by Michael Belfiore | Sep 18, 2014 | Articles, Blog
NASA’s MAVEN Mars orbiter is set for Mars orbital insertion this weekend. The unmanned probe will fire its engines on Sunday at 9:37pm Eastern Time. And then mission controllers will have to white-knuckle it for 12.5 minutes to find out whether the maneuver was...
by Michael Belfiore | Sep 16, 2014 | Articles, Blog
NASA announced a pair of contracts worth a total of $6.8 billion to Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station in a press conference today. The mission for each company: build a ship capable of sending at least four astronauts at...
by Michael Belfiore | Aug 23, 2014 | Blog
In the trade they call it a rapid unplanned disassembly, or a RUD. That’s an explosion, to us lay people. It happened in the sky over the SpaceX proving ground in McGregor, Texas, when a flight computer detected a problem in an unmanned reusable booster...
