July 26, 1971: 45th anniversary of Apollo 15

Former astronaut Al Worden, who orbited the moon and performed the first spacewalk in deep space in 1971, died Wednesday in Texas. He was 88.

The latest prototype of SpaceX’s  Starship launch vehicle — Starship SN10 — took off from the company’s South Texas test site and flew to an altitude of more than 30,000 feet Wednesday, then descended to a controlled vertical landing after two previous test vehicles crashed at touchdown. Minutes later, the 16-story test rocket exploded in a fireball, but the test flight appeared to be a major step forward in the early stages of the Starship program.

A Soyuz rocket lifted off Sunday from Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East with 36 internet satellites built on Florida’s Space Coast for OneWeb, bringing the company’s fleet to 182 spacecraft, more than a quarter of the way to building out a constellation of nearly 650 orbiting relay nodes.