Watch live: Russian film crew to launch to the International Space Station | William Shatner will launch into space with Blue Origin on Oct. 12 | World View to start flying passengers on stratospheric balloon rides in 2024
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A cosmonaut, a film director and an actor will launch on a mission Tuesday (Oct. 5) in part to film a movie on the International Space Station (ISS), and you can watch it live. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying the three crewmembers will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:55 a.m. EDT (0855 GMT or 6:55 p.m. local time). You can watch the coverage live on NASA Television, NASA social media, the NASA website or here and on the Space.com homepage. NASA's webcast will begin at 4:15 a.m. EDT (0815 GMT).
Captain Kirk will boldly go where some men have gone before, on a suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system. Actor William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame and Blue Origin's Audrey Powers, the vice president of missions and flight operations, will fill the last two seats on the company's second crewed flight, due to blast off from New Shepard's west Texas launch site in just over a week, on Oct. 12. Rumors were swirling in late September that the 90-year-old actor would be on the company's second flight, which today's announcement confirms.
Aspiring space tourists now have another option to consider. World View Enterprises is developing a balloon-based system that will carry people to the stratosphere, with the first commercial flights targeted for early 2024, the Arizona-based company announced today (Oct. 4).
A Chinese launch company is aiming to provide rides to space for tourists as soon as 2024, apparently drawing inspiration from the exploits of Blue Origin. CAS Space, a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is already developing rockets for commercial satellite launches and announced in August that it wants to send people up into space, albeit briefly.
Two spacecraft built by Europe and Japan captured their first up-close look at the planet Mercury in a weekend flyby, revealing a rocky world covered with craters. The two linked probes, known together as BepiColombo, snapped their first image of Mercury late Friday (Oct. 1) during a flyby that sent them zooming around the planet. The encounter marked the first of six Mercury flybys for BepiColombo, a joint effort by the space agencies of Europe and Japan, to slow itself enough to enter orbit around the planet in 2025.
A cosmic hurricane shows its 'eye' in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The spiral galaxy NGC 5728 has quite a powerhouse at its center. This structure located 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra is in a unique cosmic category thanks to its active core.
An enormous comet — possibly the largest one ever detected — is barreling toward the inner solar system with an estimated arrival time of 10 years from now, according to new research published on the preprint server arXiv.org.
Late Thursday night (Sept. 30) in the southeastern United States, anybody looking up could have glimpsed a brilliant streak, trailing down into the Atlantic Ocean off Florida's east coast. It was actually a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply spacecraft returning to Earth after a trip to the International Space Station (ISS).
The four private space travelers who soared into orbit on SpaceX's historic Inspiration4 mission last month officially have their astronaut wings. The civilian crew, which rode a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft into orbit on Sept. 15 and returned to Earth three days later, received their astronaut wings from the company on Friday (Oct. 1) in a presentation at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
That enigmatic U.S. military X-37B robotic space drone has now chalked up more than 500 days circling the Earth. The Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-6) is also called USSF-7 for the U.S. Space Force and launched May 17, 2020, on an Atlas V 501 booster.
