Covering All Things Florida
According to website thesmokinggun.com, the Kentucky man who won a $167.3 million Powerball jackpot last year has reached a plea deal after prosecutors said he kicked a sheriff’s deputy in the face during a chaotic incident at a St. Pete resort where he went to celebrate his newfound wealth.
Artemis II made the trip from Launch Complex 39B to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building today. The approximately 4-mile trek aboard Crawler-Transporter 2 began at around 9 AM ET and lasted until around 8 PM, when it arrived inside Bay 3 for repairs and battery updates.
Axiom Space has secured another trip to the International Space Station after NASA selected the Houston-based company for a fifth commercial crew mission to the orbital outpost.
The Federal Aviation Administration released the Final Environmental Impact Statement and its Record of Decision regarding the matter this morning. The Record of Decision approves SpaceX to operate Starship-Super Heavy at Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, clearing the final major regulatory hurdle for the company’s next-generation launch vehicle on Florida’s Space Coast.
Virginia firm lands multi-year deal to keep America’s other East Coast spaceport humming.
NASA has selected ARES Technical Services Corporation to run its launch range operations at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. They awarded the McLean, Virginia-based company a contract worth up to $339.8 million.
2026 promises to be the most transformative year in American spaceflight since the Apollo era. From Artemis II astronauts circling the Moon to the first commercial space stations, here’s what’s coming.
Today, in 1968 aboard Apollo 8, NASA astronaut Bill Anders captured “Earthrise” — one of the most iconic photographs of the Apollo era. For the first time, humans were able to the Earth from the perspective of the moon. Later, Anders recalled seeing “…a very fragile looking Earth, a very delicate looking Earth, I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.” Using a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera outfitted with a 250mm telephoto lens, Anders, with a click of the button had captured a moment epiphany and perhaps one of the great works of art of our time.
Floyd “Sonny” Tillman spent most of his life working. Not the kind of work that draws attention, but the kind that fills days and wears on your hands. He believed in showing up, doing things the right way, and letting the results speak for themselves.
The Department of the Air Force has officially signed off on a plan that lets SpaceX redevelop Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral SFS for Starship and Super Heavy operations. Their Record of Decision lays out how the company can rebuild the pad, transport hardware, and eventually fly and land the massive booster and ship right here on the Space Coast.
Space X’s massive Starship has been designed with the capacity to boost up to 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, far more than rockets currently in common use. With its success, the potential for launching larger payloads — whether cargo, satellites, or entire interplanetary spacecraft — becomes more tantalizing to deep space mission designers looking to explore other planets and asteroids.
It has been a big week for Blue Origin, first with the second launch of New Glenn, the successful landing of the first stage. As they were moving the first stage of last week’s New Glenn flight, the company casually made three major announcements today in one press release: a new, supersized New Glenn for megapayloads, ramping up the power output of its BE-4 and BE-3U engine used on the second stage of the current New Glenn, as well as the 9X4. It might be a while for the megarocket to be on the launch pad, but the engine advancements start arriving on the next New Glenn flight, NG-3.
For scientific survey probes and landers that head into deep space, power generation is a critical problem: think of exploring space like backpacking across a continent a place like Antarctica: no stores, no roads, and months and months of cold temperatures. Solar power is handy, light and handy, but useless at night or in a blizzard. NASA’s nuclear technology could offer a solution in such scenarios.
