Mission Reports

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and five crewmates flew to the edge of space over New Mexico Sunday, riding the company’s VSS Unity rocketplane to an altitude of more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) after a high-altitude release from a carrier aircraft. The rocketplane safely landed back at Spaceport America.

China launched a fresh satellite for the country’s Tianlian data relay network July 6, reinforcing a fleet of spacecraft designed to connect ground controllers with the country’s space station.

Virgin Galactic-founder Richard Branson and five company crewmates are set to take a barnstorming ride to space Sunday in a bold show of confidence in his company’s readiness to start carrying passengers on brief trips out of the atmosphere.

Wrapping up a 36-day mission to the International Space Station, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico Friday night with biomedical experiments, spacewalk equipment, and other hardware returning from orbit.

After nearly two decades of overly optimistic forecasts, technical challenges, a tragic setback and a determined recovery, Richard Branson, the globe-trotting media mogul and founder of Virgin Galactic, plans to rocket into space Sunday, beating fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos to the punch by nine days.

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.