Space News & Blog Articles

SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon capsule departs the International Space Station Thursday. Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

A SpaceX cargo capsule undocked from the International Space Station Thursday and headed for splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after a two-day delay to wait for Tropical Storm Elsa to clear the area.

Flying in autopilot mode, the Cargo Dragon capsule backed away from the space station’s Harmony module at 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT) Thursday as the complex sailed more than 250 miles over the South Atlantic Ocean.

The spacecraft fired thrusters to depart the vicinity of the space station, setting the stage for re-entry and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico south of Tallahassee, Florida, at around 11:29 p.m. EDT Friday (0329 GMT Saturday).

The unpiloted supply ship spent 33 days at the space station since docking there June 5, two days after launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The mission set to end Friday is SpaceX’s 22nd round-trip cargo delivery flight to the space station since 2012. NASA has contracts with SpaceX and Northrop Grumman to fly commercial resupply missions to the station.

Live coverage of the departure of SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship from the International Space Station and its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean with several tons of experiment samples and cargo. SpaceX and NASA will not provide live video coverage of the splashdown. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.

A Chinese astronauts outside the Tiangong space station Sunday. Credit: Xinhua

Two Chinese astronauts headed outside the country’s space station Saturday for the second-ever spacewalk in China’s space program, and the first staged from the new Tiangong complex in low Earth orbit.

Astronauts Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo tested new-generation Chinese-built spacesuits, installed foot restraints and a work platform on the space station’s robotic arm, and mounted a panoramic camera outside the complex, according to the China Manned Space Agency.

The excursion was the second extravehicular activity in the history of China’s space program, following a 22-minute spacewalk on the Shenzhou 7 mission in 2008. On that flight, Liu and crewmate Zhai Zhigang briefly exited the hatch to the Shenzhou 7 spacecraft and waived a Chinese flag for a television audience.

Zhai wore an earlier model of a Chinese Feitian spacesuit in the 2008 spacewalk, while Liu put on a Russian Orlan spacesuit. For Sunday’s spacewalk, Liu and Tang wore updated Feitian spacesuits, Chinese officials said.

Liu and Tang put on their spacesuits and opened the hatch of the Tianhe core module’s airlock at 0011 GMT Sunday (8:11 p.m. EDT Saturday). Among other tasks, the astronauts tested the performance of the upgraded Chinese spacesuits and practiced using the space station’s 33.5-foot (10.2-meter) robotic arm.

A Chinese Long March 4C rocket takes off carrying the Fengyun 3E weather satellite. Credit: Xinhua

A new Chinese Fengyun weather satellite launched Sunday and flew into an early morning polar orbit to feed data into global computer models, adding inputs that international weather officials said will improve medium and long-range forecasts.

The Fengyun 3E satellite rocketed into orbit on top of a Long March 4C rocket at 7:28 p.m. EDT Sunday (2328 GMT; 7:28 a.m. Monday in Beijing), according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., or CASC, the top state-run contractor for China’s space program.

The three-stage Long March 4C rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the Inner Mongolia region of northwestern China. The liquid-fueled launcher flew south from Jiuquan before releasing the Fengyun 3E weather satellite into a polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.

China launched the roughly 2.5-ton Fengyun 3E satellite into an orbit that flies along the terminator, or the line between the day and night sides of Earth. Fengyun 3E crosses the equator in the early morning, local time, making it the first civilian weather satellite to launch directly into an early morning orbital plane.

The China Meteorological Administration said Fengyun 3E, designed for a service life of at least eight years, will fill a gap in the early morning orbit. There are aging U.S. military DMSP weather satellites in a similar orbit, but they are well beyond their design lives, and no more DMSP satellites are scheduled for launch.

A Chinese Long March 2D rocket lifts off Saturday. Credit: Xinhua

China successfully launched five small remote sensing satellites on top of a Long March 2D rocket Saturday into an orbit more than 330 miles above Earth.

The five spacecraft, all from Chinese companies operated using commercial business models, lifted off at 0251 GMT Saturday (10:51 p.m. EDT Friday) from the Taiyuan launch base in Shanxi province located in northern China.

A Long March 2D rocket carried the satellites into orbit, and officials declared the launch a success, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., the top government-owned enterprise in China’s space program.

