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Pegasus XL Launch Vehicle The Pegasus XL Launch Vehicle is a light-weight lift vehicle operated by Orbital Sciences Corporation. It can deliver Payloads of up to 443 Kilograms into Low Earth Orbit. The Rocket is launched from the L-1011Stargazer Aircraft which makes Pegasus a high...

Delta IV Heavy The Delta IV Heavy is one of various versions of the workhorse launcher family of Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles. In the family of Delta IV rockets, the DIV Heavy is the most powerful launcher and, since the retirement of the Space Shuttle has been the most...

Is That A Massive Stripe Streaking Across Pluto's Surface? The latest image of Pluto taken by the New Horizons spacecraft may have yielded the dwarf planet’s first prominent surface feature — a dark diagonal stripe that stretches from one side to the other. New Horizons took these two...

Orion recovery training

Skylab

Here's Why The New Horizons Spacecraft Won't Be Stopping At Pluto In less than five weeks, New Horizons will zip past the Pluto-Charon system in a brief but historic encounter. Given the huge interest in Pluto, it’s fair to ask: Why won’t mission planners let the probe hang out a while? The...

The Space Shuttle’s Military Launch Complex In California That Never Was Everybody identifies Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center as the epicenters of America’s now defunct Space Shuttle Program. What most people don’t know is that the Shuttle almost had a second home at Vandenberg...

I had to do a double take too. I live in Virginia, last week we had 5 straight days of rain! We're in drought conditions apparently, but still get rain nearly every week. I trust NOAA and its data, but this was not what I expected, I thought Virginia was at least average, if not getting more...

The Beautiful Art That Helped Inspire Space Travel Chesley Bonestell was born long before the flight of the first airplane, and yet he’s well-known as the most influential people in aerospace art. The painter, designer and illustrator died the year of the Challenger disaster—1986—but not before...

The United States Just Recorded Its Wettest Month. Ever. In the 121 years that precipitation has been recorded in the contiguous U.S., no months were as wet as the one experienced this past May. Numbers put out by the NOAA show that the May precipitation total for the continental U.S. was...

A Direct Image Of Another Solar System’s Kuiper Belt By using the Gemini Planet Imager, an international team of astronomers have captured an image of a protoplanetary disc that shares remarkable similarities with our own Kuiper Belt — though as it was at a much earlier time in our Solar...

50 Years Ago, Ed White Became The First American To Walk In Space On June 3rd, 1965, Edward White became the first American astronaut to walk in space. His mission commander, Jame McDivitt snapped this picture over the Pacific Ocean over the course of the Gemini 4 mission. He later described...

New Solar Storm Forecast Gives Over 24 Hours Warning of Disruption Solar storms start their lives as violent explosions from the sun’s surface. They’re made up of energetic charged particles wrapped in a complex magnetic cloud. As they erupt from the sun’s surface, they can shoot out into...

Here's a Glimpse at What the Hyperloop Might Actually Be Like What we know about the Hyperloop thus far can be summed up in a few exclamatory phrases: It’s visionary! It’s crazy! It’s impossible! But we haven’t really understood much about how Elon Musk’s totally tubular transportation...

Bird's eye view time lapse shows off Apple's new spaceship campus Apple’s new campus is in the process of being built right now and it truly does look like a space ship is being constructed in sleepy Cupertino. Here’s the state of things so far, from August 2014 to May 2015, a pile of...

Here's Proof That the LightSail Satellite Has Unfurled Properly Over the weekend, the LightSail satellite unfurled its gigantic solar sail to help propel it through space. Now, the first images to be beamed back from the satellite prove that it’s really up and running. The satellite, funded...

Space Nuclear Propulsion Office NERVA - a nuclear rocket engine

SpaceX Dragon Pad Abort Test SpaceX successfully tested the launch abort system for its new commercial crew capsule, which is designed to carry astronauts to the International Space Station by 2017. Everything went as planned, and you can watch the replay of the event here: Pad Abort Test on...

Apollo 11