A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft onboard is raised into a vertical position on the launch pad at Launch Complex 39A.
NASA/Bill Ingalls
Wendy Whitman Cobb, US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies
SpaceX's launch of astronauts to the International Space Station will make it the first private company to launch humans to space. The effort has ramifications for NASA and spaceflight in general.
A brief line in the State of the Union address hints at an exciting year for commercial spaceflight companies in the US. After an eight year lull, US rockets will again carry astronauts into space.
Kids dream about going to space – and some very wealthy adults are booking tickets.
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With any type of human exploration, there are risks as we push boundaries, and there are inevitably mishaps and fatalities as a result. Space tourism is no exception.
We're on the cusp of being able to consistently launch and land rockets, greatly reducing the cost of space travel. But how long before there's a Millennium Falcon in every garage?
View from the hotel balcony?
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
The turbocharged capitalism of private space flight is strangely at odds with the brotherly, generous global consensus that built the legal framework for extra-terrestrial travel.
National Transportation Safety Board inspectors with a tail section of SpaceShipTwo.
National Transportation Safety Board/Wikimedia Commons
Last week was a particularly grim one for private space flights. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert, about 150km north of Los Angeles, killing a pilot, Michael Alsbury, and seriously…
A co-pilot on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (seen here in 2010) died after the spacecraft crashed in the Mojave desert.
EPA/Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic
Tragically, the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave desert during a test flight on Friday, killing one pilot and injuring another. It is not clear what went wrong, and the coming…
Success never comes without sacrifice. And frontiers are never crossed without some type of loss. We are seeing with brutal clarity that the frontier of successful space travel is one which has not yet…