Q&A with Michel Denis, ExoMars flight director

Kurt Eberly, who helps lead the Antares rocket program at Orbital ATK, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the launcher’s return-to-flight with newly-built engines later this year.

An Ariane 5 launcher uniquely modified to loft four of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites on one flight has received its payload for liftoff next week in French Guiana.

Persevering through a global pandemic, a last-minute earthquake, and the trials of a rocket launch, NASA’s next Mars rover — named Perseverance — took off from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet with sophisticated science instruments, technology to collect samples for to Earth, and the first interplanetary helicopter that could produce a “Wright Brothers moment” on another world.