Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists. But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon. The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008. Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...
Last week, as the Dragon capsule successfully launched for the International Space Station under the watch of Space enthusiasts the world over. There was also a bit of chatter about a secondary SpaceX goal, to land the Falcon 9 rocket on a floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean as a new method of recovery. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had tweeted at the time that the landing did not go well, implying a bit of damage to the landing pad. A few days later, a first picture surfaced of the landing pad showing a bit of charring and a few rocket...
It’s been a rough week in the space flight industry. On Friday afternoon, a test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo class VSS Enterprise resulted in a catastrophe, crashing down in the Mojave desert, killing one pilot, with the other ejecting and now being treated in hospital. During the test flight, launched by Virgin Galactic’s partner corporation Scaled Composites from the Mojave Spaceport, WhiteKnightTwo, an aircraft designed to bring SpaceShipTwo to launch altitude, successfully released the spacecraft. After two minutes, something went wrong, resulting in the eventual crash of the craft. Virgin Galactic released a statement shortly after the accident, saying the National...
