Video: Falcon 9 test-fired before space station cargo launch (members only)

Bulking up NASA’s constellation of tracking stations in the sky that provides critical links between orbiting spacecraft and ground control, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket successfully deployed a new communications hub in space today.

In the first official weather outlook the planned launch this week of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, meteorologists predict an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions to allow liftoff of an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Thursday.

Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander geared up for launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Saturday on a six-hour flight to the International Space Station.