Ground teams will try to stabilize the motion of NASA’s small CAPSTONE scouting satellite and rescue the $30 million mission on the way to the moon, following a problem Sept. 8 that sent the spacecraft into a tumble and caused controllers to temporarily lose contact with the probe, officials said Monday.
The suborbital rocket developed by Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin suffered its first launch failure Monday, when the main engine on the New Shepard booster appeared to cut out about a minute after liftoff from West Texas. The crew capsule, which carried NASA-funded experiments but no people, safely landed under parachutes after firing an abort motor to escape the stricken booster.
Firefly Aerospace scrubbed a launch attempt Monday for its second Alpha rocket due to high winds at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company called off an earlier launch attempt Sunday to examine a drop in helium supply pressure on the second stage. The next try to launch the Alpha rocket will be no earlier than Sept. 19.
These photos show Firefly Aerospace’s second Alpha rocket as it was raised on its launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sept. 10, and again on Sept. 12 after the first launch attempt for the mission. Photographers captured these views as Firefly prepared the rocket for a planned test flight carrying seven small satellites into orbit.
A reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 booster completed its record-breaking 14th flight to space after blastoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Saturday night. The mission was billed as one of SpaceX’s complex launches to date, deploying 34 Starlink internet spacecraft and a testbed satellite for AST SpaceMobile’s space-based cellular broadband network into two different orbits.
NASA officials said Thursday they hope to try again to launch the Artemis 1 moon rocket from the Kennedy Space Center as soon as Sept. 23 or 27, but that schedule comes with two big caveats: A repair to a leaky liquid hydrogen fueling line must hold tight during a tanking test next weekend, and the Space Force’s Eastern Range has to extend the certification of batteries on the moon rocket’s flight safety system.
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