Rocket

NASA has powered up the core stage of its SLS rocket, completing an eight-minute hot-fire test of its four RS025 engines. The core stage is the largest rocket element ever built by NASA and is designed to carry astronauts to the Moon and beyond.

Rocket Lab has made a name for itself in short space of time by focusing on highly frequent launches of small satellites, but now the space startup believes it has bigger fish to fry, introducing a larger rocket named Neutron.

The outright land speed record has stood firm since 1997. Now, with its two main competitors out of the picture, Western Australia's Aussie Invader team has its sights set on a 1,000 mph run next year, using a custom-developed 62,000 lbf rocket.

SpaceX has again blasted off from the launchpad with a prototype of its massive Starship vehicle designed for deep space exploration, and again brought it back to Earth in explosive style as another landing attempt had a fiery finale.

A crewed mission to Mars may be more practical thanks to a new rocket concept developed by Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), that uses magnetic fields to generate thrust.

SpaceX's has set a new record for the most spacecraft launched by a single rocket at one time, deploying 143 CubeSats and microsats, including another 10 Starlink communication satellites, during the first of its SmallSat Rideshare Program missions.

Howe Industries has submitted the design for a solar-powered steam rocket engine for propelling CubeSats to the National Science Foundation. With only two moving parts, ThermaSat uses a thermal condenser to flash boil water into superheated steam.

Controlled landings of its Falcon 9 boosters have become almost de rigueur for SpaceX, but Elon Musk has revealed different plans for the Falcon 9's bigger sibling, the Super Heavy booster – catching it using the launch tower arm.

SpaceX's Starship has reached magnificent new heights, today climbing to high altitude before exploding in a spectacular fireball during a landing attempt. Despite this, the first sub-orbital flight of the SN8 prototype was largely a successful one.

Rocket Lab is set to take an important step forward in its mission to reuse parts of its Electron booster, announcing that it will make its first attempt to recover the rocket’s first stage during a mission scheduled for later this month.

Seattle-based USNC-Tech has developed a concept for a safer and more reliable Nuclear Thermal Propulsion system that could help realize the goal reducing Earth-Mars travel time to just three months.

DARPA has awarded a US$14-million contract to the Gryphon Technologies engineering firm to support the development and demonstration of a nuclear rocket engine for the agency's Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program.