Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome with 36 OneWeb broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Arianespace’s live video stream begins at approximately 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT) and is in English. Roscosmos’s live video stream begins at approximately 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT) and is in Russian.
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
William Shatner floats out of its seat after arriving in space on Blue Origin’s crew capsule. Credit: Blue OriginWilliam Shatner, the 90-year-old veteran of countless imaginary space voyages playing Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, blasted off for real Wednesday, becoming the oldest person to reach the final frontier in a PR bonanza for Jeff Bezos and his rocket company Blue Origin.
Over the course of 10 minutes and 17 seconds, Shatner and three crewmates took off atop a hydrogen-fueled rocket, climbed to edge of space 65.8 miles up and enjoyed three to four minutes of weightlessness, along with spectacular views of Earth, before plunging back to a gentle parachute-assisted touchdown.
Within minutes, Bezos and Blue Origin recovery crews were on the scene to open the spacecraft’s hatch and welcome Shatner, Australian entrepreneur Chris Boshuizen, microbiologist Glen de Vries and Blue Origin executive Audrey Powers back to Earth.
Shatner cautiously made his way down a few short steps to the ground and was warmly embraced by Bezos. The actor grew emotional and was occasionally at a loss for words describing the flight to the man who made it possible.
NASA mission specialist Kayla Barron, pilot Tom Marshburn, commander Raja Chari, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer participate in the Crew Equipment Interface Test at Area 59, home of Dragon spacecraft processing at Cape Canaveral Space force Station. Credit: SpaceX
The four astronauts set to blast off Oct. 30 to the International Space Station visited Cape Canaveral over the weekend for a test run inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft, one of the last training events before they return to Florida on launch week.
Commander Raja Chari, a U.S. Air Force colonel, leads NASA’s Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station. Chari and the mission’s other three astronauts visited Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Saturday for the Crew Equipment Interface Test, a customary pre-flight training event officials equate to a “test drive” or “walk through” of the spacecraft.
The four-person crew will launch on the third NASA crew rotation flight to the space station, and the fifth human flight on a Crew Dragon spacecraft overall, including a 2020 test flight and the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission last month.
Chari, pilot Tom Marshburn, mission specialist Kayla Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer puit on the custom-fitted SpaceX fight suits and climbed into the Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft Saturday at SpaceX’s processing facility at Cape Canaveral.
SpaceX performed suit leak checks and moved the Dragon spacecraft’s seats into launch position. The test is intended to familiarize astronauts with the spacecraft and hardware they will take into orbit.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and crew capsule from West Texas carrying actor William Shatner, Planet co-founder Chris Boshuizen, microbiologist Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin vice president Audrey Powers on a 10-minute flight to suborbital space. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Blue Origin’s live launch broadcast begins at 7:30 a.m. CDT (8:30 a.m. EDT; 1230 GMT) Wednesday, Oct. 13
The French-flagged MN Colibri transport ship arrived Tuesday at the Pariacabo harbor in Kourou, French Guiana, with the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/P. Baudon/E. Prigent
The James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to Hubble, arrived at the European Space Agency’s launch base Tuesday in Kourou, French Guiana, for final checkouts and fueling ahead of blastoff in December on top of an Ariane 5 rocket.
The $10 billion observatory pulled into port at Pariacabo harbor in Kourou, French Guiana, aboard the French-flagged MN Colibri transport ship Tuesday, completing a 16-day, 5,800-mile (9,300-kilometer) journey from Seal Beach, California.
Ground teams later pulled the spacecraft from the transport ship, then trucked the observatory inside its custom-built shipping container to the S5 payload processing facility at the Guiana Space Center on the northern shore of French Guiana.
The arrival of Webb in French Guiana kicks off a two-month launch campaign leading up to blastoff on an Ariane 5 rocket. Launch from the tropical spaceport is currently scheduled for Dec. 18.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is a colossal achievement, built to transform our view of the universe and deliver amazing science,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. “Webb will look back over 13 billion years to the light created just after the big bang, with the power to show humanity the farthest reaches of space that we have ever seen.
The Landsat 8 remote sensing satellite captured this view of La Palma in visible and infrared wavelengths, showing the smoke plume and lava flow from the Cumbre Vieja volcano. Credit: NASA/USGS
Satellites and astronauts orbiting Earth have been tracking the eruption of a volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma for the last three weeks, revealing a red-hot river of lava pouring out of the ground and flowing into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rare views from orbit of an erupting volcano come from a fleet of government and commercial remote sensing satellites, and from astronauts watching from the International Space Station.
