Space Station
Fire returns to flame trench at Apollo-era launch pad in Florida
Nine Merlin engines ignited and throttled up to nearly 2 million pounds of thrust Sunday during a brief hold-down firing of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, sending a plume of smoke out of the flame trench at Kennedy Space Center’s historic launch pad 39A as the company preps for a space station cargo mission next weekend.
Video: Soyuz rocket blasts off with German-made, Spanish-owned satellite
Watch a video replay of Friday night’s blastoff of a Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Center with Hispasat 36W-1, a communications satellite developed by OHB in Germany for Spain’s Hispasat to test out new telecom technologies and provide data networking, video and broadband services over South America and Europe.
Japanese cargo craft departs space station
Japan’s sixth HTV supply ship departed the International Space Station on Friday and headed for a destructive re-entry over the South Pacific with trash and disused batteries from the research lab, but engineers will first use the spacecraft for a pioneering experiment to investigate a new way to remove space junk from orbit.