John Grunsfeld speaks about Orion’s science goals

A push to give NASA’s Space Launch System a new name is garnering support from lawmakers, who have written into legislation provisions that would order NASA to rename the heavy-lift rocket through a competition among schoolchildren.

A record number of would-be space travelers have applied to join NASA’s corps of astronauts to fly aboard the International Space Station, the Orion crew capsule, or commercial spaceships built by Boeing and SpaceX, the space agency announced Friday.

On its second flight, SpaceX’s mammoth Falcon Heavy rocket hurled an Arabsat communications satellite the size of a school bus nearly one-quarter the way to the moon Thursday, days after NASA’s administrator identified the privately-developed rocket as a backup to the agency’s behind-schedule Space Launch System for sending astronauts back to the lunar surface.