The U.S. government’s Landsat 8 satellite, which specializes in wide-angle multi-color views of Earth’s land surfaces, spotted the Cumbre Vieja volcano in a spectacular image captured Sept. 26. The spacecraft’s instruments imaged La Palma, located in the Canary Islands, in visible and infrared wavelengths, simultaneously showing the volcano’s plume of smoke and ash blowing out to sea, and the destructive lava flow heading the opposite direction across the island’s landscape.
Maxar’s WorldView 3 Earth observation satellite captured this view Sept. 30 of the lava flow streaming away from the Cumbre Vieja volcano. Maxar combined the Sept. 30 nighttime image with a daytime image captured Aug. 17 to provide context on where the lava was flowing. Credit: Satellite image ©2021 Maxar TechnologiesThe Cumbre Vieja volcano began erupting Sept. 19 after a series of precursor earthquakes, forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 people. As of Oct. 8, the lava flow had affected more than 1,200 acres (497 hectares) of land and destroyed more than 1,100 buildings.
The optical camera on Maxar’s WorldView 3 high-resolution imaging satellite recorded sharper views of the volcano. One of the images, taken Sept. 30 from an altitude of 379 miles (610 kilometers), shows the lava flow snaking across La Palma before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean.
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
Space industry entrepreneur Chris Boshuizen, actor William Shatner, Blue Origin vice president Audrey Powers, and businessman Glen de Vries pose in their flight suits ahead of their launch on a suborbital flight to the edge of space. Credit: Blue OriginFifty-five years after his debut as Captain Kirk in the cult-classic TV series Star Trek, William Shatner, now 90, is finally launching to the final frontier for real Wednesday, becoming the oldest person to fly in space courtesy of Jeff Bezos and his rocket company Blue Origin.
Shatner will join Australian Chris Boshuizen, founder of Earth-observation company Planet Labs, microbiologist Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin’s Audrey Powers for blastoff on a 10-minute up-and-down flight out of the discernible atmosphere to the edge of space.
Running a day late because of high winds, liftoff from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site is targeted for 9:30 a.m. EDT
In an interview with Gayle King om CBS Mornings, Shatner joked he’ll be able to brag about being the oldest person to fly in space. But he said his actual motivation was “to have the vision, I want to see space, I want to see the Earth, I want to see what we need to do to save Earth.”
“I want to have a perspective that hasn’t been shown to me before,” he said. “That’s what I’m interested in seeing.”
If all goes well, the New Shepard will carry the crew to an altitude of just above 62 miles, the internationally recognized “boundary” between the discernible atmosphere and space. The passengers will enjoy three to four minutes of weightlessness — and jaw-dropping views — before a parachute descent to Earth.
“Yes, it’s true; I’m going to be a ‘rocket man!'” Shatner tweeted when Blue Origin revealed he was joining the crew.
“Welcome Mr. Shatner to our flight crew! We’re going to have so much fun this week!” Boshuizen tweeted back.
The flight will mark just the second crewed launch of a New Shepard capsule since Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen took off July 20 on the company’s first such flight.
Daemen will still hold the record for youngest person to fly in space after Tuesday’s launch, but Shatner will eclipse Funk’s record by eight years and John Glenn’s mark before that by 13.
“I’m looking forward to the whole thing,” Shatner told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Imagine being weightless and staring into the blackness and seeing the Earth, that’s what I want to absorb.”
But he added, smiling: “Things like that go up and boom in the night. It’s a little scary, I’ll tell you.”
Blue Origin’s medical requirements for passengers are relatively relaxed given the spacecraft is fully automated.
The most difficult challenges for 90-year-old Shatner likely will be climbing the seven flights of stairs required to reach the gangway to board the New Shepard capsule and then enduring more than five times the normal force of gravity during descent.
But Funk had no problems, and Blue Origin officials presumably expect the same for Shatner.
The mission marks the sixth piloted commercial, non-government sub-orbital spaceflight in a high-stakes competition between Bezos’ Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, owned by fellow billionaire Richard Branson.
