Astronauts will not fly to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship until at least May 2018, NASA said this week, missing a previous target launch date at the end of next year.
Four days after a picture-perfect blastoff from southern Japan, a cargo-carrying supply freighter arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday with 4.5 tons of equipment, food, clothing and experiments.
In preparation for liftoff Dec. 18 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, the powerful Internet-from-space broadcasting satellite called EchoStar 19 was encapsulated in the nose cone.
Trouble with a hydraulic pump needed to release Orbital ATK’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket from its carrier jet Monday has delayed the deployment of eight NASA hurricane research satellites until at least Wednesday.
Orbital ATK’s Pegasus XL rocket will take about eight minutes to reach orbit with NASA’s eight CYGNSS weather research microsatellites, then comes deployment of the spacecraft more than 300 miles above Earth.
An Orbital ATK Pegasus XL rocket carrying eight hurricane research satellites for NASA fired into orbit Thursday at 8:37 a.m. EST (1337 GMT) off the east coast of Florida.
The first satellite in an upgraded series of Chinese geostationary weather observatories lifted off on top of a Long March 3B rocket Saturday to demonstrate the performance of new spacecraft systems and instrumentation.
Take a look around the L-1011 jetliner, Pegasus rocket, and ground support gear at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Skid Strip for Monday’s scheduled launch of eight microsatellites to listen for winds inside hurricanes.
Spaceflight Now visited the CYGNSS production facility at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and the Pegasus XL rocket’s carrier plane at Cape Canaveral for rare looks at hardware that make NASA’s $157 million hurricane research mission possible.
This is the pre-launch news conference for NASA’s CYGNSS hurricane research mission featuring a constellation of eight microsats launching Dec. 12 aboard an Orbital ATK Pegasus XL rocket off the Florida coast.