Blue Origin, the private aerospace manufacturer founded by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, will be launching its first mission for 2020 - a suborbital mission with its reusable New Shepard rocket that will test critical parts of its human landing system (HLS) to be used in the Artemis flight in 2024. The upcoming flight will be the first for Blue Origin this 2020, marking the 13th launch for the New Shepard project. It follows the twelfth New Shepard flight last December 11, 2019.

NASA is definitely targeting the moon's south pole for a crewed landing in 2024 — but that timeline will be difficult to achieve if Congress doesn't open its purse strings, and fast, agency chief Jim Bridenstine said. During a presentation with NASA's Lunar Exploration Analysis Group last Monday (Sept. 14), Bridenstine seemed to suggest that the agency is open to a more equatorial site for the 2024 touchdown, a key milestone in NASA's Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration.

Are we here to re-create ourselves as robotic humanoids? In a recent podcast, Robert J. Marks discusses what robots can do for us with retired internist and author Geoffrey Simmons. In his most recent book, Are We Here to Re-Create Ourselves?: The Convergence of Designs (2019), Simmons argues that in creating artificially intelligent robots, we are trying to recreate the human being. But can we really recreate everything about ourselves? For example, they discussed, can robots be counselors? Should robots go into space instead of humans?

While on Earth, satellites are kept in immaculate cleanrooms to protect their instruments from harmful dust particles. If those instruments fail to function properly in space, however, it could be because of particle contamination during launch. Now a British company has developed a device to identify whether this is the case.

Mars Science City is planned for the desert outside Dubai, intended as a space to develop technology to colonize Mars.

China is building a floating spaceport from which it can launch rockets from the Pacific Ocean. The “Eastern Aerospace Port” off the coast of Haiyang city in the province of Shandong will also be used the building and maintenance of small rockets. It’s being developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), the nation’s biggest defense contractor, Universe Today reports.

Astra's first orbital mission got off the ground, but it soon came back down again. The California-based spaceflight startup launched its first orbital test flight tonight (Sept. 11), sending its two-stage Rocket 3.1 skyward from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska at 11:20 p.m. EDT (7:20 p.m. local Alaska time and 0320 GMT on Sept. 12). The 38-foot-tall (12 meters) booster, which was carrying no payloads, didn't make it all the way to the final frontier.

As a strengthening low pressure system crossed the Florida peninsula on Sunday, weather conditions at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station were poor all day. There were intermittent showers and plenty of lightning. By mid-morning, SpaceX had already canceled one launch from Florida, a mission carrying five dozen Starlink satellites. But the company held out hope for getting the second flight of a planned doubleheader off on Sunday evening, and by the time the clock ticked down on the SAOCOM-1B mission, weather conditions began to marginally improve.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft is one step closer to getting up close and personal with a host of strange space rocks as assembly begins. Lucy will make an ambitious journey across the asteroid belt out to Jupiter's neighborhood, studying a total of eight different space rocks over nearly a decade. But before the spacecraft can begin its trip at the launchpad, currently scheduled for October 2021, it needs to become, well, a spacecraft. And, thanks to a recent milestone permitting integration of the instruments and main vehicle, that's exactly what will happen next.

The latest prototype of Elon Musk's Starship prototype has only flown about 500 feet (150 meters) in the air, but the SpaceX CEO said Monday his rocket company may begin construction of a booster prototype to pair with Starship as soon as this week. "That's gonna be pretty cool," Musk said in a keynote interview at the virtual Humans To Mars summit.

China is making progress with a spaceport to facilitate sea-based launch activity and development of rockets, satellites and related applications. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the country’s main space contractor, is developing the spaceport in Haiyang City on the coast of the eastern province of Shandong. The ‘Eastern aerospace port’ will add to China’s four established space launch centers and be a base for sea launches of light-lift solid rockets.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there’s a “good chance” settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that’s easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth.

NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and associated ground infrastructure have soared past original cost estimates to a degree that requires the agency to notify Congress about the ballooning budget. The recently appointed leader of NASA's human spaceflight efforts, Kathy Lueders, announced the new cost estimates in a blog post published on Aug. 27.

NASA just awarded substantial funding to Pioneer Astronautics, a company that claims it can gather up lunar regolith and turn it into usable oxygen. Pioneer Astronautics is one of four companies to win funding through a newly-established Phase II round of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, TechCrunch reports. The company will split the total $17 million pot with three other firms ­— though the exact breakdown hasn’t been disclosed — because the space agency believes it could prove valuable to the fledgling Artemis program.

The U.S. and China are also launching their own Mars missions — expected to reach the planet's orbit around the same time as the Hope probe.

In what is considered to be the biggest technological leap of all time, NASA successfully landed twelve astronauts on the Moon between 1969 to 1972. Naturally, there is a lot of Apollo content on the web, including an extensive set of NASA documents. Since all of it can get pretty overwhelming, I’ve compiled a curated list of Apollo content for you to enjoy.

Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth. This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket. It'll be the Airbus satellite's job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home.

After a prolonged delay, American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company, SpaceX, launched its ninth operational flight of internet satellites ‘Starlink.’ The launch comes at the cost of three delays reaching back to late June due to weather and technical issues. The lift-off was at 1:12 a.m. ET (10:12 p.m. PT) on Friday, when the company’s Falcon 9 rocket ascended from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a black-and-white spacecraft raced through the atmosphere, ionizing molecules, and creating a plasma inferno. Amidst this fireball, two astronauts sheltered within the small haven of Dragonship Endeavour, as its carbon-based heat shield crisped and flaked away.

ThumbSat aims to make access to space for the scientific community a much more affordable endeavor.