NASA brought a smile to faces of Boeing shareholders this week with the announcement that it would be ordering 10 Space Launch System (SLS) core stages from the US aviation giant for Artemis rocket launches to the Moon. Although paying for the things could be tricky. The news came as NASA was trumpeting the arrival of the …

There was good news for Martian miners this week as NASA's stuck mole began making progress into the red planet's soil once more. The multinational instrument, a key part of the payload of NASA's InSight spacecraft, had been stuck at the 30cm mark out of a hoped-for 5m after hammering began in February. Boffins used the lander …

PicAstroboffins have released images taken by the Hubble telescope of the second-ever interstellar object and the first-ever verified comet to enter our Solar System from the depths of the universe. Dubbed comet 2I/Borisov, the speeding bundle of rock and dust was detected back in August by Crimean hobbyist Gennady Borisov and …

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has wheeled out the first production version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft ahead of a 2021 mission to the International Space Station. Of course, this wasn't the completed vehicle, but rather the "primary vehicle structure", as the company put it. We're a little surprised that no wag thought …

NASA has unveiled two new space suit designs for future astronauts on its Artemis program, a mission to send “the first woman and the next man" to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The main suit worn by the explorers living on a lunar shuttle will be the Orion Crew Survival System. Built with safety in mind, it’s made out of a …

RoundupIn a week where the space-faring community said goodbye to death-defying cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, Skyrora upped the ante with its rocket testing, Elon Musk and Jim Bridenstine kissed and made up, and Britain said it would be sending mech-spider nightmare fuel to the Moon. Your worst nightmare? Brit spiderbot* to roam the Moon …

ESTECThe European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, Netherlands, opened its doors to the public last weekend, and The Register braved the rain to grill top brass on spaceships, partnerships and the "B" word. The annual event, which this year saw 9,159 visitors crawl over the European Space Agency's (ESA) …

If humans are to go beyond the Moon, they must rely less on ground control and more on AI systems to perform operations such as flying, and conduct scientific experiments more autonomously, according to a NASA paper [PDF] out this week. "Future missions to Mars will require crew and ground to operate independently from Earth- …

RoundupHow's your World Space Week shaping up? Baked a rocket cake or two? No? Nevermind. Take some time out to catch up with this week's roundup of space stuff. Italian Air Force going to space* with Virgin The Italian Air Force has signed up with the Bearded One's Virgin Galactic to take a jaunt into space aboard the company's …

Neural networks have helped scientists monitor the Sun’s extreme ultraviolet outbursts after an instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory suffered an electrical malfunction, making it difficult for scientists to monitor a portion of extreme ultraviolet energy (EUV) being spewed by our star. EUV rays ejected from solar …

NASA has released audio clips of marsquake recordings taken by its InSight lander currently resident about on the Red Planet. The seismometer, known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure or SEIS for short, sniffs out marsquakes and uses the rumblings to reveal the planet’s inner structure. InSight has detected over …

RoundupWhile shy and retiring Elon Musk may have made a big noise with his big rocket, there was plenty other news for space fans to chew over in the last week. 'As The Crow Flies' to be Rocket Lab's ninth Electron mission Small-sat upstart RocketLab has set the date – kind of – for its ninth Electron launch. The mission, still from …

RoundupWhile NASA splashing the cash on Orion modules may have grabbed the headlines, the fate of India's lander continued to perplex, assembly of the Space Launch System continued and Blighty pondered a Space Bridge. Structural assembly complete for core of monstrously delayed monster rocket The last of the five main sections that …

Texas Senator Ted Cruz hailed "a great day for the men and women at Johnson Space Center" as NASA awarded the contract for building Orion spacecraft to Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado. For the doubters, this is it: the production line has been set in motion for the first mission to put astronauts on the Moon since …

RoundupUnlike SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which plops down in the ocean at the end of a mission (ideally in one piece), Boeing's CST-100 Starliner is designed to land on, er, land. As NASA and Boeing inch ever closer to its first crewed launch, rehearsals were conducted last week to practice locating a capsule, safing it and preparing for …

NASA's enormous mobile launcher is back at Pad 39B after worried engineers stashed it in the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to ride out Hurricane Dorian. Engineers had been testing the platform on the pad ahead of an eventual mission and verifying everything works except for, you know, actually standing the rocket …

InterviewNot content with stashing an Apollo-based supercomputer aboard the ISS, HPE will also be slinging the petaFLOPS for NASA's Ames Research Center. The Reg had a chat with supercomputing veteran Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager of HPC and AI at HPE, who told us the company is looking beyond Earth orbit. Based on …

The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope has finally been assembled, NASA announced on Wednesday. The project has had a rocky road. Originally scheduled to enter space as early as 2007, the instrument has been bedeviled with numerous delays, including a redesign and an accidentally ripped sunshield that had to be repaired. …