Science

British billionaire Richard Branson on Sunday soared more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert aboard his Virgin Galactic rocket plane and safely returned in the vehicle’s first fully crewed test flight to space, a symbolic milestone for a venture he started 17 years ago. Branson, one of six Virgin Galactic employees strapped in

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday it approved a Blue Origin license to carry humans on the New Shepard launch system into space. Former Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos is set to fly to the edge of space on Blue Origin’s maiden crewed voyage on July 20. Blue Origin is authorised to carry

Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are competing fiercely to outwit each other and capture the huge commercial space tourism market. And their fellow billionaire Elon Musk appears to be siding with the British entrepreneur and his Virgin Galactic venture. Musk, the SpaceX CEO who aims to colonise Mars someday and make humans a multi-planetary species, seems to have

NASA has released an intriguing image that appears like a potato, but it is not. The image, captured by the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, is of Phobos, the largest of Mars’ two raggedy moons. The other moon of the Red Planet is called Deimos. In an Instagram post, the space agency

Indigenous peoples patrolling the Peruvian Amazon equipped with smartphones and satellite data were able to drastically reduce illegal deforestation, according to the results of an experiment published Monday. The study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), showed that recognising indigenous people’s rights to their territory can be a powerful

NASA administrator Bill Nelson has lauded billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic, who along with five other crew members soared to the edge of the space aboard the VSS Unity spacecraft on Sunday. Nelson, a former astronaut who went to space in 1986, said that it was hard to believe back then that

Scientists have identified a new dinosaur genus following the analysis of a fossilised jawbone discovered over two decades ago in the Portell locality of Spain’s Castellón province. The styracosternan hadrosaurid dinosaur, scientists say, was likely six to eight metres long, a herbivore, and closely related to species found in modern-day China and Niger. The study

Jeff Bezos may have been beaten to space by rival Richard Branson, but the billionaire American businessman is poised to make history next week aboard what would be the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew. Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, is due to be part of a four-person crew for a

Virgin Galactic acknowledged on Tuesday that billionaire founder Richard Branson never rode a bicycle to the launch site of his space flight on Sunday, as depicted in a highly publicised video included in the company’s webcast of the event. The video clip showed Branson riding his bike toward New Mexico’s state-owned Spaceport America near the town

Three billionaire entrepreneurs – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson – are each vying to usher in a new era of private commercial space travel. Here is how their rival ventures compare in the race to open up space travel. Tickets Bezos, Branson, and Musk have been investing billions of dollars in their space

As Virgin Galactic finalises plans for founder Richard Branson to join five others on a test flight to the edge of space on July 11, the British billionaire said his wife may be nervous about the launch but he himself wasn’t the least bit afraid. “I’ve been looking forward to this for 17 years,” Branson

Decades after burnishing his reputation as a wealthy daredevil mogul in a series of boating and hot-air balloon expeditions, Richard Branson is poised to promote his burgeoning astro-tourism venture by launching himself to the final frontier. Branson’s Virgin Galactic is due on Sunday to send the company’s passenger rocket plane, the VSS Unity, on its first

NASA on a regular basis shares pictures on its social media handles of missions currently underway. But occasionally, it takes us down the memory lane too. On Thursday, July 8, the American space agency shared images of a mission from a decade ago on its Twitter and Instagram handles. It was on this day back

Singapore researchers have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and repairs itself when damaged, just like human skin. Artificially innervated foam, or AiFoam, is a highly elastic polymer created by mixing fluoropolymer with a compound that lowers surface tension. This allows the spongy material to fuse easily into one

Virgin Galactic is set to send its billionaire founder Richard Branson, along with a crew of five others, aboard VSS Unity to the edge of space today, July 11. Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo vehicle will lift off from Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, US. Now, the question many have been asking

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is getting back into launch activity fully at Sriharikota spaceport with the planned orbiting of geo imaging satellite GISAT-1 on board GSLV-F10 rocket on August 12. It’s going to be only the second launch of the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency in the COVID-19-hit 2021.  ISRO successfully launched PSLV-C51 mission on

NASA will launch its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, in 2023 to get a closer view of the Moon’s South Pole and evaluate the concentration of water as well as other potential resources on its surface. The space agency is undertaking the mission to understand if it is possible for human life to

Ever wondered what songs on radio broadcasts you would hear if you moved light-years away from the Earth into space? Lightyear.fm website can help answer the question to a certain degree. It shows what music you’d hear, depending on the distance in light-years you were away from the Earth. Once you enter the website —

Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, one of the 13 women who passed NASA’s astronaut training programme in the 1960s, on the first crewed flight into space from his rocket company Blue Origin later this month. Funk, 82, will be the oldest person ever to travel into space, Blue Origin

Researchers at Cambridge University say that they have used AI to find 200 potential drugs that can treat COVID-19. With the coronavirus pandemic still not over, researchers are working on ways in which to limit the harms caused by COVID, and scientists in the UK said that using a combination of computational biology and machine

NASA astrophysicists have used computer simulation to demonstrate that tsunami-like structures may form on a large scale, deep into space when gas escapes the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole. Not just that, researchers added that these supermassive black holes are capable of hosting the largest Tsunami-like structures in the universe.  On Sunday, in an