March 2015
A boom and a (possible) bust in small spacecraft production
... drop in the overall cost of constellation support due to the short active performance time of each spacecraft. Thirdly, a large amount of spacecraft could serve as an instrument of risk hedging: the loss of a single craft does not have a significant...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
... named in honour of the Italian mathematician Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, best known for his calculations on how to get a spacecraft into a resonant orbit with Mercury. His work contributed to the success of NASA’s Mariner 10 mission, the first...
May 2020
Space for Art – The magnificent beauty of spaceflight
..., and as more commercial activities develop in space, it’s important that the story of the complexity and beauty of the spacecraft continues to be told through the art of photography, so we can all better understand the mission for humanity that...
08 May 2019
Tests start on first design of 'wafer scale' spacecraft
... Earth in a process known as Directed Energy Propulsion. Put basically this type of propulsion uses energy beamed to the spacecraft from a remote power plant to provide energy; it can be in the form of microwaves, but in this instance the wafercraft...
02 July 2019
Orion spacecraft's launch abort test completed successfully
... schedule and lower costs by simplifying the test spacecraft and eliminating parachutes and related systems. NASA already.... Engineers are making progress building and testing the Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1, the first uncrewed mission with the SLS...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... Hayabusa2 spent 2.5 years after swing-by travelling in deep space towards Ryugu. Over such long journeys, the spacecraft is powered by ion engines. Ion engines are a form of electric propulsion that accelerates positively charged atoms of xenon...
