Proton lifts off with Inmarsat broadband satellite
A Russian Proton rocket launched Sunday with a spacecraft to kick off Inmarsat's $1.6 billion initiative to expand access to high-speed broadband satellite communications services. Launch occurred at 1212 GMT (7:12 a.m. EST) to begin a more than 15-hour mission to deliver the 6.7-ton craft into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit.
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IMAGES: PROTON ROLLOUT
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Classified spy satellite launches on Atlas 5 rocket
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off Friday carrying a classified payload into orbit for the U.S. government's spy satellite agency on Thursday night. Liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base occurred at 11:14:30 p.m. PST Thursday (0714:30 GMT; 2:14:30 a.m. EST Friday).
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IMAGES: PAD GANTRY RETRACTED FOR LAUNCH
IMAGES: ATLAS 5 POISED FOR LAUNCH
IMAGES: PAYLOAD MATED TO ROCKET
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Chinese probe arrives in lunar orbit for moon landing
Less than five days after leaving Earth atop a blazing Long March launcher, China's Chang'e 3 spacecraft reached lunar orbit Friday to prepare for an historic rocket-assisted touchdown in the moon's Bay of Rainbows later this month.
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Falcon 9 launches first commercial telecom payload
A kerosene-fueled Falcon 9 launch vehicle owned and operated by SpaceX climbed away from Florida's Space Coast on Tuesday, steering into orbit more than 50,000 miles above Earth with a television broadcasting satellite in a successful flight signaling the changing landscape of the commercial launch industry.
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IMAGES: SES 8 PREPARED FOR LAUNCH
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X-ray telescope, gravity wave probe to be led by ESA
The European Space Agency has decided its next two big science missions, each costing more than $1.3 billion, will be a massive X-ray telescope and a long-proposed observatory to confirm the existence of gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
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Remembering NASA's rescue of Hubble
One of the most daunting yet crucial space shuttle missions launched Dec. 2, 1993, as the crew of Endeavour embarked on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The observatory had been launched three-and-a-half years earlier with a crippling vision flaw, requiring teams of spacewalkers to install corrective optics.
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GPM satellite delivered to Japan after shutdown delay
An international satellite built to extend and expand precipitation measurements from space has arrived at its Japanese launch site after a trans-Pacific flight from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
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Long March rocket blasts off with Chinese lunar rover
A six-wheeled robotic rover named Yutu rode a Long March rocket into space Sunday on China's first lunar landing mission, marking an auspicious start to a four-day journey to the moon.
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IMAGES: CHANG'E 3 ROVER LIFTS OFF
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Rocket burn puts Indian probe on course to Mars
India's first robotic Mars probe set sail for the red planet Saturday with a vital rocket burn to catapult the spacecraft out of the realm of Earth's gravity and into interplanetary space.
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Engine trouble aborts Thanksgiving launch
Topped with a television broadcasting satellite, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket fired its engines and was moments away from liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, but the commercial booster aborted the launch after computers detected the engines were too slow building up thrust.
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Bearing holiday gifts, Progress arrives at station
International Space Station commander Oleg Kotov took over manual control of an approaching Progress supply ship Friday after an undisclosed problem and deftly guided the craft in for a smooth docking at the aft end of the Russian Zvezda command module to wrap up a four-day rendezvous.
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Scientists not sure what happened to Comet ISON
After a multi-million-year plunge from the frozen fringes of the solar system, Comet ISON may have broken apart and evaporated in the fierce heat and crushing gravity of the sun before or during a close flyby Thursday, presumably scotching long-held hopes for a dramatic sky show on Earth over the next few weeks. Or maybe not.
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Chinese moon lander on the verge of launch
China has scheduled the launch of an ambitious robotic lunar rover as soon as Sunday on a quest to achieve the first soft landing on the moon in more than three decades.
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Holiday travelers trump SpaceX launch plans
Concerned a rocket launch might add more congestion to the skies during Thanksgiving week, federal regulators blocked SpaceX's bid to launch a commercial broadcasting satellite Tuesday and Wednesday, two of the busiest travel days of the year.
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Air Force welcomes new craft into warning network
A next-generation missile detection satellite launched in March has been accepted into the U.S. military's early warning network after a seven-month checkout period, the Air Force announced Tuesday.
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Falcon 9 rocket launch scrubbed until Thanksgiving
SpaceX called off launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with a commercial telecommunications satellite Monday after several technical problems held up the countdown, delaying the flight until Thanksgiving Day.
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Progress dispatched on space station cargo run
A Russian Progress logistics craft, filled with 2.9 tons of supplies and sporting upgrades to its automated rendezvous radar, blasted off from the Kazakh desert Monday en route to the International Space Station.
IMAGES: PROGRESS LIFTS OFF FROM BAIKONUR
IMAGES: SOYUZ ROLLS OUT WITH PROGRESS
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Long March puts experimental craft in orbit
China launched an experimental satellite Monday for technological demonstrations and environmental surveys, according to official state media reports.
