Commercial Space – Page 3 – Spaceflight Now

Live coverage: Arianespace launches Vega rocket from French Guiana

April 28, 2021

After two of the last three Vega rocket launches ended in failure, Arianespace launched another Vega launcher from French Guiana at 9:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0150 GMT Thursday) with Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 3 commercial Earth observation satellite and five secondary payloads.

Vega rocket’s return-to-flight launch set for Wednesday night

April 28, 2021

Six satellites are set to ride a light-class European Vega rocket into orbit from French Guiana on Wednesday night, the first Vega launch since a failure last year that officials attributed to human error.

Live coverage: SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink satellites

April 28, 2021

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:44 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0344 GMT Thursday) from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with the next 60 Starlink internet satellites. The Falcon 9’s first stage booster landed on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean nearly nine minutes after launch, completing its seventh trip to space and back.

SpaceX to resume Starlink flights, stretching reused Falcon rockets to their limits

April 27, 2021

SpaceX aims to resume launching satellites for its Starlink internet network with the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday night at Cape Canaveral, and company founder Elon Musk says SpaceX will use the sizeable backlog of Starlink missions to keep pushing the envelope and find the Falcon booster’s reuse life limit.

Return of SpaceX crew capsule delayed by high winds

April 26, 2021

High winds predicted off the coast of Florida this week will keep SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and its four-person crew in orbit until Saturday, three days after their previously scheduled return to Earth from the International Space Station.

OneWeb adds 36 more satellites to internet network

April 26, 2021

A Soyuz rocket lifted off Sunday from Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East with 36 internet satellites built on Florida’s Space Coast for OneWeb, bringing the company’s fleet to 182 spacecraft, more than a quarter of the way to building out a constellation of nearly 650 orbiting relay nodes.

Live coverage: Soyuz lifts off from Vostochny Cosmodrome

April 25, 2021

The next batch of 36 OneWeb internet satellites lifted off at 6:14 p.m. EDT (2214 GMT) from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. The Florida-built broadband satellites rode into orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket procured under a contract with Arianespace.

Soyuz rocket set to launch more OneWeb internet satellites

April 24, 2021

A Soyuz rocket is standing on a launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East for liftoff Sunday with the next 36 satellites for OneWeb’s internet network, the sixth Soyuz mission dedicated to the commercial broadband constellation.

With SpaceX crew docking, it’s a full house on the International Space Station

April 24, 2021

A refurbished SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship linked up with the International Space Station early Saturday more than 260 miles above Earth, delivering four veteran astronauts to the orbiting research complex and temporarily raising the lab’s crew complement to 11.

SpaceX launches astronauts on recycled capsule and ‘flight-proven’ rocket

April 23, 2021

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ferried a multinational crew into orbit at the break of dawn Friday with a spectacular sky-lighting launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, dazzling early risers along the East Coast with a flawless start to a planned six-month expedition on the International Space Station.