The roll-out ceremony for the first of eight Polish Air Force M-346 aircraft took place today at Leonardo-Finmeccanica’s facility in Venegono-Superiore (near Varese). The event was attended by the Polish Deputy Defense Minister, Bartosz Kownacki, the State Under Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Gioacchino Alfano, and by the Managing Director of Leonardo-Finmeccanica Aircraft, Filippo Ba...
India launched a mini unmanned space shuttle on Monday to test the viability of reusable spacecraft. The shuttle will head 43 miles into the atmosphere before dropping down into the sea, the BBC reports. It is not expected to survive in one piece, but will collect data on hypersonic speed and autonomous landing. India has been investing significant rupees in space missions in recent years, l...
Since 2011, NASA has been trying to wean itself off Russian rockets as the only way of getting astronauts up to the International Space Station, and in 2014, Boeing and SpaceX won contracts to carry out launches. Now, though, Boeing says it's going to have to delay its crewed flights, pushing them back from 2017 to 2018. Boeing's executive vice president Leanne Caret made the announcement,...
Yuri Milner is pushing forward with the hunt for intelligent alien life beyond our planet, and is investing another $100 million in a more proactive approach after putting up the original $100m last year. In July of 2015, Milner and I sat down and discussed the greatest question of all. In the mind of this legendary investor, that question is “are we alone?” To get to the answer, he...
Elon Musk has successfully launched another Space X rocket into space, but failed to land this latest one on its target barge. Tesla, Musk's company, launched the unmanned Falcon 9 at sunset on Friday. It carried a broadcasting satellite for SES, a company based in Luxembourg. This was Tesla's fifth launch for the past one and a half weeks. Another launch was tried on Sunday, but with t...
Virgin Galactic is getting ready to fly again. Sixteen months after a fatal accident sidelined the private spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic presented its new and improved space plane designed to bring paying space tourists into suborbital space and back home again. Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo, named Unity because of an idea from cosmologist Stephen Hawking, rolled out in the...
Tomorrow, private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic will unveil the newest version of SpaceShipTwo — the reusable spaceplane that will become the company's primary vehicle. The company has been without a main vehicle since October 2014, when a crash killed one test pilot and seriously injured another. After the accident, many journalists and industry experts expressed skepticism about...
Boeing and SpaceX are racing to become the first private companies to carry astronauts into space, as early as next year. And although SpaceX is generally considered to be leading the race (it already delivers supplies to the space station), Boeing shouldn't be underestimated (the company built most of the International Space Station). After carrying astronauts to space, B...
Space tourism projects leaped off the drawing board when a $10 million prize was offered as an incentive for private development of manned rockets, but it took years to make a winner. Many more years have passed since, but the only space tourists have been a few wealthy people who paid millions of dollars for trips aboard Russian rockets to the International Space Station. Things to know about spa...
Did you notice this big investment Google made last year? You may have missed it. After all, the U.S. space company hadn't yet earned itself a name for successfully landing a rocket on the ground just after the rocket delivered a payload in space. But the investment shouldn't be overlooked. Indeed, it may be one of Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (formerly Google) boldest m...
By pushing the atmospheric envelope at the edge of Earth’s stratosphere, the Airbus Perlan 2 glider’s next tests should pave the way for both future aviation on Mars and Earth-based commercial hypersonic aircraft, Allan McArtor, the Chairman and CEO of Airbus Group, Inc.. told me. The Perlan 2 sailplane/glider, which had its first test flight last September in Oregon, will attempt t...
Welcome to my first new trip report of 2016, as my goal for this year is to sample as many new first & business class products as possible. And I’m sure you guys will agree this is a good start. The way this trip came to be is sort of funny. In mid-December I wrote about how Finnair was flying the A350 to the US for a limited time in January. They just recently to...