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Sizing up America's place in the global launch industry
The launch of a high-definition television broadcasting satellite by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket Monday will mark the first commercial communications craft to take off from the United States in four years, a gap representative of America's diminished place in the commercial launch market as more affordable Russian and European boosters gobbled up contracts.
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Swarm satellites blast off to explore magnetic field
A swarm of three European magnetic field research satellites rocketed into orbit Friday from a wintry launch pad in northern Russia, kicking off a four-year mission to catalog the sources behind Earth's shield against radiation and solar storms.
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VIDEO: SWARM LAUNCHES IN FREEZING FOG
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Falcon engine restart glitch blamed on cold conditions
SpaceX says frozen fluid lines prevented the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage engine from re-igniting on a Sept. 29 test flight, but engineers are confident extra insulation will resolve the thermal problem on the Falcon 9's next mission set for liftoff Monday on the company's first launch to geostationary transfer orbit.
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Rover engineers studying 'soft short' on Curiosity
Science observations by the Curiosity Mars rover are on hold pending tests to pin down the cause of an unexpected voltage change that was detected last Sunday, NASA said in a status report Wednesday. There is no evidence the anomaly is related to a computer reboot earlier this month that triggered protective "safe mode" software.
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Silo-launched Dnepr rocket lofts 32 satellites
A Soviet-era ballistic missile shot out of an underground silo in southern Russia and rocketed into orbit Thursday with 32 satellites for students, corporations and government agencies from 18 countries on five continents.
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VIDEO: DNEPR LAUNCHES OUT OF MISSILE SILO
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Student-built satellites, military payloads launched
Crowned with a record-setting horde of 29 satellites, a Minotaur 1 rocket bounded into space from Virginia on Tuesday night and put on an evening sky show before releasing the medley of spacecraft more than 300 miles above Earth.
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IMAGES: MINOTAUR DAZZLES EAST COAST
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Chinese military satellite launched into orbit
A Long March rocket shot a Chinese intelligence-gathering satellite into orbit Wednesday. Analysts believe the spacecraft carries a high-resolution optical camera.
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NASA ends production of new nuclear power source
NASA has decided to stop development of an improved lightweight plutonium power generator, blaming budget constraints and a diminished need for a high-efficiency nuclear power source with the restart of U.S. plutonium production, officials said Sunday.
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One-on-one with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden spoke with Spaceflight Now about the MAVEN mission to Mars, the agency's budget woes and his impressions of the first Orion capsule.
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Mars atmospheric probe blasts off aboard Atlas 5
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket dispatched a $671 million gas-sniffing sleuth to Mars on Monday, taking the first step in a long-distance voyage across the solar system to survey the Martian atmosphere and decipher an enigma nearly as old as the solar system itself.
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IMAGES: ATLAS 5 AT SUNSET
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Thrift pays for extra science by NASA's MAVEN mission
Citing cost-conscious caution in the early days of the development of NASA's MAVEN mission, scientists say the Mars mission has enough funding reserves to bankroll extra researchers on the MAVEN science team and enhance data analysis models to get the most out of the spacecraft's survey of the Martian atmosphere.
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Ames to pitch NASA on 'new' Kepler mission
Managers in charge of the Kepler telescope have identified a way of salvaging the crippled observatory for a modified, less-sensitive cosmic survey for alien worlds, but NASA may not have the money to pay for the mission.
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Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, flew 25 years ago
The Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle took off Nov. 15, 1988, on an unmanned twice-around-the-world test flight that marked the pinnacle of Cold War space development behind the Iron Curtain, and its legacy still powers space programs worldwide.
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JPSS reviewers push for gap-filler weather satellite
An independent review board impaneled to scrutinize NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System says a new polar-orbiting spacecraft with bare-bones meteorological instruments should be developed to prevent a dangerous gap in critical forecasting data.
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Curiosity driving again after bungled software upgrade
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is hitting the road again Thursday, setting its sights on arriving at the base of a 3.4-mile-high Martian mountain next spring after recovering from a software fault that halted science observations for nearly a week.
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Next Ariane launch delayed to January by satellite issue
Continuing a string of payload delays that have plagued Arianespace's launch manifest in recent months, the French commercial launch provider announced Wednesday its final Ariane 5 flight of the year has been stalled to conduct additional checks on one of its satellite passengers.
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Russian military probing fatal accident at Plesetsk
Two military officers died last week while cleaning out a propellant storage tank at northern Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome, the Russian Defense Ministry announced Tuesday.
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Cassini mosaic shows views of Earth, Mars and Venus
A spectacular panorama of the ringed planet Saturn, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it flew through the planet's shadow July 19, was unveiled Tuesday, showing Earth and its two sister planets, Mars and Venus as star-like points of light nearly a billion miles away.
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Minotaur launch from Virginia one week away
Working on an austere launch pad in Virginia, technicians have constructed a 69-foot-tall rocket out of stockpiled government-furnished missile stages and commercial hardware for launch Nov. 19 with a record payload of 29 satellites.
