Q&A with Guglielmo Aglietti, RemoveDebris principal investigator (members only)

Ground crews at the Guiana Space Center in South America have spent the last few months preparing the BepiColombo spacecraft, a tandem mission with European and Japanese science orbiters bound for Mercury, for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.

A communications satellite built for the South Korean military arrived at Cape Canaveral this week from an Airbus factory in France to begin final preparations for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July.

A Soyuz-2.1b rocket lifted off at 0541 GMT (1:41 a.m. EDT) Thursday from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East, carrying a new Russian weather satellite and 32 secondary payloads into polar orbit.