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168 articles
SpaceX files protest of NASA’s Lucy launch contract awarded to ULA
SpaceX has filed a protest challenging a nearly $150 million NASA contract awarded to United Launch Alliance last month to send a robotic asteroid probe into space.
Rideshare mission for U.S. military confirmed as second Falcon Heavy launch
More than two dozen satellites from the U.S. military, NASA and research institutions will ride into orbit on SpaceX's second Falcon Heavy rocket launch, a mission currently scheduled for liftoff in June, a military spokesperson said.
Atlas 5 launch on track for Thursday, SpaceX mission expected to slip
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is set to roll to its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral, a day before liftoff with a new-generation NOAA weather satellite. The launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a Spanish communications satellite is expected to be shuffled after the Atlas 5 flight in a rapid-fire launch sequence at the Florida spaceport this week.
NASA gears up for brisk launch pace, starting with weather satellite
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.
SpaceX informed NASA of slowdown in its commercial Mars program
Confirming rumors and suspicions that SpaceX is adjusting its plans to begin dispatching robotic landers to Mars, NASA officials said the commercial space company has informed the agency that it has put its Red Dragon program on the back burner.
NASA to have limited role in SpaceX’s planned Mars campaign
Expertise, input and advice from seasoned NASA engineers will improve SpaceX's chances of nailing the first commercial landing on Mars as soon as late 2018, a senior space agency official said Wednesday, but Elon Musk's space transport company will likely seek more independence from U.S. government support on later expeditions to the red planet.
NASA spells out support for SpaceX’s Red Dragon Mars mission
If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.
SpaceX announces plan to send mission to Mars in 2018
Elon Musk's space transport company -- chartered with a long-term goal of colonizing Mars -- plans to send the first commercial mission to the red planet as soon as 2018, SpaceX announced Wednesday.
Jason 3 satellite begins surveying world’s oceans
Two months after its foggy blastoff from California on a Falcon 9 rocket, a $364 million oceanography satellite has returned the first data from its radar altimeter mapping global sea levels, catching this year's ongoing El Niño in the act.
Satellite launched to measure motions of the oceans
A new satellite built to extend a 24-year series of joint U.S.-European ocean observatories climbed away from a foggy California launch pad and sailed into orbit more than 800 miles above Earth on Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.