Space News & Blog Articles

The payload compartment containing the Pléiades Neo 4 Earth observation satellite is lifted into the Vega rocket’s launch pad gantry in preparation for Monday night’s mission. Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace

An Airbus-owned commercial optical Earth-imaging satellite and four small CubeSat rideshare payloads are set for launch Monday night from French Guiana aboard a European Vega rocket.

The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega launcher is poised for liftoff from the Guiana Space Center, located on the northeastern coast of South America, at 9:47:06 p.m. EDT Monday (0147:06 GMT Tuesday).

The mission, managed by the French launch services company Arianespace, will deploy the second of four planned satellites in a modernized fleet of Airbus-built Earth observatories, joining an identical spacecraft launched on the previous Vega rocket flight in April.

Monday night’s mission will deliver Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 4 Earth observation satellite into a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of around 388 miles (625 kilometers).

The new satellite will take a position in a similar orbit as the Pléiades Neo 3 spacecraft that launched in April, but will fly in a slot 180 degrees from its counterpart to begin enabling repeat coverage of the same location on Earth.

File photo of Rocket Lab’s privately-owned spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Credit: Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab is gearing up for three back-to-back missions beginning later this month from its New Zealand launch base, each carrying two commercial BlackSky Earth-imaging satellites.

The small satellite launch company said Aug. 10 it is planning a series of three missions, each carrying a pair off BlackSky satellites, between late August and the end of September.

Rocket Lab said in a statement that the back-to-back missions “represent the company’s fastest launch turnarounds to date.”

All three launches will blast off from Rocket Lab’s privately-owned spaceport on Mahia Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand. The facility, known as Launch Complex 1, has been the departure point for all of Rocket Lab’s Electron rockets to date.

BlackSky, with offices in Seattle and Herndon, Virginia, is deploying a fleet of small remote sensing satellites to provide high-resolution Earth imagery to commercial and government clients. One big potential customer for BlackSky is the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

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The next-generation spacesuits needed by the first moonwalkers in NASA’s Artemis program will not be available until 2025 at the earliest and will have cost more than $1 billion to develop, the agency’s Office of Inspector General reported Tuesday.

While November 2024 remains NASA’s goal for obtaining two flight-ready spacesuits, known as xEMUs, “the agency faces significant challenges,” the OIG said, including a 20-month delay in development and delivery of test suits, a space station demonstration version and two lunar flight suits.

“These delays — attributable to funding shortfalls, COVID-19 impacts, and technical challenges — have left no schedule margin for delivery of the two flight-ready xEMUs,” the report concluded. “Given the integration requirements, the suits would not be ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest.

“Moreover, by the time two flight-ready xEMUs are available, NASA will have spent over a billion dollars on the development and assembly of its next-generation spacesuits.”

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In September 2135, the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu will pass between the Earth and the moon and while scientists said Wednesday there is no chance of a collision, Earth’s gravity will alter the interloper’s trajectory, raising the possibility of an impact during a subsequent close encounter.

It all depends on how Bennu’s trajectory is affected by Earth’s gravity, the long-range gravitational influence of other plants and asteroids and perturbations caused by more subtle factors, including the effects of solar heating.

The latter is known as the Yarkovsky effect, a tiny acceleration produced when the heat absorbed from the sun is radiated back into space as an asteroid rotates from daylight to darkness and rocks cool down.

“The Yarkovsky effect acting on Bennu is equivalent to the weight of three grapes,” said Davide Farnocchia, a researcher at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of a paper describing Bennu’s path in the journal Icarus.

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Around-the-clock work to fix valve problems that derailed an Aug. 3 attempt to launch Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule on an unpiloted test flight was called off Friday, delaying another try until after NASA launches a higher-priority asteroid probe in mid-October.

Despite the team’s eagerness to fly, “we have to have the maturity to stop, investigate and sit before flying again,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of space operations. “And that is what we are doing. We fly when we are ready.”

“I know this is very, very hard on our NASA-Boeing team, but I’m very proud of them for how diligently and carefully they’ve been working. … We’re going to go fix this problem. And we’re going to move forward.”

The delay marked the latest setback for the hard-luck Starliner, which suffered major software problems during the commercial crew ship’s initial test flight in December 2019, preventing an attempt to rendezvous with the International Space Station and nearly leading to a catastrophic failure.

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship arrives at the International Space Station on Thursday. Credit: Thomas Pesquet/ESA/NASA

Closing out a 36-hour flight from a launch pad in Virginia, a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station Thursday with a host of biomedical experiments, supplies for a 3D printing tech demo, fresh food, and spare parts.

