spacecraft

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, will become the first human-made object to travel one light-day (about 16 billion miles) from Earth on Nov. 18, 2026. The article explains light-distance measurements and notes Voyager 1 is headed toward star AC+79 3888, passing within 1.7 light-years in 40,000 years.

Virgin Galactic unveiled its new Delta-class spaceship Apeiron and announced another delay, pushing its first commercial spaceflight to early Q2 2027 as it completes avionics software validation at Spaceport America.

NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have far outlivened their planned lifespans, providing decades of Martian observations thanks to resilient engineering, redundancy, and autonomous operation 140 million miles from Earth.

SpaceX 报告 Dragon 飞船鼻锥已关闭并锁定，准备再入大气层，预计约30分钟后溅落。

NASA is live-streaming the arrival of Crew-13 at the International Space Station, with the spacecraft scheduled to dock at 7pm ET and hatches opening around 8:45pm ET.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule was spotted in Long Beach harbor alongside Shannon, the company's capsule recovery ship, which is preparing to recover astronauts from the upcoming Crew 12 mission after their Pacific splashdown.

Russia's long-delayed reusable crewed spacecraft will begin parachute drop tests this fall, with abort-system tests in 2027 and a target debut crewed launch in 2028 or 2029 on the Angara A5M rocket.

SpaceX announced the completion of the deorbit burn for Starship, with the spacecraft set to reenter Earth's atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean within an hour.

NASA and Boeing will provide an update on Starliner spacecraft development and plans for regular crew flights to the International Space Station during a live news conference on September 28, 2026.

Starfish Space is releasing its Otter spacecraft for a NASA mission after seven years of development, aiming to demonstrate orbital servicing and docking capabilities.

The Department of War has awarded $161 million to AntaresNuclear, a Los Angeles nuclear startup, to demonstrate a nuclear reactor integrated with spacecraft for persistent high-power operations in orbit.

NASA's Orion spacecraft heat shield, initially problematic during Artemis I, performed well in Artemis II after adjusting the reentry profile, with future missions planned to use a more permeable material for enhanced capability.

A non-profit organization called The FermiExplorer Mission has been founded to launch the first spacecraft to another star, Alpha Centauri, by 2029, aiming to make interstellar travel a reality and address the Fermi Paradox.

Due to an ongoing attitude control issue, the LINK spacecraft will not boost NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory as planned, but will still attempt rendezvous operations to demonstrate satellite servicing capabilities for future space exploration.

SpaceX Recovery team has successfully guided the Starship vehicle to a location off Christmas Island after 24 days at sea. Engineers are en route to analyze the vehicle before attempting to return it.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg says Starliner's propulsion redesign is going well, and the spacecraft could launch a cargo test flight to the ISS this year, pending port availability. A crewed mission might follow in late 2027 if the cargo flight succeeds.

SpaceWASM is an open-source WebAssembly interpreter from NASA/JPL designed for on-board spacecraft sequencing, with a focus on deterministic memory usage and streaming capabilities for resource-constrained environments.

This paper explores deep reinforcement learning for attitude control of spacecraft during hypersonic re-entry. It demonstrates that state-of-the-art RL and hybrid controllers can outperform traditional PID controllers with gain scheduling, especially when dynamics randomization is used to improve robustness and generalization.

This paper investigates memory-efficient meta-reinforcement learning architectures for adaptive safety-critical control in adversarial spacecraft proximity operations, finding that state space models like Mamba with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel savings compared to LSTM and GRU.

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which studied the Martian atmosphere for 11 years, has been officially declared lost after losing contact in December 2025 when it disappeared behind Mars during a routine occultation. Telemetry fragments recovered later showed the spacecraft was spinning at 2.7 RPM, suggesting an unrecoverable power failure.