Video: Animation of Vulcan launch

Among the 21 missions set to be ordered in the fifth year of Phase 2 task orders, only eight are anticipated to be ordered under a continuing resolution.

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.

NASA’s last space shuttle commander — former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Chris Ferguson — will fly Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule on its first piloted test mission to the International Space Station next year.