William Harwood – Page 32 – Spaceflight Now

NASA, SpaceX clear Crew Dragon for critical March 2 test flight

February 23, 2019 William Harwood

NASA managers held a flight readiness review Friday and cleared SpaceX to press ahead with work to ready a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon commercial ferry ship for launch March 2 on an unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic stages second piloted spaceflight

February 22, 2019 William Harwood

Two test pilots and their instructor flew Virgin Galactic’s winged spaceplane out of the discernible atmosphere Friday for the second time in nine weeks, a successful sub-orbital flight that moves Richard Branson’s company one step closer to its goal of launching paying passengers and payloads on brief forays into the weightlessness of space.

First unpiloted test flight of SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule reset for March 2

February 6, 2019 William Harwood

As expected, NASA announced Wednesday that the first unpiloted test flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a Crew Dragon astronaut ferry ship has slipped from later this month to March 2. The first unpiloted flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is now targeted for the April timeframe.

JPL still trying to contact Opportunity rover on Mars

January 25, 2019 William Harwood

NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover landed on Mars 15 years ago this week, but the long-lived robot remains out of action in the wake of a global dust storm last summer that caused it to lose power. Engineers are still trying to contact the spacecraft, sending commands and listening for any sort of response, but hopes are fading, a senior manager said Friday.

Boe pulled from commercial crew test flight due to medical issue

January 22, 2019 William Harwood

Eric Boe, one of three astronauts assigned to the first piloted test flight of a Boeing CST-100 Starliner commercial crew ship later this year has been removed from the mission due to unspecified medical issues, NASA announced Tuesday. He will be replaced by veteran astronaut Mike Fincke.

SpaceX plans to lay off 10 percent of workforce

January 11, 2019 William Harwood

SpaceX, the upstart rocket company that has shaken up the launch industry with low-cost reusable boosters and ambitious long-range plans to carry people to Mars and beyond, plans to reduce its workforce by about 10 percent, company sources said late Friday.

New Horizons phones home, confirms successful flyby

January 1, 2019 William Harwood

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft raced past a frozen remnant of the solar system’s birth early New Year’s Day, phoned home to confirm a successful flyby and readied a treasure trove of pictures and other data for transmission back to eager scientists some 4.1 billion miles away.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft heads for New Year’s encounter with distant world

December 28, 2018 William Harwood

Three years and a billion miles past Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons probe is on the verge of at least one more pioneering, once-in-a-lifetime milestone: a New Year’s Day flyby of a small body known as 2014 MU69, unofficially dubbed Ultima Thule — “beyond the known world” — in a NASA naming contest.

Crew of three safely lands in Kazakhstan after 197-day space mission

December 20, 2018 William Harwood

A Russian cosmonaut, a German flight engineer and a NASA astronaut undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth overnight Wednesday, landing on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan to wrap up a six-month mission.

Station crew set for overnight landing in Kazakhstan

December 19, 2018 William Harwood

Eight days after a dramatic spacewalk to inspect the site of a leak in the hull of his Soyuz ferry ship, Russian commander Sergey Prokopyev, German flight engineer Alexander Gerst and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor geared up to depart the International Space Station Wednesday for a fiery plunge back to Earth.