SPACE

Five commercial satellite companies are said to be feeding information to the Ukrainian government.

Russia has said it will no longer supply rocket engines used in launches by the United Launch Alliance joint venture.

Rocket Lab, the fast-growing rocket company, has chosen to build a second launch site at the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where it would launch its Neutron rocket, a fully reusable vehicle that’s designed to land back at its launch site.

As Russia continues its bloody invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.-Russia partnership that runs the International Space Station has come under more strain than it has endured in years, and it is unclear how the countries will continue to work together in space as tensions mount on the ground.

The Chinese rocket part probably launched into space seven years ago, NASA said, explaining that the agency identified the booster after analyzing the object’s orbits between 2016 and 2017.

The privately financed Polaris space program would include the first spacewalk by private citizens and the first crewed launch of the Starship, Elon Musk's gigantic spacecraft he hopes will fly to Mars.

SpaceX's Starship was placed atop its Super Heavy booster on Thursday in anticipation that Musk will outline when it will be ready for launch.

NASA and SpaceX announced they are looking into why the fourth parachute on recent Dragon capsules appeared slow to open.

The much-anticipated rollout of NASA’s moon rocket and capsule to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a fueling test will be delayed for another few weeks, the space agency said Wednesday.

The NTSB wants to investigate commercial spaceflight crashes. The FAA and commercial space companies object.

Monthly astronomy column

The Pentagon wants to clean up low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably.

Since Bill Gray's blog post earlier this month, other space observers have confirmed the data and agreed that the Falcon 9 rocket, which weighs about 4 metric tons, is set to crash into the far side of the moon on March 4, in what Gray believes might be “the first unintentional case” of space junk hitting the moon.

Alexa may soon be going to space for real. Lockheed Martin, which has built the Orion spacecraft that NASA hopes will fly astronauts to the moon within a couple of years, is partnering with Amazon to put Alexa in the capsule.

The announcement by NASA Friday comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any new sanctions stemming from the growing crisis in Ukraine could lead to “a complete rupture of relations.”

2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon.

The fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years.

“Humanity has touched the sun,” Nicola Fox, division director for NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in announcing that the Parker Solar Probe entered the sun's atmosphere earlier this year, a groundbreaking accomplishment for scientists.