Making its first flight, a privately-funded air-launched rocket developed and built by Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit failed to reach space Monday after release from the company’s modified 747 carrier airplane over the Pacific Ocean.
Virgin Orbit is setting modest expectations ahead of the company’s first attempt to reach orbit with a liquid-fueled air-launched rocket, emphasizing a hunger for flight data on the test launch, which could occur as soon as Monday off the coast of Southern California.
The first orbital test flight of Virgin Orbit’s privately-developed air-launched rocket is scheduled as soon as Sunday off the coast of Southern California, the company said Wednesday.
A Cygnus supply ship built by Northrop Grumman departed the International Space Station Monday, beginning an extended mission in orbit to deploy a pair of CubeSats and perform a NASA-sponsored fire experiment.
Targeting a pair of satellite launches in June and July, ground teams will resume work at the Guiana Space Center in South America next week after a nearly two-month pause in Arianespace’s launch campaigns due to the coronavirus pandemic.
NASA has selected a mission to dispatch six CubeSats, each the size of a toaster oven, to an orbit more than 20,000 miles from Earth to study massive particle ejections from the sun.
Propelled by five strap-on solid rocket boosters and a Russian-made kerosene-fueled RD-180 main engine, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on March 26 with the U.S. military’s sixth AEHF communications satellite.
The sixth and final satellite in the U.S. military’s most secure satellite communications fleet lifted off from Cape Canaveral Thursday aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, extending the network’s expected lifetime beyond 2030.
Rocket Lab says it has paused launch operations after the government of New Zealand this week ordered most businesses closed and urged people to stay at home in an effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
A United Launch Atlas 5 rocket is set to launch the U.S. Air Force’s sixth and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite from Cape Canaveral. This timeline shows the major mission events planned over a nearly six-hour flight to an optimized geostationary transfer orbit.