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Polaris Dawn astronaut Sarah Gillis, a violinist, released a new music video from space this morning. Just yesterday (Sept. 12), Gillis was one of two Polaris Dawn astronauts to perform a historic spacewalk, the world’s first commercial extravehicular activity, or EVA. During the one-hour and 46-minute spacewalk, Gillis and Polaris Dawn mission commander and financier […]

SpaceX’s Starship will be grounded for a while longer yet. Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — flew for the fourth time in June, and SpaceX has been gearing up for flight number five ever since. But that test mission is probably still at least 2.5 months away, according to the U.S.

The private Polaris Dawn crew called home from space to share their historic mission with two nonprofit organizations close to their hearts. Polaris Dawn, funded and commanded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, lifted off early Tuesday morning (Sept. 10) and has since accomplished the first commercial spacewalk and the highest orbit of a crewed vehicle

Two private astronauts conducting the first commercial spacewalk did not so much float out of their spacecraft as they did “stand up.” Polaris Dawn crewmates Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis took turns emerging from the upper hatch of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft “Resilience” on Thursday (Sept. 12). It was the first time that non-government astronauts have

A NASA cubesat designed to search for the universe’s most powerful and violent explosions has successfully detected its first massive burst, space agency officials announced earlier this week. BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite placed into orbit in April to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, spotted a “mega blast” in the small, dim constellation of

Saturday, Sept. 14 marks NASA’s annual Observe the Moon Night, a worldwide event to promote lunar science and astronomy, celebrate cultural connections to the moon, and promote amateur lunar observations. On the day, NASA will be hosting a broadcast channel (all live streams available here), along with a Twitch livestream on Thursday, Sept. 12, where

Astronomers have gotten the first-ever detailed views of turbulent activity in a star other than our own sun. A time-lapse video released Wednesday (Sept. 11) shows enormous gas bubbles roiling on a nearby star called R Doradus, a red giant about 300 times bigger than our sun that lies roughly 180 light-years away, in the

AST SpaceMobile’s first five commercial satellites have reached orbit. The huge spacecraft, called BlueBirds, lifted off today (Sept. 12) at 4:52 a.m. EDT (0852 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth about 7.5 minutes later, making a vertical touchdown

The distant and cold Voyager 1 spacecraft did a clever thruster trick to help it phone home. Voyager 1, the most distant human object that is now flying through interstellar space, had thruster issues making it difficult for the spacecraft to stay pointed at Earth when calling home. Unless Voyager 1 could make a switch

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) this afternoon after a brief orbital chase. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA’s Don Pettit and Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos docked with the ISS today at 3:32 p.m. EDT (1932 GMT), as the two