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Six months after they launched for the International Space Station, the members of SpaceX's Crew-6 returned to Earth. NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, together with Sultan AlNeyadi of the United Arab Emirates and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos splashed down aboard the Dragon spacecraft "Endeavour" off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla.
In "The Six," author Loren Grush recounts the lives and launches of the first six women to become NASA astronauts. As the book hits store shelves this month, NASA draws closer to selecting from its 16 active female astronauts the one who will become the first woman on the moon. As Grush says in this interview, The Six and the sixteen are alike because of the way they differ.
When he returns to Earth later this month, Frank Rubio will be the first American astronaut to have spent a full year in space. On Monday (Sept. 11), he breaks the prior record for the longest U.S. spaceflight (355 days, 3 hours and 45 minutes) logged by Mark Vande Hei in 2022. Rubio's flight was extended after he launched to the International Space Station as a result of his original ride home (Soyuz MS-22) suffering damage.
After being called a fake and taken off public display, the lectern that President John F. Kennedy used to deliver his "We choose to go the moon" speech was placed back on exhibit Tuesday (Sept. 12), 61 years to the day after it made history at Rice University. Space Center Houston partnered with an expert in furniture conservation to authenticate the wooden stand.
For 58 years, collectors, the public and even astronauts have sought to have their stamped envelopes ("covers") postmarked with the Kennedy Space Center cancellation device. That is now coming to an end with the permanent closure of the post office at the Florida spaceport this month. NASA's mail will continue to be processed through Orlando, but philatelic requests will be directed to and returned with a Titusville, Fla. postmark.
The acclaimed Apple TV+ alternate space history series "For All Mankind" returns on Nov. 10 with a 10 episode fourth season. The teaser released Wednesday (Sept. 13) plays like a recruitment campaign for Helios Aerospace, as Gemini and Apollo astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) seeks a new class to join the workforce at the Happy Valley Mars colony.
While Michael Peña stars as NASA astronaut José Hernández in the new film "A Million Miles Away," debuting Thursday night (Sept. 14) on Amazon Prime Video, the other STS-128 crew members are also portrayed. collectSPACE spoke with a few of them to hear their reactions to the movie and memories of its focus.
The next Russian cosmonauts to spend a year in space and a NASA astronaut on a six-month mission left Earth for the International Space Station on Friday (Sept. 15). Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Loral O'Hara lifted off on Russia's Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a two-orbit to rendezvous to join the Expedition 69 crew.
When Michael Peña, portraying astronaut José Hernández, goes to board the space shuttle in "A Million Miles Away," a familiar face is there to assist him. Hernández spoke about his cameo and how it was inspired by his time as a Cape Crusader, joining the film's director Alejandra Márquez Abella in an interview.
Twenty-five years after he went "From the Earth to the Moon," Tom Hanks is returning to telling the stories of the Apollo missions as co-writer and narrator of "The Moonwalkers," a new experience set to debut at the Lightroom in London. In addition to Hanks, the production also involves the firm that projected a Saturn V rocket on the Washington Monument in 2019 and imagery from Andy Saunders' "Apollo Remastered." "Moonwalkers" also features NASA's moon-bound Artemis crew members.
You can now get the first U.S. postage stamp to depict the return of asteroid samples by a U.S. mission two days before that NASA probe returns its samples to Earth. The U.S. Postal Service is holding a first-day-of-issue ceremony for its stamp honoring the OSIRIS-REx mission in Salt Lake City on Friday (Sept. 22), ahead of the spacecraft dropping its sample capsule to land under a parachute in the Utah desert on Sunday.
Seven years after it left Earth, NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned home on Sunday (Sept. 24), to drop off a capsule filled with the first asteroid sample collected by the United States. The capsule landed in the Utah desert aided by a parachute. NASA and Lockheed Marin will fly the capsule to Johnson Space Center, where the work to reveal and study its contents will get underway.
Two flight-proven pieces of SpaceX rocket hardware have joined the national collection curated by the Smithsonian. A grid fin that flew once in 2017 and a Merlin engine that among its three flights helped launch an Israeli moon lander in 2019, will go on exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. when renovations are complete in 2026.
After an extended stay of 371 days, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin of Roscosmos landed on Wednesday (Sept. 27) from the International Space Station. Other cosmonauts have spent more than a year off the planet (Prokopyev and Petelin were the first to do so on the ISS), but Rubio set a first for a U.S. astronaut and broke the record for the longest American spaceflight.
The details are still to be worked out, but NASA has chosen three museums to display pieces of asteroid Bennu as collected and returned to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The three venues in Washington, DC, Houston and Tucson have been told to be ready by mid-November, though a lot depends on what scientists find after the sample return capsule is inspected.
