Space Exploration

In the early hours of the 20th of March, a Long March 8 rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 2 at the Wenchang Space Launch Site. Onboard the rocket were three satellites bound for the Moon. The three satellites are Queqiao-2, Tiandu-1, and Tiandu-2. The Long March 8 launch vehicle

Mar 20, 2024 • 4 mins

Last week on the 22nd, the United States of America returned to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, which was fifty-two years ago. According to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the lander landed at 80.13 degrees South and 1.44

Feb 28, 2024 • 7 mins

Early on the 24th of February, the China Manned Space Engineering Office announced that it had selected the names for its two spacecraft that will be used for its crewed lunar exploration program. The applications had been open since August and ran until late 2023 with over two-thousand submissions received!

Feb 24, 2024 • 5 mins

After a delay on the 14th of February, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A bound for the Moon, the first since Apollo 17! The Falcon 9 was carrying Intuitive Machine's Nova-C lander for the IM-1 mission. The launch took place at 06:05 am

Feb 15, 2024 • 9 mins

Recently the China National Space Administration announced that the Chang'e 6 lunar spacecraft had arrived at the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Wednesday, the 10th of January. Parts of the spacecraft arrived in two military aircraft at Haikou, the capital of the Hainan province, before being transported to

Jan 10, 2024 • 4 mins

On the 9th of January at 15:03 pm, Beijing Time, a Long March 2C lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center carrying the Einstein Probe to a 600-kilometer low Earth orbit. The Einstein Probe is believed to weigh 1,450 kilograms and be roughly the size of an

Jan 9, 2024 • 3 mins

It has been over five years since the Chang'e 4 lunar lander landed on the far side of the Moon. The lunar landing occurred at 02:26 am Coordinated Universal Time on the 3rd of January 2019 touching down the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

Jan 5, 2024 • 3 mins

Slated to launch in November 2026, Japans Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) is planning on launching their most daring mission yet. The target of this mission? The two Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos. MMX or "Martian Moons Exploration" is an upcoming planetary science mission that is poised to launch

Nov 16, 2023 • 4 mins

The last two decades have been quite the bumpy ride for humans. But throughout it, one thing has been constant: a continuous presence aboard quite possibly the world's best-known laboratory, the orbiting, International Space Station. The ISS is just as much a triumph of geopolitics as it is

Nov 1, 2023 • 1 min

On the 15th of October 2003, The People's Republic of China became the third country to successfully launch a person into Earth orbit using its own spacecraft and launch vehicles. The taikonaut, what China calls its astronauts, onboard the spacecraft for this mission was Yang Liwei, becoming the

Oct 17, 2023 • 3 mins

Launched on September 8, 2016, on ULA's Atlas V rocket, the Osiris-Rex mission dropped a capsule containing samples of a near-by asteroid nearly a month ago, on September 24th, 2023. Here’s everything you need to know. Osiris-Rex landed on Bennu, an asteroid that is half a kilometer

Oct 11, 2023 • 2 mins

In October 1957 the people of Earth became aware of a second satellite circling the planet, this one however was artificial and man-made. Sputnik-1 was the first artificial satellite launched from Earth on the 4th of October 1957 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics atop of

Oct 5, 2023 • 2 mins

Disclaimer: This article was written on the 17th of September 2023 so some information may be outdated. This article is intended as a general explanation of the Chinese crewed spaceflight programs and the spacecraft used for them. Tiangong space station The Tiangong space station, also called the Chinese space station,

Oct 4, 2023 • 4 mins