Virgin has launched four piloted flights of its winged spaceplane VSS Unity, most recently sending up Branson, two pilots and three company crewmates on July 11. At least one more flight is planned this year, with three researchers on board representing the Italian air force, before commercial passenger flights begin next year.
Blue Origin followed up the Bezos flight by launching a suite of NASA experiments on an unpiloted mission Aug. 26. The flight Wednesday will be the company’s 18th overall and the second with passengers aboard.
Virgin Galactic is charging about $500,000 per seat. Blue Origin has not announced pricing for the New Shepard or how much Boshuizen and de Vries might have paid.
Shatner is flying as a guest of Blue Origin while Powers, a lawyer, a former NASA space station flight controller and Blue Origin’s vice president for missions and flight operations, is flying as a company representative.
CBS News recently reported allegations of safety issues from current and former Blue Origin employees, most speaking anonymously, including complaints about a “toxic” corporate culture. But Powers told King “that just hasn’t been my experience at Blue.”
“We’re exceedingly thorough,” she said. “I’ve worked on New Shepherd for eight years now in a variety of roles, and I can’t say enough about the team of professionals that work on this program. … Safety has always been our top priority. That has always been my experience here.”
Asked what she wanted to do most on the flight, Powers said in a Blue Origin video posted to Twitter “I plan to spend the majority of the time looking out the window.” Shatner agreed, saying “I plan to be looking out the window with my nose pressed against the (glass). The only thing I don’t want to see is a little gremlin looking back at me!”
He was referring to a now-classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” in which Shatner, playing the part of an airline passenger, sees a gremlin on the plane’s wing. His frantic efforts to convince his wife and fellow passengers the gremlin is real instead convinces them he’s suffered a breakdown.
James T. Kirk is Shatner’s most famous role and in the Blue Origin video, Powers was asked how excited she was to fly with the legendary starship captain.
“I don’t know if I’m more excited to be going to space with Denny Crane or with Captain Kirk,” she said, referring to Shatner’s portrayal of a lawyer in the TV series “Boston Legal.”
“But Denny Crane was on the verge of senility,” Shatner joked.
“That’s right!” Powers laughed. “We probably want the Captain Kirk version.”
“I think you’re better off with that guy,” Shatner replied.
Star Trek debuted in 1966 when NASA was still launching two-man Gemini spacecraft. The series was canceled after three seasons, but devoted fans turned it into a cult classic. NASA named its prototype space shuttle “Enterprise,” spin-off series were launched and Shatner starred in seven of the 13 feature-length Star Trek movies released to date.
While filming the original Star Trek for television, Shatner told Cooper, it was just dawning on people that astronauts would soon be flying to the moon.
“I would go down to Cape Kennedy from time to time during the series and I met all the astronauts and I was very impressed,” Shatner said. “When they went to the moon, I had reached (my) nadir, they were at the apogee. I was divorced, the show was canceled and I’m looking up there … and I’m lying in a cab trying to get some sleep because I have to perform the next day and I can’t afford a hotel room.
“So 55 years later, I wrote a song for this album that’s out there now called ‘Bill,’ and one of the songs is ‘So Far From the Moon.” It was all about that moment when I was looking at the sky, being so far from the moon, and here I am all this time later being a few thousand feet closer to the moon than you are.”
As might be expected, Shatner is the “star” of New Shepard flight 18, and that’s presumably just fine with crewmates Boshuizen and de Vries. Despite their professional and financial success, neither man has an entry in Wikipedia and both seem content to keep personal details personal.
Boshuizen, 44, is an Australian who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Sydney. After a stint at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, he co-founded Planet Labs, a company that pioneered the use of small “nanosats” and now operates the largest fleet of commercial Earth-observation satellites.
He also is a partner at DCVC, a “deep tech” investment company in San Francisco, and is a musician in his spare time, performing under the name “Dr. Chrispy.”
“I’m very excited,” he told King. “I’ve waited my entire life to do this. I think it’s pretty amazing that 2021 is the year that really the human race is finally starting to go to space at scale.
“I think we’ll look back at this date 50 years from now and go, wow, this really was a special time in history, just like the Wright brothers, when people started flying passenger planes. It’s really exciting to be part of history and I can’t wait to fly.”
De Vries, a private pilot in his spare time, was trained as a molecular biologist and co-founded Medidata Solutions, the most-used clinical research platform in the world. The company’s software has managed more than 25,000 clinical trials involving more than seven million patients. Dassault Systèmes acquired the company in 1999 for $5.8 billion.