Heading south from Taiyuan, the two-stage Long March 2D rocket dropped its first stage over Chinese territory a few minutes after liftoff. A second stage deployed the five payloads into a near-circular polar orbit with an average altitude of around 333 miles (537 kilometers), at an inclination of about 97.5 degrees to the equator, according to tracking data published by the U.S. military.

The Long March 2D rocket deployed four Jilin Earth observation satellites for Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. Ltd., a commercial remote sensing company based in China’s Jilin province. The company has successfully launched 30 small remote sensing satellites into orbit since 2015.

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION

Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, will fly into space aboard his company’s VSS Unity rocketplane July 11 for an up-and-down test flight, beating Amazon-founder and rival Jeff Bezos into sub-orbital space by nine days.

“I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11, it’s time to turn that dream into a reality,” Branson tweeted.

The announcement came just a few hours after Bezos revealed that aviation pioneer Wally Funk will be joining him, his brother Mark and the yet-to-be named winner of an on-line auction for blastoff July 20 aboard his company’s New Shepard spacecraft.

Both Virgin Galactic and Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing head to head in the emerging space tourism marketplace, both offering short rides just above the discernible atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views before returning to Earth.

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer and one of the 13 female fliers who were tested but ultimately barred from NASA’s initially all-male astronaut corps, is finally getting her chance to fly in space, thanks to Jeff Bezos.

Funk has accepted Bezos’ invitation to join him, his brother Mark and the yet-to-be named winner of an on-line auction aboard the Amazon founder’s New Shepard spacecraft when it blasts off on its first passenger flight July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, made the announcement Thursday.

“I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up,” Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos. “They said, ‘Wally, you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ I said, guess what? Doesn’t matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to. And I like to do things that nobody’s ever done.”

Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket fires its kerosene-fueled main engine seconds after dropping from the company’s Boeing 747 carrier jet. Credit: Virgin Orbit

Virgin Orbit’s air-launched rocket aced its first operational mission Wednesday, firing into orbit from the wing of a 747 carrier jet southwest of Los Angeles to deploy small satellites for the U.S. Army, Navy, the Missile Defense Agency, the Dutch military, and the Polish company SatRevolution.

The mission was the third flight of Virgin Orbit’s expendable LauncherOne rocket. A first launch in May 2020 failed to reach orbit due to an engine problem shortly after ignition, but a second test flight in January successfully placed a cluster of NASA-sponsored CubeSats into orbit.

That gave Virgin Orbit confidence to proceed into commercial service, and Wednesday’s mission opens the door one more LauncherOne flight later this year and up to six missions in 2022, according to Dan Hart, the company’s CEO.

Ground crews filled the LauncherOne rocket with its liquid propellant mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen at Mojave Air and Space Port in California early Wednesday. After final checks, managers cleared the Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, named “Cosmic Girl,” for departure from the runway at Mojave around 6:50 a.m. PDT (9:50 a.m. EDT; 1350 GMT).

With a crew of five, the Cosmic Girl carrier aircraft flew to the mission’s launch zone just south of the Channel Islands southwest of Los Angeles. The pilots guided the jumbo jet through the drop box for a “cold pass” to check winds and ensure mission control had a stable telemetry link with the rocket.

A Soyuz booster takes off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome Thursday with 36 OneWeb satellites. Credit: Roscosmos

A Russian Soyuz rocket and Fregat upper stage deployed 36 more OneWeb internet satellites into orbit Thursday, bringing the company’s fleet to 254 spacecraft, enough to start commercial service above 50 degrees latitude.

A Soyuz-2.1b rocket fired off a launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East at 8:48:33 a.m. EDT (1248:33 GMT) to begin a nearly four-hour mission delivering the 36 OneWeb satellites to orbit.

Liftoff occurred at 9:48 p.m. local time at Vostochny to begin the third Soyuz launch in six days.

The mission Thursday followed Soyuz rocket flights from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia on June 25 and a launch of a Progress resupply ship to the International Space Station Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Thursday’s launch took off from Russia’s newest spaceport, Vostochny, on the eighth Soyuz mission dedicated to carrying satellites for OneWeb, a London-based company building out a global space-based internet network.

Russia’s automated Progress MS-17 cargo ship is approaching the International Space Station for docking at 9:03 p.m. EDT Thursday (0103 GMT Friday), wrapping up a two-day journey from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with nearly 2.7 tons of fuel, food, water, and supplies.