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Indian Mars mission weathers first snag
A week into its mission, India's Mars probe overcame a bout of engine trouble Monday with an unplanned maneuver to boost its orbit after a rocket firing failed to do its job Sunday.
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Proton rocket lifts off with Russian military payload
A Russian military communications satellite took a nine-hour ride to orbit overnight Monday after a smooth liftoff aboard a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The payload was delivered to a 22,300-mile-high orbit by the launcher's Breeze M upper stage.
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VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY
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ESA trusts fixes to Swarm's Russian-built launcher
Going into the Nov. 22 launch of the European Space Agency's $300 million Swarm mission, which promises to collect exquisite data on Earth's magnetic field, European officials say they trust Russian authorities have done all they can to ensure Swarm's Rockot launch vehicle and Breeze upper stage are not afflicted with the problems that have caused a series of launch failures in recent years.
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GOCE's re-entry pinpointed with help from Twitter
With a tip from social media and armed with data from a suite of radar and optical tracking sensors, the European Space Agency confirmed Monday its GOCE research satellite fell through the atmosphere and broke apart Sunday night over the South Atlantic Ocean near the Falkland Islands.
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Soyuz returns home, completing torch relay
Three station fliers strapped into their Soyuz TMA-09M ferry craft, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth Sunday, settling to a jarring rocket-assisted landing on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 166-day stay in space.
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Running on empty, GOCE satellite falls back to Earth
A European research satellite fell back to Earth late Sunday, breaking up from destructive aerodynamic forces as it streaked through the upper atmosphere, but the exact location of the spacecraft's fall from orbit has not been pinpointed.
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GOCE RE-ENTRY POSED LITTLE RISK
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Olympic torch handed off in spacewalk photo op
The Olympic torch relay leading to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, chalked up a space first Saturday, with two cosmonauts staging a symbolic handoff, passing the torch back and forth while posing for publicity shots during a nearly six-hour spacewalk.
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MAVEN affixed to Atlas 5 rocket for Nov. 18 launch
NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, the centerpiece of a $671 million mission to study the atmosphere of Mars, reached its penultimate stop before liftoff when technicians transported the delicate probe to the Atlas 5 rocket's seaside launch complex Friday.
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IMAGES: PAYLOAD HOISTED ATOP ATLAS 5
IMAGES: MAVEN ENCAPSULATED IN FAIRING
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Three-man station crew lifts off carrying Olympic torch
A Russian Soyuz booster roared to life late Wednesday and rocketed away from Kazakhstan carrying a crew of three and an Olympic torch bound for the International Space Station, the centerpiece of an out-of-this-world photo op to herald the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. The three-man crew docked with the space station Thursday after a quick six-hour pursuit.
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IMAGES: SOYUZ LAUNCH
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Astronauts catch glimpse of cargo craft's re-entry
The European Space Agency's fourth automated resupply spacecraft, packed with several tons of the International Space Station's garbage, dipped back into Earth's atmosphere over the weekend and disintegrated in a spectacular fireball caught in pictures taken by astronauts living on the orbiting complex.
IMAGES: ATV'S FINAL PLUNGE
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Indian spacecraft soars on historic journey to Mars
India's workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle blasted off Tuesday with the country's first Mars mission, a low-budget project marking India's foray into an elite club of space powers.
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IMAGES: LAUNCH PHOTOS
IMAGES: PSLV PREPARED FOR LAUNCH
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Kepler finds Earth-size planets commonplace
Showing stars with planets are the rule rather than the exception, data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope indicates one in five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy likely hosts an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone where life as it is known on Earth can, in theory, exist, scientists announced Monday.
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GOCE gravity-mapping satellite falling from orbit
A sleek European satellite is coming back to Earth after depleting its supply of xenon propellant last month, and European Space Agency controllers say an uptick in solar activity could hasten the spacecraft's fiery fall from orbit.
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Fourth ATV mission ends in fireball over Pacific Ocean
Five days after ending its mission at the International Space Station, a European logistics carrier plummeted back to Earth over the remote South Pacific Ocean on Saturday, disposing of nearly 2.4 tons of trash and liquid waste in a stream of glowing plasma visible from the orbiting complex.
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Soyuz switches ports on International Space Station
Three space station crew members put on spacesuits and boarded their Soyuz spacecraft Friday for a short trip to relocate the capsule to a new docking port on the orbiting outpost, clearing the way for the arrival of three new residents next week.
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Read our archive for past news.
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This commemorative patch celebrates NASA's Curiosity rover mission of the Mars Science Laboratory in search of clues whether the Red Planet was once hospitable to life.
The historic first orbital flight by an American is marked by this commemorative patch for John Glenn and Friendship 7.
The crew emblem for the final space shuttle mission is available in our store. Get this piece of history!
This special commemorative patch marks the retirement of NASA's Space Shuttle Program. Available in our store!
This embroidered patch commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Program. The design features the space shuttle Columbia's historic maiden flight of April 12, 1981.
The official patches from Apollo 1, the shuttle Challenger and Columbia crews are available in the store.
This beautiful one piece set features the Apollo program emblem surrounded by the individual mission logos.
