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Blue Origin called off the debut launch of its massive new rocket early Monday because of technical trouble. The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn with a prototype satellite from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. But launch controllers had to deal with an unspecified rocket issue in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time. Once the countdown clock was halted, they immediately began draining all the fuel from the rocket. Blue Origin did not immediately set a new launch date, saying the team needed more time to resolve the problem. The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company's plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic. New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn. It is five times taller than Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas. Amazon's Jeff Bezos founded
A Chinese rocket start-up has suffered yet another launch failure, resulting in the loss of three satellites as part of a commercial constellation being assembled for global weather forecasting and earthquake prediction. Hyperbola-1 a 24-metre (79ft) high solid-fuel rocket produced by iSpace lifted off on Thursday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China's Gobi Desert. The rocket's first, second and third stages flew normally, but the fourth stage suffered an anomaly and the launch mission ended in failure, the company said, adding that the specific reasons for the failure would be announced as soon as possible after detailed investigations, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Friday. The relatively small Hyperbola-1, which can deliver a 300 kg (661 pounds) payload into a 500 km (311 miles) sun-synchronous orbit, was carrying Yunyao-1 weather satellites 15, 16 and 17 for the Tianjin-based Yunyao Aerospace Technology company. The satellites did not re
A powerful Chinese rocket crashed after an "accidental launch during a ground test on Sunday due to a structural failure, a private company responsible for the rocket said. Space Pioneer, also known as Beijing Tianbing Technology, said in a statement that the Tianlong-3 rocket was unexpectedly launched during a static-fire test at a facility in Gongyi county in Henan province. Luckily it landed in a hilly area of the city of Gongyi and the company said there were no injuries as people in the area were evacuated in advance of the rocket test. The nine engines of the rocket, stated to be the most powerful in the country, fired in the afternoon on Sunday were lifted off because of a structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test platform, the company said. Space Pioneer is one of several private aerospace companies that are developing medium-lift, reusable rockets to help China assemble its satellite constellations comparable to SpaceX's Starlink. Residents
ISRO Chairman S Somanath inaugurated state-of-the-art propellant tank production and computer numerical control (CNC) machining facilities at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's Aerospace Division here, boosting rocket manufacturing capacity . HAL said the facilities would provide a major boost to ISRO's ability to meet its growing production needs, particularly for the Launch Vehicle Mark3, India's heaviest and most powerful rocket. Currently, the existing capacity allows for only two LVM3 launches per year, whereas ISRO's requirements stand at six launches annually, according to an HAL statement on Wednesday. The facilities will address this gap, enabling HAL to manufacture enough critical components to support the production of six LVM3 rockets per year, it said. Somanath was quoted as saying in the statement that HAL has enormous capacities and this potential should be explored in the larger interest of both the organisations. "HAL will play a larger role in ISRO's future missions
Japan's space agency announced Friday a plan to launch a major upgrade to its satellite imaging system, as a new flagship rocket is put to the test for a third time. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency that an H3 rocket will be launched from the Tanegashima Space Center, on a southwestern Japanese island, early afternoon on June 30, with a launch window that runs through the end of July. The rocket will be carrying an Advanced Land Observation Satellite, ALOS-4, tasked primarily with Earth observation and data collection for disaster response and mapmaking, as well as with monitoring military activity, such as missile launches, with an infrared sensor developed by the Defense Ministry. The ALOS-4 is a successor to the current ALOS-2 and can observe a much wider area. The launch will be the H3's third, coming after a failed debut in March 2023 and a successful launch on Feb. 17. During the first attempt, the rocket's second stage engine did not ignite and the rocket had to be ...
Skyroot Aerospace, a space-tech company, has successfully test-fired the Stage-2 of Vikram-1 space launch vehicle, called Kalam-250, at the propulsion testbed of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), at its Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The city-based firm in a press release on Thursday said Vikram-1 launch is slated to be a landmark event for the Indian space sector as its first private orbital rocket launch, and follows the remarkable suborbital space launch of India's first private rocket - the Vikram-S by Skyroot in November 2022. The test, done on Wednesday, which lasted 85 seconds, recorded a peak sea-level thrust of 186 kilonewtons (kN), which will translate to a fully expanded vacuum thrust of around 235 kN in flight, it said. The Kalam-250 is a high-strength carbon composite rocket motor, which uses solid fuel and a high-performance Ethylene-Propylene-Diene terpolymers (EPDM) thermal protection system (TPS). Pawan Chandana, ..
SpaceX came close to completing an hourlong test flight of its mega rocket on its third try on Thursday, but the spacecraft was lost as it descended back to Earth. The company said it lost contact with Starship as it neared its goal, a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Until then, most everything had gone well following liftoff from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The ship has been lost. So no splashdown today, said SpaceX's Dan Huot. But again, it's incredible to see how much further we got this time around. Two test flights last year both ended in explosions minutes after liftoff. By surviving for close to 50 minutes this time, Thursday's effort was considered a win by not only SpaceX's Elon Musk, but NASA as well as Starship soared higher and farther than ever before. The space agency is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in another few years. The nearly 400-foot (121-meter) Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, headed o