NASA

TAMPA, Fla. — Skyrora has become the first British company to secure a launch license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), though a lack of available launch pads could push its first suborbital flight from SaxaVord Spaceport into 2026. The CAA license, announced Aug. 4, allows for up to 16 launches from SaxaVord using Skylark L, an 11-meter suborbital rocket with a 50-kilogram payload capacity. Skylark L flew for the first time in 2022 from Iceland using the company’s mobile launch facility. It reached 300 meters, well short of the 100-kilometer Kármán line, because of a software issue. The rocket is designed to de-risk technologies that will be used in Skyrora XL, a vehicle twice as tall and capable of placing up to 315 kilograms into low Earth orbit. While t...

Colorado Springs, CO — July 29, 2025 — Frontgrade Technologies, a leading provider of high-reliability electronic solutions for space and national security missions, has launched its operationally resilient SpaceStor™ Mass Memory Unit (MMU), a high capacity, solid state storage solution designed for mission-critical space applications. As the newest addition to Frontgrade’s MAMBA (Modular Applications for Mission processing with a Bifurcated Architecture) offering, the radiation-tolerant SpaceStor delivers up to 3.97 TB of reliable, NAND flash memory in a 3U SpaceVPX form factor, ideal for SWaP-C constrained and data-intensive missions. Delivering transaction throughput of up to 4Gb per second, SpaceStor’s significant capacity enables real-time, in-flight computing and pr...

NASA’s newest mission, TRACERS, soon will begin studying how Earth’s magnetic shield protects our planet from the effects of space weather. Short for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, the twin TRACERS spacecraft lifted off at 11:13 a.m. PDT (2:13 p.m. EDT) Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. “NASA is proud to launch TRACERS to demonstrate and expand American preeminence in space science research and technology,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “The TRACERS satellites will move us forward in decoding space weather and further our understanding of the connection between Earth and the Sun. This mission will yield breakthroughs that will advance our pursuit of ...