Check out photos of a picturesque sunset at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad, where a Falcon 9 rocket is poised for liftoff with a commercial broadcasting satellite for Luxembourg-based SES.
Touching down after 340 days in orbit, astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have returned to Earth from the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz crew capsule commanded by Sergey Volkov. Landing in Kazakhstan occurred at 0426 GMT Wednesday (11:26 p.m. EST Tuesday).
Stymied by Russian government dithering that has indefinitely grounded a launch on a modified Soviet-era missile, Iridium officials say that SpaceX agreed to move up to July the first of seven Falcon 9 launches from California with the company’s next-generation mobile communications satellites.
Kurt Eberly, who helps lead the Antares rocket program at Orbital ATK, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the launcher’s return-to-flight with newly-built engines later this year.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is awaiting liftoff from Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad as soon as Tuesday after three scrubs caused by propellant loading problems and a boat that strayed into restricted waters in the Atlantic Ocean.
A commercial communications satellite stayed on Earth after a last-second launch abort Sunday, the third time in five days that SpaceX has scrubbed the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.
The Canadian telecom satellite operator Telesat plans to launch two multipurpose communications spacecraft aboard SpaceX Falcon rockets in 2018, the company disclosed this week in a quarterly earnings announcement.
SpaceX kept an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket on the ground Thursday after running into a problem loading super-cold liquid propellants into the launcher’s fuel tanks, postponing blastoff of a commercial communications satellite for the second day in a row.
Arianespace will fit in a bonus launch of a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in May to deliver two more European Galileo navigation satellites to orbit, giving the French launch services firm 12 missions on its 2016 manifest, officials said Thursday.
SpaceX called off the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday to make sure the booster’s supply of super-chilled cryogenic liquid oxygen is cold enough to support the delivery of the 5.8-ton SES 9 commercial communications satellite to an orbit nearly 25,000 miles above Earth.