CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – NASA unexpectedly announced its bringing the previously cancelled VIPER Lunar Rover mission back to life and selected Blue Origin to launch the robot to the Moon’s South Pole in search of lunar ice and in support of the agency’s Artemis human landing campaign. On Sept. 19, NASA reversed course on the VIPER cancellation and announced the
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – NASA is inviting everyone to send your name around the Moon by signing up for a personalized ‘Boarding Pass’ on NASA’s Artemis II mission in 2026 – launching with the first humans traveling to the Moon in over 50 years. Myself and Jean Wright of Space UpClose have just signed up to launch our names around
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – The NASA Firefly Aerospace commercial lunar lander named Blue Ghost Mission 1 concluded its two-week Moon mission on March 16 as planned following the successful landing on the Moon with ten NASA science and technology demonstrations on March 2. The Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed at 3:34 a.m. EST on March 2, 2025,
GRAND CAYMAN – Ken Kremer, Managing Editor for Space UpClose, joined FOX 35’s Garrett Wymer on March 7, 2025 to discuss the next steps for Starship and SpaceX after the eighth flight test exploded on March 6, 2025. The Starship mission aims to bring astronauts back to the moon. Jean Wright and Ken Kremer of Space UpClose watched the SpaceX
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) announced the crew of four astronauts who will blast off on the historic Artemis II mission – as ‘humanity’s crew’ on humanity’s next epic journey beyond Earth orbit and around the Moon and back for the first time in more than 50 years! The history making international flight will
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – Technicians working at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans have completed the assembly of the major core stage structures for the mammoth Space Launch System (SLS) mega Moon rocket that will launch on the agencies next Project Artemis mission – namely Artemis II – that will propel a crew of four astronauts beyond Earth orbit
For SpaceUpClose.com & RocketSTEM TITUSVILLE, FL – Just past midnight, SpaceX lofted another 55 Starlink high speed broadband internet satellites to low Earth orbit while accomplishing the fastest turnaround between missions – five days and three hours – from the same pad! Namely complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and soaring away again on a southeasterly
For SpaceUpClose.com & RocketSTEM CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – Precisely 50 years to the day when humans last landed on the Moon on Apollo 17, NASA’s next generation human rated lunar capsule Orion safely returned to Earth, Sunday, Dec. 11, capping a history making month long demonstration mission around the Moon and back with a successful ocean splashdown off the coast
For SpaceUpClose.com & RocketSTEM CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, FL – In the dead of the night Sunday, Dec. 11, SpaceX successfully launched a pair of science missions to the Moon placing the commercially built Japanese HAKUTO-R robotic lunar lander for iSpace and NASA’s Lunar Flashlight rideshare cubesat searching for lunar water ice into a lunar transfer orbit from Florida’s
For SpaceUpClose.com & RocketSTEM CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – NASA’s Orion Artemis 1 spacecraft snapped a series of staggeringly beautiful selfie views with the cratered lunar surface and the crescent Earth rising against an eerie backdrop of the blackness of space as it conducted the critical return flyby powered (RPF) maneuver Monday, Dec. 5 – that irreversibly committed the capsule to