“I am actually looking forward to seeing the Earth from a different perspective than I ever had before,” he said in the CBS Mornings crew interview. “I just can’t wait to stare out that window and feel differently about humanity and our planet than I’ve ever had the opportunity to before.”
COMPETING APPROACHES TO SUB-ORBITAL SPACEFLIGHT
The Orion Stage Adapter with the Artemis 1 mission’s rideshare payloads installed. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston
Workers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have lifted the Orion Stage Adapter on top of the Space Launch System moon rocket, adding the structure housing 10 CubeSat rideshare payloads heading into deep space on the Artemis 1 mission. But three of the CubeSat missions missed their opportunity to fly on the first SLS mission.
Teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy raised the Orion Stage Adapter on top of the Space Launch System rocket Friday evening, according to Madison Tuttle, a NASA spokesperson.
The mounting of the circular adapter structure is one of the final steps in stacking the SLS rocket inside High Bay 3 of the iconic assembly building. The Orion spacecraft, NASA’s human-rated moon ship, will be added to the rocket in the coming days to complete the build-up of the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) launch vehicle for an unpiloted test flight to lunar orbit and back to Earth.
NASA has not announced a target launch date for the mission, known as Artemis 1, but it is expected to fly some time in early 2022. The test flight will pave the way for the next SLS/Orion mission, Artemis 2, to carry four astronauts to lunar orbit as soon as 2023.
The Artemis program’s objective is to land astronauts on the surface of the moon some time later in the 2020s.
OneWeb announced Monday it is working on an agreement to launch future broadband internet satellites on Indian rockets, the same day the next batch of 36 OneWeb spacecraft moved into position at a Russian spaceport for liftoff Thursday on a Soyuz launcher.
The London-based company, which builds its satellites in a factory on Florida’s Space Coast, said Monday it has signed a letter of intent with NewSpace India Limited, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization, to use Indian rockets for launches beginning as soon as next year.
OneWeb is owned by a consortium of shareholders led by the Indian telecom company Bharti Global and the UK government.
Arianespace won a contract in 2015 to launch OneWeb’s first-generation network. The deal between Arianespace and OneWeb now covers 19 launches aboard Russian Soyuz rockets from spaceports in Russia, Kazakhstan, and French Guiana.
Students at Boston University work with CuPID spacecraft during pre-launch testing. Credit: NASA
Ground teams are stepping through testing of three small CubeSats launched with the Landsat 9 remote sensing satellite last month, preparing the small spacecraft for exoplanet observations and communications experiments. NASA says engineers have not established contact with another CubeSat designed for space weather research.
Four CubeSats launched as rideshare payloads with the Landsat 9 mission Sept. 27 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The Atlas 5 successfully deployed the Landsat 9 satellite, a joint project between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, into a 420-mile-high (675-kilometer) polar orbit after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
The Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage maneuvered to a lower altitude to release four CubeSats carried inside dispensers on a secondary payload adapter.
The small secondary payloads — two for NASA and two sponsored by the U.S. military’s Defense Innovation Unit — ejected from carrier modules on the Centaur stage, according to ULA.
One of the CubeSats, named CuPID, was built to study the interactions between solar activity and Earth’s magnetic field, probing dynamics that impact space weather. The Cusp Plasma Imaging Detector, or CuPID, carries instruments to measure X-rays emitted when plasma from the solar wind collides with neutral atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Japan’s fifth Epsilon rocket, originally set for liftoff Sept. 30, is visible inside a gantry structure at the Uchinoura Space Center. Credit: JAXA
The launch of a solid-fueled Japanese Epsilon rocket with nine small satellites, originally scheduled to blastoff last week, has been grounded until after the flight of a larger H-2A launcher later this month, Japan’s space agency said Friday.
The Epsilon rocket was supposed to blast off Sept. 30 (U.S. time) from the Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima prefecture. Officials scrubbed that launch attempt less than a minute before liftoff due to a balky connector on a mobile radar tracking system.
Teams geared up for a second launch attempt Wednesday, but managers called off the countdown because of unfavorable high-altitude winds over the space center.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said Friday that the near-term weather forecast is “not suitable” for launch of the Epsilon rocket. Facing a unfavorable weather conditions, JAXA decided to ground the Epsilon rocket until after the liftoff of a previously-scheduled Japanese H-2A rocket Oct. 24 (U.S. time).
