the Space Tech Expo Europe conference in Bremen, Germany, last November, Manfred Jaumann, vice president of low Earth orbit and suborbital programs at Airbus, said the module has a diameter of more than eight meters. That is larger than what can be accommodated on vehicles in service or under development other than Starship.

Starlab, like Starship, will be made of stainless steel, which Jaumann said was possible because of the existence of large launch vehicles that can place up to 100 tons into low Earth orbit. The module will also be manufactured in a shipyard and completely integrated on the ground before launch, eliminating the need for on-orbit assembly. That cuts the manufacturing time in half to three years, he said, and launch costs by more than 80%.

Working with SpaceX, though, means dealing with a potential competitor. SpaceX was one of the companies that received an unfunded NASA Space Act Agreement in June through the agencys Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities-2 initiative. SpaceXs agreement, NASA said, involved studying the use of Starship as a commercial space station, but neither NASA nor SpaceX provided more details.

Starlabs single-launch solution continues to demonstrate not only what is possible, but how the future of commercial space is happening now, Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, said in a statement. The SpaceX team is excited for Starship to launch Starlab to support humanitys continued presence in low-Earth orbit on our way to making life multiplanetary.

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Starlab commercial space station to launch on Starship - SpaceNews

SpaceX launched Northrop Grumman's robotic Cygnus spacecraft today (Jan. 30), sending the freighter and its 4 tons of cargo toward the International Space Station.

The Cygnus lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today at 12:07 p.m. EST (1707 GMT).

The launch kicked off the 20th operational cargo mission for Cygnus. SpaceX was not involved in the previous 19; they all lifted off atop Antares or Atlas V rockets.

Related: Facts about Cygnus, Northrop Grumman's cargo ship

The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth as planned today, acing its touchdown at Cape Canaveral about 8 minutes and 20 seconds after launch. It was the 10th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

The Cygnus, meanwhile, deployed from the Falcon 9's upper stage in low Earth orbit around 14 minutes and 45 seconds after launch. The freighter then began making its own way to the International Space Station (ISS).

If all goes according to plan, Cygnus will arrive at the orbiting lab at 4:20 a.m. EST (0920 GMT) on Thursday (Feb. 1). You can watch its rendezvous and docking activities live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.

Northrop Grumman named this Cygnus vehicle after Patty Hilliard Robertson, a NASA astronaut who died in a private plane crash in 2001. She was selected to the astronaut corps in 1998 and was supposed to fly to the ISS in 2002.

The freighter is packed with more than 8,200 pounds (3,720 kilograms) of supplies and scientific hardware. Among the research gear is a cartilage-growing experiment that could help address joint damage and disease here on Earth and a European Space Agency project that will test the 3D printing of metals in microgravity.

You can learn more about this cargo mission, called NG-20,via NASA's overview.

Cygnus will spend about six months docked to the ISS, then head back down for a fiery destruction in Earth's atmosphere.

One experiment aboard Cygnus, called the Kentucky Re-entry Probe Experiment-2, will gather data during this death dive, taking "measurements to demonstrate a thermal protection system for spacecraft and their contents during re-entry in Earth's atmosphere, which can be difficult to replicate in ground simulations," NASA officials wrote in their NG-20 mission overview.

Cygnus is one of three robotic cargo craft that currently service the ISS, along with SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Russia's Progress vehicle. Progress, like Cygnus, is an expendable spacecraft, but Dragon is reusable, surviving the trip through Earth's atmosphere and splashing down softly under parachutes in the ocean.

Editor's note: This story was corrected at 4:40 p.m. EST on Jan. 30 to state that Patty Hilliard Robertson was supposed to fly to the ISS in 2002 (rather than 2022, as originally written).

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SpaceX launches private Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS (video) - Space.com

The four Axiom Mission 3 astronauts (front row) and the seven Expedition 70 crew members wave to the camera after greeting each other on Jan. 20, 2024. Credit: NASA TV

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX now are targeting no earlier than Tuesday, Feb. 6, for the undocking of Axiom Mission 3 from the International Space Station. Teams are standing down from the Monday, Feb. 5, undocking opportunity of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Axiom crew members due to weather conditions off the coast of Florida. The next weather review is planned for 3 p.m. EST Sunday, Feb. 4. NASA will provide additional information on coverage.

Learn more about station activities by following thespace station blog,@space_stationand@ISS_Researchon X, as well as theISS FacebookandISS Instagramaccounts.

Get weekly video highlights at:https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/

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NASA and Partners Now Target Tuesday for Ax-3 Mission Departure - NASA Blogs

The Cygnus cargo craft from Northrop Grumman sits atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at its launch pad in Florida. Credit: SpaceX

NASA Television coverage is underway for the launch of Northrop Live NASA coverage is underway for the launch of Northrop Grummans 20th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station for the agency. The launch of the companys Cygnus spacecraft is scheduled for 12:07 p.m. EST on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Loaded with more than 8,200 pounds of supplies, the spacecraft will arrive at the orbiting outpost Thursday, Feb. 1. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli will capture Cygnus using the stations Canadarm2 robotic arm, and NASA astronaut Loral OHara will be acting as a backup. After capture, the spacecraft will be installed on the Unity modules Earth-facing port.

