Mission Reports

Two Chinese astronauts headed outside the country’s space station Saturday for the second-ever spacewalk in China’s space program, and the first staged from the new Tiangong complex in low Earth orbit.

A new Chinese Fengyun weather satellite launched Sunday and flew into an early morning polar orbit to feed data into global computer models, adding inputs that international weather officials said will improve medium and long-range forecasts.

China successfully launched five small remote sensing satellites on top of a Long March 2D rocket Saturday into an orbit more than 330 miles above Earth.

Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, will fly into space aboard his company’s VSS Unity rocketplane July 11 for an up-and-down test flight, beating Amazon-founder and rival Jeff Bezos into sub-orbital space by nine days.

Virgin Orbit’s air-launched rocket aced its first operational mission Wednesday, firing into orbit from the wing of a 747 carrier jet southwest of Los Angeles to deploy small satellites for the U.S. Army, Navy, the Missile Defense Agency, the Dutch military, and the Polish company SatRevolution.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer and one of the 13 female fliers who were tested but ultimately barred from NASA’s initially all-male astronaut corps, is finally getting her chance to fly in space, thanks to Jeff Bezos.