Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

The second set of Iridium’s next-generation satellites to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were prepared for liftoff inside a climate-controlled clean room at Vandenberg Air Force Base over the last few weeks.

Two months after its foggy blastoff from California on a Falcon 9 rocket, a $364 million oceanography satellite has returned the first data from its radar altimeter mapping global sea levels, catching this year’s ongoing El Niño in the act.

Mission managers will be closely monitoring the weather for the first launch of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, not just around the Kennedy Space Center, but along a corridor stretching thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean in case the crew capsule has to escape from its Falcon 9 rocket during the climb into orbit.