SpaceX

The Crew Dragon capsule will still be able to land with just three working parachutes. Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET What do you do if your spaceship comes in for a landing and one of your parachutes doesn't work right? You hope the rest will do th…

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft and its service module sit atop the test stand at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico ahead of the company's Pad Abort Test.  Boeing You can watch a big test of Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft Monday as NASA pushe…

Elon Musk isn't feeling Twitter right now. James Martin/CNET Elon Musk seems to be having an existential social media crisis. The usually Twitter-happy founder of Tesla and SpaceX announced Friday he is "going offline" after first tweeting "Not sure about g…

Enlarge/ The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. 0 with 0 posters participating Welcome to Edition 2.21 of the Rocket Report! As always, there are intriguing developments in the world of lift this week. We particularly liked the Russian plans to devel…

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly announced architecture for three years. The target performance figures are on the Starship w…

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The Air Force’s mystery space plane is back on Earth, following a record-breaking two-year mission. The X-37B landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Sunday. The Air Force is mum about what the plane did in orbit after…

The old space shuttle landing facility at NASAs Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Forces secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission. For the last 780 days, the …

The fifth mission, known as OTV-5 (for "orbital test vehicle") launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 7, 2017. That means it was in space for 780 days, or more than two years. This mission started with a liftoff atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Ai…

Building effective propulsion systems for satellites has traditionally been a highly bespoke affair, with expensive, one-off systems tailor-made to big, expensive spacecraft hardware. But increasingly, companies including startups are looking at ways to provi…

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s secretive X-37B spaceplane landed in Florida on Sunday after a record-long orbital flight lasting more than two years, the U.S. Air Force said, capping the latest test mission for an array of military technologies. The unpiloted X…