After the threat of lightning kept the mission on the ground Thursday, Arianespace and the European Space Agency successfully launched an Ariane 5 rocket Friday from Kourou, French Guiana, with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, a robotic spacecraft embarking on an eight-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet. Liftoff with ESA’s JUICE spacecraft occurred at 8:14 a.m. EDT (1214 UTC).
SpaceX continues to prepare for a launch attempt as soon as next week for the first test flight of its Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket, with final work on the ship’s self-destruct system, data reviews, and the receipt of an FAA license still to come before teams proceed into a countdown in South Texas.
SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy mission, set for April 18 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will launch a powerhouse bus-sized broadband satellite for Viasat into a high-altitude circular geostationary orbit, a demanding flight profile that will require disposal of all three of the rocket’s reusable boosters.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral shortly after midnight Friday with Intelsat 40e, a communications satellite destined to beam broadband internet signals to airplane and cruise ship passengers across North America while hosting a NASA instrument package to monitor air pollution.
Reid Wiseman, a veteran U.S. Navy test pilot and former chief of NASA’s astronaut corps, will lead the four-person crew assigned to the Artemis 2 mission to carry people to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Wiseman says he views the crew’s job as making sure NASA’s Orion spacecraft is ready for more demanding missions later this decade to support moon landings and assembly of a space station called the Gateway in lunar orbit.
© 1999-2026 Spaceflight Now Inc