[🇺🇸] Space Program Of The USA

[Saif]

Date of Event: Apr 20, 2026

Source: https://www.newagebd.net/post/north-america/297379/blue-origin-launches-rocket-with-used-booster-for-first-time

Blue Origin launches rocket with used booster for first time
Agence France-Presse . Washington 20 April, 2026, 01:14

Blue Origin, the US space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX.

But the uncrewed mission also suffered a partial setback: the satellite carried into space by the rocket did not settle into the right orbit.

The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters. It has previously launched its smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components in a less technically challenging operation.

The novel recycling approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos’s firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has also recovered a booster from a launched rocket.

The New Glenn rocket, standing at 98 meters tall, lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral with its reused booster at about 7:25am (1125 GMT) carrying a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile.

After lift-off, the rocket’s two stages separated, with the upper stage continuing its journey carrying the satellite into space. Its booster successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean about nine minutes and 30 seconds after take-off.

Blue Origin said later in a statement on X that the satellite turned on properly but was placed in ‘an off-nominal orbit.’ The gravity of this error was not immediately known. The company said it was assessing the mishap.

In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a floating platform.

A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent.

The booster used in Sunday’s launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and made several other modifications.

The New Glenn is at the heart of Bezos’s space ambitions as he competes with Musk in NASA’s Artemis lunar program, with their companies both developing lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is doubling down on efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028, before the end of president Donald Trump’s second term and a deadline set by Chinese rivals.​

 

[Saif]

NASA’s Curiosity rover captures stunning Martian dawn over ancient cliffs

NASA's Curiosity rover has captured a remarkable image of the Martian landscape at dawn, revealing ancient, wind-sculpted cliffs as sunlight spreads across the surface of the Red Planet.

www.thedailystar.net

NASA’s Curiosity rover captures stunning Martian dawn over ancient cliffs

Tech & Startup Desk

Photo: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS

NASA's Curiosity rover has captured a remarkable image of the Martian landscape at dawn, revealing ancient, wind-sculpted cliffs as sunlight spreads across the surface of the Red Planet.

The image, taken on August 11, 2026, and released by NASA in October, shows rugged geological formations known as yardangs on Mount Sharp, a mountain rising approximately five kilometres above the floor of Gale Crater.

Taken about an hour after sunrise, the rover's Mastcam camera captured the photograph, revealing jagged cliffs and distant ridges.

The formations are particularly interesting to scientists because their geological composition differs from surrounding rock layers. Researchers believe they may have originated from windblown sediments, potentially including volcanic ash, before billions of years of erosion shaped them into ridges.

The yardang layer stretches approximately 16 kilometres across the northwestern section of Mount Sharp. Scientists believe examining the rocks could provide further evidence of how Mars changed from a planet that once supported lakes and flowing water into its present cold, dry environment.

The formations probably developed about three billion years ago, although scientists believe the rocks were deposited after some of the mountain's earlier layers had eroded.

Curiosity has been exploring Mars since landing in 2012 and began ascending Mount Sharp in 2014. The rover has now climbed approximately one kilometre above the crater floor, setting a Martian exploration record.

NASA scientists hope Curiosity will reach the unusual formations in 2027 or 2028, allowing its scientific instruments to examine their composition directly.

The rover's ongoing mission seeks to understand Mars's geological history and determine whether the planet once had environmental conditions suitable for microbial life.​

 

[Saif]

NASA's 22-year-old Swift satellite telescope falls from orbit in fiery finale

NASA's Swift satellite telescope, which spent two decades studying the most powerful known blasts of energy in the cosmos, tumbled out of orbit as expected on Wednesday and burned up in Earth's atmosphere over Indonesia, the space agency reported. The fiery demise of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observa

thefinancialexpress.com.bd

NASA's 22-year-old Swift satellite telescope falls from orbit in fiery finale

The special rescue spacecraft LINK, which flew on a failed mission designed to extend the life of NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The spacecraft awaits encapsulation aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, US Jun 8, 2026.

NASA's Swift satellite telescope, which spent two decades studying the most powerful known blasts of energy in the cosmos, tumbled out of orbit as expected on Wednesday and burned up in Earth's atmosphere over Indonesia, the space agency reported.

The fiery demise of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, weighing roughly 3,200 pounds (1,452kg), came less than three months after a rescue spacecraft failed its mission to boost the satellite to higher orbit and extend its life.

The US Space Force confirmed that Swift's re-entry occurred at 7:39am EST (1239 GMT), as the satellite streaked into the upper atmosphere at about 22 times the speed of sound over Indonesia's North Sumatra province, roughly 200 miles (322km) north of the equator, according to NASA.

NASA said it expected the frictional heat of re-entry would incinerate most of the satellite well above Earth's surface, with some fragments surviving the plunge, though the US space agency reported no damage or injuries on the ground from falling debris.

It was not immediately clear how close the telescope's re-entry point was to North Sumatra's capital and largest city, Medan, home to about 2.5 million people. The population of the province as a whole totals around 16 million.

The Space Force had earlier calculated the risk posed to populated areas as very low, putting the odds of harm coming to anyone on Earth at one chance in 2,100.

Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer for Britain-based industrial parts supplier Accu Components, said prior to re-entry that only a “handful of small, scorched fragments are expected to make it down, nothing recognisable as a telescope”.

"Satellites this size re-enter the atmosphere regularly, and in nearly 70 years of spaceflight no one has ever been killed by falling debris," Sladen said in an email.

The risk of a re-entry accident grows over the longer term, "which is why designing satellites to come down safely matters more and more," he added.

NASA's prized $500 million Swift satellite was primarily designed to study gamma-ray bursts - the most intense blasts of energy in the universe - using its multi-wavelength array of three telescopes.

Since its launch in 2004, Swift had also studied hundreds of supernova explosions, star-shredding black holes, stellar X-ray flares, asteroids and comets, contributing to some 7,000 published scientific papers. It ceased operations on Oct 20.

The observatory, which lacked its own propulsion system, had long outlasted its two-year design life and had been drifting toward orbital instability for months.

In July, NASA and Arizona-based startup Katalyst launched a specially built rescue vehicle called LINK on a mission to rendezvous with Swift, latch onto the satellite and tug it into a higher, more sustainable orbit.

But the LINK spacecraft itself began spinning uncontrollably soon after reaching space, and by mid-August, mission managers abandoned the effort, resigned to letting Swift fall back to Earth.​