Live coverage: Atlas 5 countdown and launch journal

Dante Lauretta, a researcher based at the University of Arizona, leads the science team on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission scheduled for launch Sept. 8 on a round-trip journey to asteroid Bennu.

On the eve of the Iridium’s fifth launch with SpaceX, the mobile telecom satellite operator’s chief executive says he no longer waits for SpaceX’s rockets to be ready. Instead, Iridium’s satellite team is racing to keep pace churning spacecraft off their assembly line.

A new weather observatory that will track storms across the globe as it orbits from pole to pole has been trucked to its launch site in California for a long-awaited ascent into space this November.