Photos: Falcon takes flight

Axiom Space, a Houston-based company with plans to develop a commercial outpost in space, announced Thursday it has signed a contract with SpaceX to ferry a professional astronaut and three paying passengers to the International Space Station as soon as next year on the first fully private human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit.

NASA hopes to have a new leader for the agency’s human spaceflight directorate by the end of the year to replace Bill Gerstenmaier, who held the post for nearly 14 years before his reassignment in July amid the Trump administration’s push to land humans on the moon by 2024, a NASA official said Wednesday.

SpaceX is standing down from a launch attempt of the Starlink 6-34 mission onboard its Falcon 9 rocket. It comes less than a day after they had to scrub the launch at the T-1 minute mark due to strong, ground-level winds at Cape Canaveral.