The H-2A rocket is larger than the Epsilon, and it is based at the Tanegashima Space Center around 60 miles south of the Uchinoura launch base. But both rockets share common equipment and facilities, such as ground tracking infrastructure, and JAXA is giving priority to the H-2A mission.
European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer and NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari, and Kayla Barron pose for a photo during training at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Credit: SpaceX
The astronauts who will ride SpaceX’s newest Dragon spaceship into orbit later this month said Thursday they named their spacecraft “Endurance” as a tribute to the human spirit and a historic sailing vessel used by Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
The new spacecraft, previously known by serial number “Capsule 210,” is scheduled to launch Oct. 30 with three NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency flier heading for the International Space Station.
“We can stop calling it Capsule 210,” said Raja Chari, commander of the mission. “The crew has come up with the name of the vehicle, which is ‘Endurance.'”
Chari, a U.S. Air Force colonel, said the name “speaks to us on a number of levels.”
“First off, it’s just a tribute to the the tenacity of human spirit as we push humans and machines farther than we ever have, going both to stay in extended stays for low earth orbit, opening it up to private companies and private astronauts, and knowing that we’ll continue our exploration to go even farther,” Chari said Thursday in a pre-flight news conference.
A crane raises the Lucy spacecraft, encapsulated inside its payload fairing, atop an Atlas 5 rocket Thursday. Credit: United Launch Alliance
Teams at Cape Canaveral transferred NASA’s Lucy asteroid explorer to a United Launch Alliance integration building Thursday and mounted the robotic science probe atop an Atlas 5 rocket for liftoff later this month, using a booster originally built to send astronauts into space.
The 3,300-pound (1,500-kilogram) Lucy spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, is set for launch Oct. 16, the first opportunity in a 23-day launch period to begin a 12-year sojourn through the solar system.
The robot’s primary science goal is to conduct the first close-up flybys of a group of distant asteroids called the Trojans located ahead of and behind Jupiter in its orbit around the sun.
The Lucy spacecraft was encapsulated inside the payload fairing of its Atlas 5 rocket at the Astrotech processing facility in Titusville, Florida. ULA transported the science probe, inside its fairing, from Astrotech to the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early Thursday.
A crane raised the payload on top of the Atlas 5, competing the build-up of the 188-foot-tall (57-meter) rocket.
NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada view the rollout of a Boeing Starliner spacecraft before a test flight in December 2019. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
NASA has reassigned two rookie astronauts from missions on Boeing’s troubled Starliner crew capsule to a SpaceX crew mission to the International Space Station late next year, a move agency officials said will allow the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience for future lunar expeditions.
“It was just the right time in their careers to make this change,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.
NASA assigned astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada to the first two crew flights on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in 2018.
Mann, a former U.S. Marine Corps test pilot, was slated to fly on the Starliner Crew Flight Test, the first mission with astronauts aboard Boeing’s crew spacecraft. Cassada, a former test pilot in the U.S. Navy, was assigned to the first fully operational Starliner crew flight to the space station, following the Crew Flight Test.
At that time, Boeing and SpaceX, NASA’s two commercial crew transportation providers, planned to begin launching astronauts in 2019.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft docked at the International Space Station on May 1, 2021. Credit: NASA
SpaceX is about to double the size of its fleet of Crew Dragon spaceships. The company is debuting a new spacecraft for a NASA launch later this month, and is building a fourth human-rated capsule that should be ready for flight early next year, a SpaceX official said Wednesday.
Sarah Walker, director of SpaceX’s Dragon mission management office, confirmed Wednesday the company is readying a fourth Crew Dragon spacecraft for an inaugural flight next year. SpaceX and NASA officials previously announced that the next NASA crew mission, known as Crew-3, scheduled for liftoff Oct. 30 will use a new vehicle.
“It’s really exciting to introduce another Crew Dragon to our fleet to support our human spaceflight manifest,” Walker said. “We’ve got another one in the production line now. It should be ready in the spring to support more human spaceflight missions.”
The addition of two more Crew Dragon capsules to SpaceX’s fleet will give the spaceflight provider an inventory of four human-rated spaceships. Walker said that fleet should be sufficient to support the company’s growing manifest of crew missions for NASA and private customers.
