Mission Reports
Live coverage: Falcon 9 lifts off with Dragon cargo capsule
After a launch attempt earlier in the week was scrubbed due to bad weather, SpaceX sent a Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station Saturday with nearly four tons of supplies and experiments. Liftoff on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center occurred at 2:20 p.m. EST (1920 GMT).
Live coverage: Orion capsule completes distant retrograde orbit insertion burn
Another major engine burn on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission placed the Orion spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon, where it will spend six days performing more tests and demonstrations before returning to Earth. The 88-second burn by Orion’s main engine occurred at 4:52 p.m. EST (2152 GMT) Friday.
Defying weather odds, SpaceX sends Eutelsat broadband platform into orbit
Despite a bleak weather forecast, SpaceX took advantage of a break in cloud cover over Cape Canaveral Tuesday night to launch a Falcon 9 rocket with the Eutelsat 10B satellite, a high-throughput relay platform to beam in-flight WiFi signals and maritime data services across a coverage zone from the North Atlantic to the Middle East. SpaceX did not attempt to recover the Falcon 9’s first stage booster.
NASA managers thrilled with initial results of Artemis moon mission
NASA’s unpiloted Orion moonship, sailing smoothly toward a remote lunar orbit after a spectacular low-altitude flyby Monday, is operating in near-flawless fashion, mission managers reported Monday, out-performing expectations on a flight needed to pave the way toward the first piloted mission in 2024.