The unpiloted supply freighter launched from Baikonur at 7:27 p.m. EDT (2327 GMT) Tuesday atop a Soyuz-2.1a rocket. Since then, the cargo craft completed a series of orbital maneuvers to match the altitude of the space station, setting up for a radar-guided rendezvous Thursday.

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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome with 36 OneWeb broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

Arianespace’s live video stream begins at approximately 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) and is in English. Roscosmos’s live video stream begins at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT) and is in Russian.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Transporter 2 rideshare mission. Credit: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now / Coldlife Photography

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket and 88 small satellites from Cape Canaveral Wednesday, sending the rideshare payloads on a southerly track into a polar orbit and notching the eighth successful flight of a reusable booster that debuted exactly one year ago.

Running a day late after a helicopter ventured into restricted airspace just before launch time Tuesday, the Falcon 9 rocket lit its nine Merlin main engines and climbed through a cloudy sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:31 p.m. EDT (1931 GMT).

SpaceX held the rocket on the ground for 35 minutes Wednesday to wait for an opening in the weather at Cape Canaveral. Scattered rain showers and storms swept across the spaceport throughout the day.

But conditions were “go” for launch at 3:31 p.m., and the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket soared through the atmosphere with 1.7 million pounds of thrust from its main engines.

Heading southeast, then turning south, the rocket followed a trajectory hugging Florida’s east coast to guide its 88 payloads into a polar sun-synchronous orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter 2 small satellite rideshare mission.

Credit: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now / Coldlife Photography

A private helicopter flew into restricted airspace near Cape Canaveral moments before the scheduled liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday. SpaceX chief Elon Musk said the keep out zone for launches is “unreasonably gigantic” and called for updated regulations.

The Federal Aviation Administration clears commercial and private aircraft from safety zones around rocket launches. For missions departing from Cape Canaveral, the U.S. Space Force also plays a role in ensuring public safety.

SpaceX was set to launch a Falcon 9 rocket at 2:56 p.m. EDT (1856 GMT) Tuesday to begin the company’s Transporter 2 rideshare mission with 88 small satellites.

But the Space Force’s range safety officer declared the range as “no go” for launch less than a minute before liftoff. The countdown stopped at T-minus 11 seconds, and SpaceX announced the launch was scrubbed for the day a few minutes later.

“Unfortunately, launch is called off for today, as an aircraft entered the ‘keep out zone,’ which is unreasonably gigantic,” Musk tweeted. “There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.”

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket. The air-launched rocket will climb into orbit with seven small satellites after release from a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft southwest of Los Angeles. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Virgin’s live webcast begins at 5:30 a.m. PDT (8:30 a.m. EDT; 1230 GMT).

Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket under the wing of the company’s Boeing 747 carrier jet at Mojave Air and Space Port. Credit: Virgin Orbit

On the heels of its first successful orbital launch in January, Virgin Orbit is gearing up for its first operational mission Wednesday with a flight of its air-launched rocket off the coast of California to deploy seven small satellites.

Virgin Orbit, founded by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, has a launch window of roughly two hours Wednesday to release the LauncherOne rocket to fire into orbit.

“We have completed our L-minus one day preflight briefing from our pilots, and the system is green for launch,” said Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit’s CEO, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “So we are good to go at this time.”

Early Wednesday, ground crews at Mojave Air and Space Port in California plan to load kerosene and liquid oxygen into Virgin Orbit’s two-stage rocket mounted under the left wing of the company’s Boeing 747 carrier aircraft.

After final closeouts and pre-flight checks, the 747 flight crew will taxi to the end of the runway and depart from Mojave for an hour-long cruise to the mission’s drop point just southwest of the Channel Islands.

EDITOR’S NOTE: NASA TV’s live launch coverage in English begins at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT). The Roscosmos webcast in Russian begins at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT).

A Russian Progress supply ship is set to launch Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, commencing a two-day chase of the International Space Station with more than 5,000 pounds of fuel, water, spare parts, and experiments.

The Progress MS-17 cargo freighter is mounted on top of a Soyuz-2.1a rocket for liftoff from Baikonur at 7:27:20 p.m. EDT (2327:20 GMT) Tuesday to kick off the trip to the space station.

Launch is set for 4:27 a.m. Wednesday local time at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a historic spaceport operated by the Russian government on the steppes of Kazakhstan. That is about a half-hour before sunrise at the launch base.

