Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center tasked with overseeing launches of scientific satellites and interplanetary probes will be responsible later this year for ensuring six major missions safely get into space over a span of a little more than six months, beginning with the launch of NOAA’s new GOES-S weather observatory on an Atlas 5 rocket March 1.
The White House’s $19.9 billion NASA budget outline released Monday would continue development of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule and begin the deployment of a mini-space station around the moon as soon as 2022, but the proposal would cancel WFIRST, a flagship-class astronomy mission planned for launch in the mid-2020s.
The Trump administration is proposing to end direct government support of the International Space Station in 2025, but plans to include $150 million in NASA’s fiscal 2019 budget, to be unveiled Monday, to begin work on transitioning, if possible, to a more commercially focused outpost, according to an internal NASA review.
A Russian Soyuz booster and an automated Progress resupply ship reached their launch pad Friday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, two days before firing into orbit test out a new expedited rendezvous sequence that will culminate in the Progress spacecraft’s docking with the International Space Station just three-and-a-half hours after launch.
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