Mission Reports – Page 244

Live coverage: Dragon supply ship arrives at space station

March 6, 2020 Stephen Clark

Wrapping up a two-day pursuit since launching from Cape Canaveral, a SpaceX Dragon supply ship arrived at the International Space Station Monday with more than two tons of cargo and experiments. The automated cargo freighter was captured by the station’s robotic arm at 6:25 a.m. EDT (1025 GMT).

Axiom strikes deal with SpaceX to ferry private astronauts to space station

March 5, 2020 Stephen Clark

Axiom Space, a Houston-based company with plans to develop a commercial outpost in space, announced Thursday it has signed a contract with SpaceX to ferry a professional astronaut and three paying passengers to the International Space Station as soon as next year on the first fully private human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit.

Seventh-grader wins contest to name new Mars rover: Perseverance

March 5, 2020 William Harwood

Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.

DSCOVR resumes operations after eight-month outage

March 5, 2020 Stephen Clark

The Deep Space Climate Observatory has resumed regular observations after NOAA and NASA engineers uplinked a software patch to the spacecraft a million miles from Earth, restoring data on space weather and a daily series views of the sunlit side of our home planet.

India postpones next GSLV flight

March 4, 2020 Stephen Clark

The planned liftoff Thursday of an Indian Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle with a geostationary Earth-imaging satellite has been postponed due to technical reasons, India’s space agency announced.

NASA taps SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch mission to metal asteroid

March 4, 2020 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch a robotic mission in July 2022 to explore Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche probe is NASA’s first mission assigned to fly on SpaceX’s heavy-lift launcher.

After last-minute abort, DARPA Launch Challenge ends without a winner

March 3, 2020 Stephen Clark

Astra engineers scrubbed a launch attempt Monday at Kodiak Island, Alaska, to assess troubling data from a guidance, navigation and control sensor on the company’s new small satellite launcher, ending a bid to win up to $12 million in prize money from a U.S. military research agency.

SpaceX test-fires rocket, preps for final flight of first-generation Dragon capsule

March 2, 2020 Stephen Clark

The Falcon 9 booster for SpaceX’s next mission fired up briefly on a Cape Canaveral launch pad Sunday in a routine pre-flight test before a scheduled launch Friday night to kick off the final flight of the first version of the company’s Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station.

Live coverage: Debut flight of Astra’s satellite launcher scrubbed

February 29, 2020 Stephen Clark

Astra was gearing up for the first orbital test flight of its small satellite launcher, named Rocket 3.0, from Alaska on Monday, but officials scrubbed the launch after detecting a problem with a guidance, navigation and control system in the final minute of the countdown. Poor weather at the launch site also prevented liftoff over the weekend on the first of two missions under the auspices of DARPA’s Launch Challenge.

Boeing says thorough testing would have caught Starliner software problems

February 28, 2020 Stephen Clark

The program manager in charge of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule program said Friday that additional checks would have uncovered problems with the spaceship’s software that plagued the craft’s first unpiloted orbital test flight in December, but he pushed back against suggestions that Boeing engineers took shortcuts during ground testing.