SpaceX

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.

It's been remarkable year for space exploration, marked by a line up of ambitious new interplanetary missions, industry firsts, and the reemergence of the US in the field of human spaceflight.

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.

SpaceX has been able to cut its satellite’s apparent brightness in half by using a dark coating on one of its satellites. Applying the coating to future satellites would help reduce their impact on delicate telescope observations of the night sky.

SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) in 2012, and after more than eight years, the company has launched a new and improved version to the ISS.

An extremely odd project is planning to hold a remote-controlled car race next October ... On the surface of the Moon. What's more, the two racecars will be partially designed by high school kids, and McLaren P1 designer Frank Stephenson is involved.

Following the historic Crew-1 launch, which saw four astronauts lifted into space from US soil on the first ever crewed operational flight of a commercial spacecraft, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has now safely docked with the International Space Station.

History was made today as the US, after a nine-year hiatus, returned to regular crewed space flights from American soil to the International Space Station (ISS) with the launch of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

After a long road featuring uncrewed test flights, launchpad explosions, parachute tests and finally crewed test flights, NASA has now officially certified SpaceX’s spacecraft system for transporting humans to the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX and NASA appeared all set to go ahead with the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station on October 31. That date has now been pushed back following a mishap on the launchpad during a separate SpaceX mission earlier this month.

SpaceX began launching its Starlink satellites into orbit last year in a bid to eventually blanket the Earth in high-speed internet, and while the mega-constellation is far from complete, some are already tapping into the connectivity on offer.

SpaceX’s rocket landings have now become so routine that it’s easy to forget such a thing had never been accomplished five years ago. Today, it sent up and welcomed back the same refurbished Falcon 9 rocket for a record sixth time.