Tucked inside a shipping crate aboard an Air Force C-5 transport aircraft, the Navy’s next mobile communications satellite has flown from California to Florida in preparation for liftoff this summer.
Lockheed Martin will build two communications satellites for Saudi Arabia’s Arabsat, and Arianespace and SpaceX will launch the commercial relay platforms under contracts valued at $650 million announced Wednesday.
NASA expects to select commercial contractors to resupply the International Space Station in September, three months later than the agency’s previous timetable under a competition for cargo deliveries beginning in 2018.
Lockheed Martin has proposed a semi-reusable resupply platform to send up cargo to the International Space Station beginning in 2018, adding another competitor to a crowded list of companies bidding to win multibillion-dollar contracts from NASA.
December’s first orbital test flight of NASA’s Orion crew capsule was almost perfect, but engineers are carefully analyzing 600 gigabytes of data recorded on the spacecraft’s trip 3,600 miles into space to see how future missions to an asteroid and Mars could be improved.
The massive U.S. Navy communications satellite launched from Cape Canaveral two weeks ago has completed prescribed maneuvers to reach geosynchronous orbit and successfully unfurled its umbrella-like antenna reflectors.
A NASA spacecraft under construction for launch in 2016 to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu could benefit from an extra load of fuel, allowing an extended stay at the asteroid or a return to Earth a year early.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft achieved all but two of 87 demo objectives on its first orbital flight last month, but details on the capsule’s performance will require dismantling the spaceship’s outer skin in a careful procedure designed to keep most of the Orion prototype intact for future testing.