Video: Falcon 9 with Crew Dragon briefly ignites engines (members only)

Virgin Orbit completed a captive carry flight of its liquid-fueled air-launched rocket Sunday over the Pacific Ocean in what the company described as its final development test before the small satellite launcher’s first mission to space.

NASA’s $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has completed critical end-to-end testing in a giant vacuum chamber at the Johnson Space Center, proving the telescope will work properly in the deep cold of space, bring starlight to a sharp focus and precisely track its astronomical targets when launched in 2019.

Six months into its mission scanning the sky for planets around other stars, NASA’s orbiting TESS observatory has found three previously-undiscovered worlds and hundreds more exoplanet candidates, the first batch of a potential haul of up to 10,000 exoplanet detections over TESS’s planned two-year mission, astronomers announced this week.