Premium video content for our Spaceflight Now Plus subscribers. Launch of New Horizons The New Horizons spacecraft begins a voyage across the solar system to explore Pluto and beyond with its successful launch January 19 aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Full coverage Stardust comes home NASA's Stardust spacecraft returns samples of cometary dust to Earth with its safe landing in Utah on January 15. Full coverage NASA administrator NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and his deputy Shana Dale hold a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in the final hours of the countdown to the New Horizons launch. Questions from reporters ranged from the Pluto-bound mission, the agency's budget and the space shuttle program. Dialup | Broadband | iPod STS-32: LDEF retrieval Space shuttle Columbia's mission in January 1990 sought to retrieve the Long Duration Exposure Facility -- a bus-size platform loaded with 57 experiments -- that had been put into orbit six years earlier. LDEF was supposed to be picked up within a year of its launch. But plans changed and then the Challenger accident occurred. Columbia's STS-32 crew got into space, deployed a Navy communications satellite, then fulfilled their LDEF recovery mission, carried out a host of medical tests and returned to Earth with a nighttime touchdown in the California desert. The crew presents this post-flight film of mission highlights. Small | Medium | Large NASA through the decades This film looks at the highlights in NASA's history from its creation in the 1950s, through the glory days of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, birth of the space shuttle and the loss of Challenger, launch of Hubble and much more. Small | Medium | Large STS-49: Satellite rescue If at first you don't succeed, keep on trying. That is what the astronauts of space shuttle Endeavour's maiden voyage did in their difficult job of rescuing a wayward communications satellite. Spacewalkers were unable to retrieve the Intelsat 603 spacecraft, which had been stranded in a useless orbit, during multiple attempts using a special capture bar. So the crew changed course and staged the first-ever three-man spacewalk to grab the satellite by hand. The STS-49 astronauts describe the mission and narrate highlights in this post-flight presentation. Small | Medium | Large Become a subscriber More video
H-2A launch photo gallery
Posted: January 24, 2006
Video cameras mounted on the Japanese H-2A rocket show the solid-fuel boosters separating two minutes into the flight. The bottom image from the second stage camera facing upward shows the Advanced Land Observation Satellite being deployed.