Q&A with George Ricker, principal investigator for the TESS mission (members only)

NASA has released new target dates for test flights of commercial crew capsules in development by SpaceX and Boeing, with unpiloted demo missions by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spaceships now scheduled for January and March, followed by crewed orbital missions in mid-2019.

The mission was the 25th flight of the Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number 1071. The Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 1:10 p.m. PDT (4:10 p.m. EDT, 2010 UTC).

SpaceX raised a Falcon 9 rocket vertical Tuesday on pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, positioning the launch vehicle for a flight Wednesday carrying 57 more Starlink Internet satellites and two commercial Earth-imaging microsatellites for BlackSky.