Thomas Pesquet moves the new solar array to the P6 truss for installation. Image: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and NASA crewmate Shane Kimbrough floated back outside the International Space Station Friday and deployed a 60-foot-long roll-out solar array, the second of six new blankets being installed to upgrade the lab’s power system and offset age-related degradation.

“It looks like the deployment is complete,” Pesquet radioed, watching the array unroll itself six hours after the spacewalk began. “The motion has stopped.”

After adjusting the tension on the new array, the astronauts collected their tools and made their way back to the space station’s Quest airlock, wrapping up a six-hour 45-minute excursion.

The first two ISS roll-out solar arrays, or iROSAs, were delivered to the lab complex aboard as SpaceX Dragon cargo ship on June 5. The astronauts originally planned to install them in a pair of spacewalks, but it took two outings, one on June 16 and another on June 20, to get the first new array installed.

That panel was mounted on a fixture at the base of an existing solar wing on the far left, port 6 segment of the station’s power truss. The P6 truss segment supports the lab’s two oldest wings, feeding electricity into two of the lab’s eight major power circuits: 2B and 4B.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and NASA crewmate Shane Kimbrough floated back outside the International Space Station Friday and deployed a 60-foot-long roll-out solar array, the second of six new blankets being installed to upgrade the lab’s power system and offset age-related degradation.

“It looks like the deployment is complete,” Pesquet radioed, watching the array unroll itself six hours after the spacewalk began. “The motion has stopped.”

After adjusting the tension on the new array, the astronauts collected their tools and made their way back to the space station’s Quest airlock, wrapping up a six-hour 45-minute excursion.

The first two ISS roll-out solar arrays, or iROSAs, were delivered to the lab complex aboard as SpaceX Dragon cargo ship on June 5. The astronauts originally planned to install them in a pair of spacewalks, but it took two outings, one on June 16 and another on June 20, to get the first new array installed.

That panel was mounted on a fixture at the base of an existing solar wing on the far left, port 6 segment of the station’s power truss. The P6 truss segment supports the lab’s two oldest wings, feeding electricity into two of the lab’s eight major power circuits: 2B and 4B.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rocket fires its engines for an on-pad test-firing Tuesday at Cape Canaveral. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now

SpaceX said Thursday it has postponed the next launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, previously scheduled for Friday at Cape Canaveral, due to unspecified technical concerns. The Falcon 9 will launch on a commercial rideshare mission with more than 80 small satellites.

In a tweet, SpaceX said its team would take “additional time for pre-launch check outs.” The company released no additional details, but added it will announce a new target launch date once it is confirmed.

Two customers with satellites on the mission said Monday was a tentative new target launch date for the mission, which SpaceX calls Transporter 2.

The Transporter 2 mission is SpaceX’s second dedicated small satellite rideshare mission, following the launch of the Transporter 1 mission in January. The Transporter 1 mission delivered 143 small satellites to a sun-synchronous polar orbit, while Transporter 2 is expected to carry around 88 spacecraft into a similar orbit.

The payloads include small satellites for the U.S. military, plus radar and optical Earth observation satellites for Satellogic and ICEYE, commercial remote sensing companies based in Argentina and Finland. There are also numerous CubeSats on-board the launch for U.S. and international operators.

The Launch Vehicle Stage Adapter is lowered on top of the Space Launch System core stage inside High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

NASA has stacked the next piece of the agency’s first Space Launch System moon rocket at the Kennedy Space Center, adding an adapter structure to connect the launch vehicle’s core stage and upper stage, which is scheduled to be installed next week.

Ground crews inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center connected the Launch Vehicle Stage Adapter, or LVSA, on top of the SLS core stage Tuesday inside High Bay 3 after lifting the structure across the VAB by crane.

The LVSA is the structural interface between the SLS core stage with the rocket’s Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or upper stage. The element was built at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, under the management of prime contractor Teledyne Brown Engineering.

The cone-shaped adapter has a height of about 30 feet, or 9 meters, and tapers from the top of the 27.6-foot-diameter (8.4-meter) core stage to the base of the 16.8-foot-diameter (5.1-meter) upper stage. The LVSA will also help protect the upper stage’s RL10 engine during the early minutes of the SLS launch, before the RL10 fires to send an Orion capsule on a trajectory toward the moon.

Before the stacking of the LVSA this week, ground teams mounted the 212-foot-tall (65-meter) Boeing-built SLS core stage between the rocket’s twin solid-fueled boosters. That milestone was completed June 13.