Mission Reports

A crane at the Guiana Space Center in South America will hoist the nearly $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope more than 15 stories above the floor of a rocket assembly hangar this weekend to position the observatory on top of its Ariane 5 launcher for blastoff later this month.

Sixty years after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space, his oldest daughter plans to blast off Saturday on a sub-orbital flight of her own, joining former NFL star and TV host Michael Strahan, two entrepreneurs and a father-and-son duo aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft.

Two more BlackSky high-resolution optical remote sensing satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launcher into orbit Wednesday from New Zealand, the second mission for Rocket Lab in three weeks, and the third satellite delivery for BlackSky in the same period.

Two small BlackSky commercial remote sensing satellites launched aboard a Rocket Lab Electron booster at 7:02 p.m. EST Wednesday (0002 GMT Thursday) from New Zealand. Rocket Lab did not plan to recover the first stage of the Electron launch vehicle on this mission.

A forecast of high winds at Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas has prompted the company to delay its first suborbital space shot with a full complement of six passengers from Thursday to Saturday.