Author: starpathwp-production
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NASA Tests Power Fix on Voyager 1 as Twin Probes Diverge After 49 Years
Voyager 1 needs the fix more urgently than its twin did. It has less power in reserve, has already lost more of its original instruments, and in February this year came close to tripping its own emergency shutdown during a routine roll manoeuvre. That event prompted NASA in April to switch off the Low-energy Charged…
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NASA Administrator Tours Idaho Lab Building Reactor for 2028 Mars Mission
Isaacman and a group of NASA executives toured INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex, meeting the scientists and engineers developing nuclear power for space. The visit followed a period of accelerated activity at the laboratory tied to a May 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which called for at least three nuclear power criticalities…
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SpaceX’s Starship Upper Stage May Be Lost at Sea After Two-Week Recovery Effort
SpaceX’s attempt to recover the Starship upper stage from its 13th test flight is “not looking good”, Elon Musk tweeted on August 7th, roughly two weeks after the vehicle splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Flight 13 lifted off from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas on July 24th. The suborbital mission ended with…
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South Korean Orbiter Photographs Fresh Lunar Crater After Falcon 9 Upper Stage Impact
The upper stage was a leftover piece of the rocket that launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s HAKUTO-R M2 Resilience, two lunar landers that lifted off in January 2025. The stage measured 13.8 meters long and weighed 4,000 kg. While the incident poses no harm to any missions currently in orbit or on…
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NASA WB-57 to Chase Totality at 50,000 Feet Over the North Atlantic
Ground-based cameras must contend with clouds and atmospheric interference, while space-based cameras can return only limited data. Flying at altitude along the eclipse path avoids the clouds and extends the observation window. For anyone standing directly beneath the shadow, totality will last 2 minutes 18 seconds. By flying at 460mph along the eclipse’s path, the…
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Artemis progress building lunar return roadmap
NASA has released a series of updates on the Artemis program, spanning commercial robotic lunar landers, technology demonstrations for future surface habitats, and hardware progress on the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft for Artemis III and beyond. Reinvigorated under NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a suite of programs is working in tandem to lay…
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Blue Origin working engine resolutions and dual pad future
Blue Origin is nearing the end of its investigation into the catastrophic explosion of a New Glenn rocket that occurred roughly two and a half months ago, with CEO Dave Limp providing an update that pins the anomaly to a specific component in one of the booster’s engines, although root cause analysis is continuing. The…
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Perseverance Set to Break Mars Driving Record as Self-Navigation Powers Ahead
Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021. Its autonomous navigation system has allowed it to cover ground far faster than earlier rovers, maximizing the time available for science by reducing the periods spent waiting for driving commands from Earth. About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous, made possible by…
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SpaceX West Coast launch surge continues with Starlink mission
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Starlink 17-38 mission on Aug. 8, 2026. This was SpaceX’s 50th flight from California in 2026. Image: SpaceXUpdate Aug. 8, 2:31 p.m. EDT (1831 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 24 satellites. SpaceX’s West Coast surge in Starlink launches continued Saturday…
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SES, Eutelsat Complete RDV1 Milestone for Europe’s IRIS2 Sovereign Constellation Program
Satellite operator SES completed the Rendez-vous 1 (RDV1) milestone on the implementation phase of the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) constellation program. The goal of the program is to create a sovereign, resilient and secure satellite connectivity in Europe. SES’s rival operator Eutelsat announced its own IRIS2 milestone completion on Friday.…