The automated cargo freighter completed a laser-guided final approach to the space station, and held position less than 40 feet (12 meters) below the complex. Astronaut Megan McArthur used the lab’s Canadian built robotic arm to reach out and capture the Cygnus spacecraft at 6:07 a.m. EDT (1007 GMT) Thursday as the space station flew more than 260 miles (420 kilometers) over Portugal.

The arrival marked the 16th delivery of supplies to the space station by a Cygnus spacecraft since 2013, continuing a twice-per-year sequence of cargo runs by Northrop Grumman’s unpiloted freighter.

The Cygnus spacecraft for Northrop Grumman’s NG-16 cargo mission is named for NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka, who became the first Asian-American in space in 1985. Onizuka died with six crewmates on the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

“On behalf of the Expedition 65 crew, I’m pleased to bring the Cygnus spacecraft ‘S.S. Ellison Onizuka’ aboard the International Space Station today,” McArthur said from the station Thursday. “Our congratulations go out to the combined teams from Northrop Grumman and NASA for the mission successes so far. This mission enables ground-breaking research, through which we hope to meet Col. Onizuka’s challenge, to enable the next generation to look out from a higher plateau.”

India’s GSLV Mk.2 rocket lifts off with the EOS-03 satellite. Credit: ISRO

An Indian Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle tumbled out of control five minutes after liftoff Tuesday when the rocket’s cryogenic upper stage failed to ignite, destroying a long-delayed Earth observation spacecraft and ending a streak of 16 consecutive Indian space launches.

The GSLV Mk.2 rocket and the EOS-03 Earth observation satellite crashed back to Earth after the third stage failure.

The mission lifted off at 8:13 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0013 GMT Thursday) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s east coast. The launch occurred at 5:43 a.m. Thursday local time in India.

After good performance from the GSLV’s strap-on boosters, first stage, and second stage, the mission ran into trouble when the rocket’s third stage was supposed to take over to accelerate the EOS-03 spacecraft into orbit.

The Indian Space Research Organization said the cryogenic upper stage did not ignite due to a “technical anomaly.”

Live coverage of the countdown and launch India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle with the EOS-03 Earth observation satellite. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

ISRO’s live video stream begins at approximately 2340 GMT (7:40 p.m. EDT) and will be available on this page. If you appreciate what we do, please consider becoming a Spaceflight Now member and support our coverage of the space program.

India’s EOS 3 satellite, formerly known as GISAT 1, features a large telescope designed to peer down at the Indian subcontinent from geostationary orbit. Credit: ISRO

India is set to launch the first in a new line of high-altitude Earth observation satellites Wednesday aboard a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle debuting a slightly wider payload shroud to accommodate larger spacecraft.

The GSLV Mk.2 launcher is set for liftoff at 8:13 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0013 GMT Thursday) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota Island, located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Chennai.

Liftoff is scheduled for 5:43 a.m. local time in India.

It will be just the second orbital launch of the year from India after the Indian space program ran into delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The satellite fastened on top of the rocket, named EOS-03, is fitted with a large telescope to look down on the Indian subcontinent from a geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: Boeing

Boeing engineers at Cape Canaveral continue troubleshooting stuck valves in the propulsion system of the company’s Starliner crew capsule in hopes of resolving the problem — and understanding what caused it — in time to take off on an unpiloted test flight before the current launch window closes later this month.

Mission managers called off a launch attempt Aug. 3 after 13 of 24 valves inside the Starliner spacecraft’s propulsion system did not open as expected during pre-flight testing.

The commercial crew capsule was poised to head into orbit on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on a five-day test flight to the International Space Station. The mission — called Orbital Flight Test-2 — is a do-over of a problem-plagued test flight in 2019 that failed to reach the space station due to software errors.

If Boeing’s second shot at the unpiloted test flight goes well, it will pave the way for the next Starliner mission to carry three astronauts to the space station.

Ground teams rolled the Atlas 5 rocket back into ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility last week, allowing Boeing workers to begin hands-on inspections of the Starliner propulsion system.

Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket lifts off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia at 6:01 p.m. EDT (2201 GMT) Tuesday. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

A successful launch from Virginia aboard an Antares rocket Tuesday kicked off Northrop Grumman’s 16th commercial resupply flight to the International Space Station, setting the stage for arrival of more than 8,000 pounds of cargo at the complex Thursday.

