PopMech: MAVEN Mars

PopMech: MAVEN Mars

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...
PopMech: NASA’s New Private Space Contracts

PopMech: NASA’s New Private Space Contracts

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...