Technicians around Cape Canaveral spent the last four weeks assembling a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and preparing a Lockheed Martin-built NOAA weather satellite for liftoff March 1.
SpaceX officials have postponed the launch of a Spanish-owned telecommunications satellite from Cape Canaveral planned for this weekend to conduct additional testing on the Falcon 9’s payload fairing pressurization system, the company announced Saturday.
A bad weather forecast has prompted Japanese space officials to delay the launch of an H-2A rocket with a high-resolution government-owned reconnaissance satellite by at least 48 hours until Monday night, U.S. time.
A bad input to the Ariane 5 rocket’s guidance system that was missed during pre-launch quality control checks caused the launcher to deviate from its expected flight path and place two commercial communications satellites in the wrong orbit Jan. 25, Arianespace announced Friday.
Launching with a Spanish radar observation craft and the first two experimental satellites for SpaceX’s planned global broadband network, a Falcon 9 rocket fired away from California’s Central Coast shortly before sunrise Thursday after several days of delays.
A Falcon 9 rocket booked to launch a commercial communications satellite for Hispasat, a Madrid-based telecom company, fired its nine main engines late Tuesday night at Cape Canaveral for a pre-flight hold-down test.
SpaceX crews at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California rolled out a Falcon 9 rocket and lifted it vertical atop its launch pad ahead of a planned blastoff Wednesday with a Spanish radar observation satellite and two test probes for a planned global broadband Internet network.
SpaceX is set to launch two prototype probes Wednesday to begin testing spacecraft and antenna technology the company hopes will eventually power a network of thousands of satellites blanketing planet Earth with broadband Internet coverage.
Follow the key events of the Falcon 9 rocket’s ascent to orbit with the Paz Earth observation payload for Hisdesat, operator of Spain’s governmental satellites.
In the final hours of its pioneering mission, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft opened its cameras to gaze down on Saturn, recording views of a nighttime cloudscape illuminated by sunlight reflected off countless tiny ice particles in the planet’s rings.