Flight controllers ordered two astronauts to terminate a spacewalk outside the International Space Station Friday after one of them reported a small amount of water leaking into his space helmet.
An unpiloted space plane developed by Sierra Nevada Corp. will join cargo carriers built by SpaceX and Orbital ATK to resupply the International Space Station beginning in 2019, NASA announced Thursday.
Two space station astronauts are gearing up for a planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk Friday to replace a presumably shorted out solar array voltage regulator that knocked one of the lab’s eight power channels out of action late last year.
Orbital ATK and SpaceX won Pentagon contracts worth a combined value of up to $241 million Wednesday in public-private partnerships crafted to hasten the U.S. military’s move away from Russian-supplied propulsion to deliver national security satellites to orbit.
NASA officials expect to officially kick off development in February of a multibillion-dollar observatory recycling a grounded top secret spy satellite telescope capable of studying dark energy and directly resolving planets around other stars.
The Jason 3 oceanography satellite, a joint project between U.S. and European weather agencies, is closed up inside the nose cone of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket awaiting launch from California’s Central Coast on Sunday.
Imagery from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, now in its closest orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres, reveal textures, landscapes and bright streaks possibly made of salts exposed by violent collisions with asteroids.
SpaceX’s launch team ran through a traditional preflight test Monday, putting a Falcon 9 rocket through a mock countdown, loading it with propellant and briefly firing its nine engines on a launch pad in California ahead of this weekend’s liftoff with a U.S.-European oceanography satellite.