Mission Reports

The first test flight of ABL Space Systems’ new small satellite launcher from Alaska has been delayed until no earlier than December after technical issues cut short three launch attempts in the last week.

NASA’s unpiloted Orion spacecraft fired its main engine for two-and-a-half minutes Monday just before the capsule soared 81 miles from the surface of the moon, completing a flyby maneuver to bend its trajectory toward a distant orbit for more testing ahead of future lunar missions with astronauts.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a remote galaxy shining just 350 million years after the birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, surprising astronomers who are struggling to figure out how stars and galaxies could have formed so rapidly in the wake of the Big Bang, researchers said Thursday.

NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket relied on advanced guidance algorithms, powerful cryogenic engines, and millions of lines of software code to get it off the ground for the first time Wednesday. But “there are also times when you’ve just got to put a wrench on a nut,” NASA’s Artemis ground systems program manager said. That’s what NASA did in final hours of the Artemis 1 mission’s countdown late Tuesday night, when the launch team called upon a “red crew” of two technicians and a safety engineer to tighten nuts around a leaky hydrogen valve.