A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket stands ready to launch the X-37B military spaceplane on Dec. 11, 2023. The mission was scrubbed due to poor weather and ground issues in mid-December. Image: Adam Bernstein
For the second time this month, SpaceX is gearing up to launch the X-37B military spaceplane onboard its Falcon Heavy rocket. Liftoff of the USSF-52 mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is set for 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 UTC) on Thursday at the opening of a ten-minute launch window.
SpaceX will launch 23 new Starlink satellites when its Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Dec. 28, and you can watch live for free.
A total solar eclipse is coming to the U.S. on April 8, 2024. We've rounded up some of the best places in each state along the path of totality to view the eclipse from.
From long-awaited rocket launches and lunar landers to crewed flights around the moon, here are a few exciting spaceflight missions to look forward to in 2024.
2023 was another eventful year for our planet, delivering broken climate records, unprecedented weather disasters and worrisome studies.
11 of the biggest stories about the smallest particles from 2023.
Arriving in orbit on Christmas Day, Japan's lunar lander SLIM has beamed images of the lunar surface home ahead of its planned touchdown on the moon on Jan. 19.
Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander was stacked on the rocket that will launch it to space, with final checks and fueling now completed.
For decades, measurements of the universe's expansion have suggested a disparity, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. The James Webb Space Telescope is looking at it.
Our Milky Way bristles with giant molecular clouds birthing stars. Based on what we see here, astronomers assume that the process of star creation also goes on similarly in other galaxies. It makes sense since their stars have to form somehow. Now, thanks to JWST, astronomers have spotted baby stellar objects in a galaxy 2.7 million light-years away. That’s millions of light-years more distant than any previous observations of newly forming stars have reached.
The first commercial rocket to launch astronauts has met its end after being destroyed during its latest post-flight recovery. The SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage tipped over after a record 19th flight.
The full, weird story of the quantum world is much too large for a single article, but the period from 1905, when Einstein first published his solution to the photoelectric puzzle, to the 1960’s, when a complete, well-tested, rigorous, and insanely complicated quantum theory of the subatomic world finally emerged, is quite the story.
The final full moon of 2023, the Cold Moon, rose on Dec. 26. Skywatchers around the globe were primed and ready to capture some fantastic images of the fully illuminated lunar face.
About 3,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, brickmakers imprinted the names of their kings into clay bricks. Now, an analysis of the metal grains in those bricks has confirmed a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field.
The subsurface oceans of the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter remain our best bet for finding life elsewhere in the solar system. NASA is developing a roadmap for cryobots that could investigate these ocean worlds.
This year, we heard the low hum of gravitational waves criss-crossing the cosmos, observed a "ring of fire" solar eclipse, and applauded the arrival of asteroid samples. Here are Sky & Telescope's picks for the top news stories in astronomy this year.
Space medicine is a continuously growing field — and for good reason, if humans want to settle Mars someday.
For those who follow news related to UFOs, 2023 will be remembered as the year that UFOs came to Washington, D.C.
If all goes to plan, the spacecraft dubbed 'Tenacity' will launch on a Vulcan Centaur rocket in 2024.
As NASA continues to ramp up efforts for its Artemis program, which has the goal of landing the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface, two NASA astronauts recently conducted training with a replica of SpaceX’s Starship human landing system (HLS), albeit on a much smaller scale. Given that Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall, and the crew quarters are located near the top of Starship, the HLS will need an elevator with a basket to transport crew and supplies from the crew quarters down to the surface. The purpose of this training is to familiarize astronauts with all aspects of this system, including elevator and gate controls and latches, along with how the astronauts perform these tasks in their bulky astronaut suits, which both astronauts wore during the training.
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