Live coverage: Kennedy Space Center to reopen Friday

Spaceflight Now visited the CYGNSS production facility at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and the Pegasus XL rocket’s carrier plane at Cape Canaveral for rare looks at hardware that make NASA’s $157 million hurricane research mission possible.

The mission represents the fifth pair of Boeing-built O3b mPOWER satellites to launch into medium Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday, July 22, at 5:12 p.m. EDT (2112 UTC).

An impromptu repair job Thursday appears to have stopped a leak in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station, and the crew was back on its normal schedule Friday carrying out research and making preparations for the arrival of a Japanese cargo ship next month.