The two-stage Antares launcher ignited its twin Russian-made RD-181 engines and took off from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at 6:01:05 p.m. EDT (2201:05 GMT) to begin Northrop Grumman’s NG-16 cargo mission.

Riding some 864,000 pounds of thrust, the 139-foot-tall (42.5-meter) Antares rocket arced downrange southeast from the launch base at Wallops Island, Virginia, lining up with the space station’s orbital plane to begin a 36-hour pursuit of the research outpost.

The liftoff was delayed five minutes Tuesday to allow time for Northrop Grumman’s launch team to reset a leaky valve in a helium pressurization system.

The first stage’s RD-181 engines shut down nearly three-and-a-half minutes into the flight. Moments later, the booster separated to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.

This graphic illustrates the major events during the Antares rocket’s climb into orbit with the Cygnus supply ship on the NG-16 mission. Credit: Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket will deliver a Cygnus supply ship into orbit Tuesday to begin a pursuit of the International Space Station.

The rocket’s two RD-181 engines will ignite around 3.7 seconds before liftoff from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a complex owned by the state of Virginia at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

Launch is timed for 5:56 p.m. EDT (2156 GMT) Tuesday, Aug. 10.

The first stage’s two RD-181 engines will power up to 864,000 pounds of thrust and burn for 3 minutes, 18 seconds, then separate from the upper stage’s Castor 30XL motor about six seconds later.

The launch, known as NG-16 in Northrop Grumman’s station resupply manifest, will be the 10th Antares mission using new, more powerful RD-181 engines, which the company ordered from the Russian engine-builder NPO Energomash to replace decades-old Russian-built AJ26 engines blamed for an Antares rocket crash seconds after liftoff in October 2014.

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of an Antares rocket from Virginia with Northrop Grumman’s 16th operational Cygnus resupply flight to the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

A mobile clean room, seen here Monday, attached to the nose cone of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket allowed ground teams to load time-sensitive cargo into a Cygnus supply ship before its launch to the International Space Station. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

Northrop Grumman packed last-minute cargo into a commercial Cygnus supply ship Monday on a launch pad in Virginia, putting the finishing touches on a spacecraft set for liftoff Tuesday atop an Antares rocket on a mission to the International Space Station.

The automated cargo freighter, named the “S.S. Ellison Onizuka” after one of the astronauts who died in the space shuttle Challenger accident, is loaded with 8,210 pounds (3,723 kilograms) of supplies and experiments.

The Cygnus supply ship is set to blast off from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, at 5:56:05 p.m. EDT (2156:05 GMT) Tuesday, the opening of a five-minute launch window to send the cargo mission in pursuit of the space station.

A 139-foot-tall (42.5-meter) Antares rocket will propel the Cygnus spacecraft into orbit. The two-stage rocket rolled out of Northrop Grumman’s Horizontal Integration Facility on Friday for the one-mile trip to pad 0A.

Ground crews raised the rocket vertical on the launch pad for checkouts over the weekend, then lowered the Antares horizontal again to begin the process of loading time-sensitive cargo into the Cygnus spacecraft.

Crews at SpaceX’s Starbase test site in South Texas stack the company’s first full-scale Starship launch vehicle Friday. Credit: SpaceX

Last week’s progress at SpaceX’s Starship development site culminated with the spectacular, but brief, sight of a fully-stacked launcher towering nearly 400 feet above the tidal flats of South Texas.

The first full stacking of SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle, doubling as a fit check and photo opportunity, will be followed by more outfitting of the huge rocket ahead of its first orbital test launch. Later Friday, SpaceX detached the Starship upper stage and rolled it back to a nearby high bay for additional work to prep for its trip to space.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, tweeted Friday that engineers in South Texas will complete work on the heat shield tiles that cover the stainless steel skin of the rocket’s upper stage, known simply as Starship. SpaceX will also install thermal protection materials around the 29 high-power Raptor engines at the base of the rocket’s first stage, which SpaceX calls the Super Heavy.

Together, the rocket stands 394 feet (120 meters) tall. That’s enough to make the Starship the tallest rocket ever built.

Musk said Friday that SpaceX teams will also complete work on the ground storage tanks that will contain the methane and liquid oxygen propellants to be loaded into the gigantic rocket. Another task will be the mounting of a quick disconnect arm on the launch tower at the orbital launch pad at the Starship development site, which SpaceX calls Starbase.

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Virgin Galactic, buoyed by a successful July 11 suborbital test flight with founder Richard Branson on the company’s winged rocket plane, re-opened ticket sales Thursday for rides to space starting at $450,000 per seat.

Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, also revealed that fully commercial flights are not expected until the third quarter of 2022, after two more test flights of the company’s VSS Unity spaceplane and extensive upgrades of Virgin’s Eve carrier jet to improve durability and turnaround times between flights.

While the start of commercial operations will come a few months later than had been hoped, the results of two piloted test flights earlier this year, including Branson’s July 11 trip to space, show the company is close to “completing our test flight program and launching commercial passenger service in ’22,” Colglazier said.

“And as we advance towards that goal, we are excited to announce today that we will immediately open ticket sales to our significant list of early hand raisers, prioritizing our spacefarer community who, as promised, will be given first opportunity to reserve their place to space.”

A Long March 3B rocket lifts off with the Chinasat 2E satellite Thursday. Credit: CASC

China launched a communications satellite likely designed for use by the Chinese military Thursday, keeping up a busy schedule of space missions with the country’s fourth orbital launch attempt in barely a week.

The launch Thursday occurred at 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT), marking China’s 28th orbital launch attempt of the year. Nine of those missions have launched since July 1.

A 184-foot-tall (56-meter) Long March 3B rocket carried the Chinese-built Zhongxing 2E, or Chinasat 2E, communications satellite into orbit after liftoff from the Xichang space center in southwestern China. The launch happened at 12:30 a.m. Beijing time Friday.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., or CASC, China’s largest state-owned space contractor, said the Long March 3B rocket successfully delivered the Zhongxing 2E satellite into its targeted orbit.

The mission aimed to deploy the spacecraft in an elongated geostationary transfer orbit ranging more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth at its apogee, or highest point.

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket and Boeing’s Starliner capsule depart pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday morning. Credit: Boeing

Ground teams at Cape Canaveral wheeled Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule and a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket back inside their assembly hangar Thursday for further troubleshooting of misbehaving valves inside the Starliner propulsion system.

Without a quick fix, technicians will have to remove the spacecraft from the Atlas 5 rocket for more extensive work, likely delaying the unpiloted Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 mission to the International Space Station by months.

ULA has already taken measures to protect for the possibility that the Starliner’s Atlas 5 rocket might have to be disassembled to allow the company to move on to other missions on its launch schedule. Before rolling the Atlas 5 back into the hangar, ULA drained the first stage’s fuel tank of kerosene.

Standing on a mobile launch platform, the 172-foot-tall (52.4-meter) rocket moved off its launch mount on pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and back into ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility late Thursday morning.

With the Atlas 5 and Starliner back in the VIF, workers planned to install access platforms and begin another round of troubleshooting in a bid to find the reason propulsion valves inside the spacecraft appear to be in unexpected positions.

A Long March 6 rocket lifts off Wednesday with two small satellites. Credit: Institute of Microsatellite Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

A Chinese rocket successfully launched Wednesday with a pair of small communications satellites reportedly linked to a secretive German company. The Chinese institute that built the satellites said they will test laser communications and electric thruster technologies.

The two satellites lifted off on top of a Long March 6 rocket at 7:01 a.m. EDT (1101 GMT) Wednesday from the Taiyuan launch base in Shanxi province, located in northern China.

The three-stage Long March 6 rocket delivered its two payloads into an orbit approximately 560 miles (900 kilometers) above Earth, at an inclination of 89 degrees to the equator, according to U.S. military tracking data.

Chinese officials declared the launch a success, marking the 27th orbital launch attempt by a Chinese rocket this year. Two of China’s orbital launch attempts this year have failed.

The two satellites aboard the Long March 6 launch were developed by the Shanghai Institute of Microsatellite Innovation, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.

File photo of a Hyperbola 1 rocket undergoing launch preparations. Credit: i-Space

The launch of a solid-fueled rocket developed by the Chinese commercial space firm iSpace failed Tuesday, the second launch failure in three orbital attempts by the startup company, Chinese state media said.

A Hyperbola 1 rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan launch base at 3:39 a.m. EDT (0739 GMT; 3:39 p.m. Beijing time), China’s government-run Xinhua news agency said.

Xinhua, which described the launch as a “flight test,” said the rocket exhibited “abnormal performance” after liftoff. Officials did not immediately specify when during the flight the rocket failed.

The news agency said a satellite carried by the rocket “did not enter orbit as scheduled.” Chinese officials did not identify the payload lost on the mission.

The Hyperbola 1 rocket was developed by iSpace, also known as Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd. On its website, iSpace says the Hyperbola 1 rocket consists of four solid-fueled stages, which are supplemented by liquid-fueled attitude control engines.