Earl Maize, who leads the Cassini mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, started working on the Saturn orbiter project in 1992. In September, the spacecraft will take an intentional plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, gaining unprecedented up-close measurements and ending a 13-year odyssey round the ringed planet.
Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos revealed new details of his space company’s reusable orbital-class booster Tuesday, releasing an animation illustrating the rocket’s liftoff from Cape Canaveral and announcing a contract with Eutelsat to put a commercial communications satellite on one of the launcher’s first missions.
SpaceX is preparing for the next launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, set for blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the EchoStar 23 television broadcast satellite destined to cover Brazil. The rocket’s static fire test, a major milestone in any SpaceX launch campaign, was performed Thursday.
NASA has purchased two seats on Russian Soyuz capsules launching later this year and in early 2018 to expand the crew on the U.S. segment of the International Space Station from three to four, and reserved options to fly astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft in 2019 if commercial rides are not available in time.
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