Photos: Atlas 5 rolls out for launch

NASA expects to spend some $5 billion underwriting development of commercial spacecraft built by Boeing and SpaceX to carry astronauts to and from the space station, ending reliance on the Russians for crew flights and lowering the average cost per seat to around $58 million.

Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute leads the science team on NASA’s Juno mission, a robotic spacecraft now on final approach to Jupiter designed to probe the giant world’s deep interior and unravel how the solar system’s king planet formed.

The U.S. Space Force’s third new-generation GPS 3-series navigation satellite has arrived in Florida for final processing and fueling ahead of a launch currently targeted for April 29 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.