Northrop Grumman named the Cygnus S.S. Patricia Patty Hilliard Robertson in honor of the former NASA astronaut.

Live launch coverage will continue on NASA Television and the agencys website, as well as YouTube, X, Facebook, and NASAs App.

Learn more about station activities by following thespace station blog,@space_stationand@ISS_Researchon X, as well as theISS FacebookandISS Instagramaccounts.

Get weekly video highlights at:https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/

Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here:www.nasa.gov/subscribe

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Cygnus Cargo Ship Launching on SpaceX Rocket Live on NASA TV - NASA Blogs

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been taking illegal drugs for years, on many occasions alongside the board members and directors of his companies, the Wall Street Journalreportedon Saturday, citing sources who claimed to have either witnessed the drug use or had knowledge of it.

According to the report, Musk has attended some social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, where he recreationally took ketamine, an anesthetic commonly used to euthanize house pets. Other directors, Antonio Gracias, Kimbal Musk and Steve Jurvetson, have reportedly consumed drugs like ecstasy and LSD with him at several parties, including those held at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in Mexico allegedly known for its drug-fueled events.

Read more: Judge Rules Against Elon Musks $55 Billion Compensation Package from Tesla

According to several sources, some of the directors felt pressured to consume drugs with Musk either because refraining could upset the billionaire, or result in themlosing the social capitalof being in the CEOs circle.

Sources told the news outlet that Musks drug use was common knowledge among several current and former Tesla and SpaceX officials, and the volume of his consumption has become concerning in recent years.

However, the companies boards havent investigated Musks alleged drug use nor documented any claims. On the one hand, the use of illegal substances violates antidrug policies at both firms, while on the other, official board minutes could become public, and if they mentioned Musks drug problems, it could put SpaceXs federal contracts and Musks security clearance at risk, the report notes.

Read more: MrBeasts X Experiment on Elon Musks Advice: A Windfall or Facade?

The WSJ already reported on Musks alleged illegal drug use last month, claiming that the CEO has a history of using drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. In response to that news piece, Musk lashed out at WSJ on X, saying that the news outletis not fit to line a parrot cage for bird [poop emoji].Musk noted that he regularly took random drug tests at SpaceX, which he never failed. This claim was backed by his lawyer, Alex Spiro.

Later, Musk also tweeted:If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them!

Neither Musk nor Spiro have commented on the WSJs latest article so far. Teslas general counsel and a SpaceX spokesman have also opted not to respond to requests for comment.

Excerpt from:

Musk took drugs with Tesla and SpaceX execs WSJ - Global Village space

ORLANDO, FloridaThe Pentagon has approached SpaceX about potentially taking over Starship for sensitive and potentially dangerous missions as a government-owned, government-operated asset instead of contracting the company to launch payloads.

The company has been exploring its options in responding, Gary Henry, a senior adviser with SpaceX, told the audience at the Space Mobility Conference here Jan. 30.

SpaceX is already on contract for development of the Department of the Air Forces Rocket Cargo mission, with the goal of delivering cargo point to point through space. But this is beyond that plan, Henry says.

We have had conversations and it really came down to specific missions, where its a very specific and sometimes elevated risk or maybe a dangerous use case for the DOD where theyre asking themselves: Do we need to own it as a particular asset SpaceX, can you accommodate that? he says.

Weve been exploring all kinds of options to kind of deal with those questions, he says.

The idea is similar to how the Air Force moves cargo. At times, the service contracts with private carriers to deliver cargo, but for certain critical missions it uses service gray tail aircraft. In this hypothetical case, the military could take a Starship off the line for a specific mission and return it to SpaceX after it is complete.

Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture for the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, says there are certain concepts of operation that could be relevant for a government-owned, government-operated space vehicle.

If we can buy the commercial service, thats what were going to do, but there might be some use cases where there needs to be a government-owned, government-operated [vehicle] and that transfer can happen on the fly, Felt says.

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SpaceX: DOD Has Requested Taking Over Starship For Individual Missions - Aviation Week

The Cygnus cargo craft from Northrop Grumman launches atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from its launch pad in Florida. Credit: NASA TV

A fresh supply of more than 8,200 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo is on its way to the International Space Station on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply spacecraft after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 12:07 p.m. EST Tuesday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

NASA Televisionand the agencyswebsitecontinue to providelive coverage of the ascent. About 15 minutes after launch, Cygnus will reach its preliminary orbit and is expected to complete its solar arrays deployment about two hours after launch.

Cygnus is scheduled to arrive at the space station around 4:15 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 1.

NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and agencys website will provide live coverage of the spacecrafts approach and arrival beginning at 2:45 a.m.

NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli will capture Cygnus using the stations Canadarm2 robotic arm, and NASA astronaut Loral OHara will be acting as a backup. After capture, the spacecraft will be installed on the Unity modules Earth-facing port.

This is Northrop Grummans 20th contracted resupply mission for NASA.

Learn more about station activities by following thespace station blog,@space_stationand@ISS_Researchon X, as well as theISS FacebookandISS Instagramaccounts.

Get weekly video highlights at:https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/

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Cygnus Lifts Off Atop SpaceX Rocket to Deliver Station Cargo - NASA Blogs