Photos: Delta 4 awaits blastoff

NASA safety advisors on Thursday lauded hardware milestones on Boeing and SpaceX commercial crew capsules, but said multiple technical issues, including problems with parachutes, must be resolved before the human-rated ships are ready to carry astronauts, adding that both companies continue to pursue schedules that appear to be unachievable.

The most powerful variants of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets have been purchased by the Air Force to launch intelligence-gathering spacecraft for the U.S. government, and NASA has bought an Atlas 5 to deploy a critical polar-orbiting weather satellite.

The next pair of spacecraft to join Europe’s growing Galileo navigation system, a civilian-run analog to the U.S. military’s Global Positioning System, will be added to the tip of a Russian Soyuz booster overnight Monday after the rocket’s rollout earlier in the day in French Guiana.