Q&A with Emiliano Kargieman, founder and CEO of Satellogic (members only)

The Perseverance rover’s sterilized sample tubes — designed to seal Martian rock and sediment for eventual return to Earth — are installed on the spacecraft as teams at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center prepare to enclose the rover inside the payload shroud of its Atlas 5 launcher for liftoff July 20.

With the Space Launch System’s inaugural test flight now officially delayed to November 2021, NASA says work halted by the coronavirus pandemic will resume within weeks to prepare for the first test-firing of the SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

A Long March 2D booster fired into space Sunday from a remote Chinese spaceport in the Gobi Desert, delivering a military spy satellite to a 400-mile-high perch in polar orbit.