“Those four Crew Dragon vehicles seem sufficient to meet our manifest, which is thriving right now, and it’s exciting to see all of the traffic on the vehicles,” Walker said in response to a question from Spaceflight Now. “Reusability is key to SpaceX, with our rockets and our spacecraft.”
Live coverage of the countdown and launch Japan’s Epsilon rocket with nine small Japanese and Vietnamese technology demonstration satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
JAXA’s live video stream begins at approximately 0015 GMT (8:15 p.m. EDT) and will be available on this page.
Set for launch Oct. 16 on a flight to explore asteroids in the outer solar system, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has been fueled and encapsulated inside the payload fairing of its Atlas 5 rocket. Watch as Chris McCaa, a manager from spacecraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin, points out some of the features of the probe.
The Lucy spacecraft is the centerpiece of a $981 million mission to visit eight asteroids, including seven located in swarms of Trojan asteroids ahead of and behind Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. Scientists believe the Trojan asteroids are leftovers from the early history of the solar system, and could provide clues about the formation of the giant planets.
Read more in our story previewing the mission.
This video was recorded Sept. 29 at the Astrotech payload processing facility near Cape Canaveral, one day before crews enclosed the Lucy spacecraft inside the two halves of the Atlas 5 nose cone.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is prepared for encapsulation last month inside the payload shroud of its Atlas 5 launcher. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky
Fueled up for a 12-year mission of exploration, NASA’s Lucy science probe is nearly ready for launch Oct. 16 from Florida’s Space Coast to begin a journey through the solar system to visit eight asteroids, a record number for a single mission.
Ground teams completed testing of the Lucy spacecraft last month inside a climate-controlled clean room at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, a few miles from the gates to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The tests capped a two-month campaign at Astrotech since the Lucy spacecraft arrived from its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. Technicians loaded hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants into the probe to feed its small maneuvering thrusters and main engine, which will help steer Lucy toward its asteroid targets.
“Lucy is done, and we’re ready to fly,” said Hal Levison, the mission’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, or SWRI, in Boulder, Colorado.
The $981 million mission will be the first to explore a population of asteroids called the Trojans, which orbit the sun ahead of and behind Jupiter.
A view of the International Space Station captured Sept. 28 by a cosmonaut on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. Credit: Roscosmos
Photos taken by a Russian cosmonaut Tuesday from a Soyuz spacecraft show new exterior views of the International Space Station, with two SpaceX Dragon spaceships, a Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply craft, and the lab’s new roll-out solar arrays visible.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, commander of the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, tweeted the photos this week. Novitskiy, cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov, and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei boarded the Russian spaceship, undocked from the station, and relocated the Soyuz to a new docking port Tuesday.
Novitskiy manually piloted the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft during the 43-minute relocation maneuver. He flew the spacecraft in an arc along the length of the space station, allowing Dubrov to float into the Soyuz orbital module to snap pictures of the complex.
“All according to plan!” Novitskiy tweeted after the relocation. “We managed to take unique images of the ISS in the new configuration.”
A view of the International Space Station captured Sept. 28 by a cosmonaut on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. Credit: RoscosmosThe space station turned to a special orientation, or attitude, for the Soyuz relocation Tuesday. In these photos, the forward end of the outpost is facing up, away from Earth.
A SpaceX supply ship blazed a trail through the atmosphere over the southeastern United States Thursday night and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida, returning home with 2.3 tons of research specimens and cargo from the International Space Station.
The late-night re-entry capped a 14-hour flight from the space station that began with an automated undocking from the complex at 9:12 a.m. EDT (1312 GMT) Thursday. The Cargo Dragon spacecraft backed away from the research outpost using pulses from its Draco thrusters.
Astronauts inside the space station monitored the departure, ending the 23rd resupply visit to the complex by a SpaceX cargo ship since 2012.
“I want to give a huge thank you to the SpaceX and the NASA teams for getting this vehicle up to us in great shape with a lot of science and supplies for the ISS,” astronaut Shane Kimbrough radioed from the space station. “The activities associated with SpaceX-23 kept our crew busy over the past month.
“We look forward to hearing about the results of the payloads we interacted with,” Kimbrough said. “Have a safe journey back to Earth.”
All Rights Reserved. 2024. SpaceZE.com
