Dr. Sally Ride, American’s first female astronaut, will be honored posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House later this year, President Obama announced Monday.   The announcement coincided with a tribute to Ride on Monday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Ride, who [...]

Sierra Nevada Corporation’s winged Dream Chaser is bound for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Prior to Dream Chaser’s first autonomous free flight Approach and Landing Test (ALT), the craft will continue a series of tests, including runway tow, ground resonance, and a captive carry flight. The flight tests will [...]

Three International Space Station crew members, including the orbiting lab’s first Canadian commander, are scheduled to depart for Earth late Monday, following a whirlwind spacewalk over the weekend by two U. S. astronauts to stem a sudden leak in the ammonia cooling system. Canadian Chris Hadfield and one of the spacewalkers, Tom Marshburn, are to [...]

Frederick  ”C. J.”  Sturckow, a four time space shuttle commander and pilot, has become the first from NASA’s astronaut corps to join Virgin Galactic as a test pilot for SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft operations, the emerging commercial suborbital passenger launch service announced Tuesday. Sturckow and Michael “Sooch” Masucci, a former U.S. Air Force test [...]

  NASA has signed a $424 million contract extension with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, to assure the launch and return of U. S., European, Japanese and Canadian astronauts to and from the International Space Station aboard Soyuz spacecraft through 2017, while Congress and the White House debate funding levels for the space agency’s [...]