Live coverage of the flight of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
NASA TV (English
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A European Ariane 5 rocket blasts off from Kourou, French Guiana, on Tuesday with Europe’s MTG-I1 weather satellite and Intelsat’s Galaxy 35 and 36 communications satellites. Credit: ESA–M. Pedoussaut
A European Ariane 5 rocket fired off a launching stand Tuesday in tropical South America with the vanguard of a modernized series of weather satellites to improve storm forecasts for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and two Intelsat television broadcasting satellites to cover the United States, a heavyweight payload totaling more than 24,000 pounds (about 11 metric tons).
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of an Ariane 5 rocket with the MTG-I1 geostationary weather satellite for ESA and Eumetsat, and the Galaxy 35 and 36 communications satellites for Intelsat. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
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The MTG-I1 satellite is integrated with its Ariane 5 rocket at the Guiana Space Center. Credit: Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/P. Baudon
The first in a new generation of European weather satellites is set for launch Tuesday on a mission that promises to improve the timeliness and precision of weather forecasts for Europe and Africa, sharing a ride to space from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket with two Intelsat communications satellites.
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NASA’s Orion spacecraft descends under three. orange and white main parachutes. Credit: NASA
NASA’s Orion spacecraft parachuted to a gentle splashdown in the Pacific Ocean Sunday west of Baja California, ending an unpiloted test flight to the moon that spanned 25-and-a-half days and 1.4 million miles, proving out a new rocket and capsule to carry astronauts back to Earth’s celestial companion.
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Live coverage of the flight of the Space Launch System moon rocket and Orion spacecraft on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission . Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
NASA TV's live coverage of Orion splashdown
NASA's live video feed from Orion
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Artist’s illustration of the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft firing its lasers toward the moon’s surface. Credit: NASA
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, a small briefcase-size CubeSat that could break new ground in the search for water ice on the moon, is hitching a ride to space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with the privately-developed Hakuto-R moon lander after missing a launch opportunity on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission.
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STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
A camera on one of the Orion spacecraft’s four solar array wings captured this view of a crescent Earth on Saturday, Dec. 10, the Artemis 1 mission’s final full day in space. Credit: NASAClosing out a 25-day voyage around the moon, NASA’s Artemis 1 spacecraft closed in on Earth Saturday, on track for a 25,000-mph re-entry Sunday that will subject the unpiloted capsule to a hellish 5,000-degree inferno before splashdown off Baja California.
In an unexpected but richly-symbolic coincidence, the end of the Artemis 1 mission, expected at 12:39 p.m., will come 50 years to the day after the final Apollo moon landing in 1972.
Testing the Orion capsule’s 16.5-foot-wide Apollo-derived Avcoat heat shield is the top priority of the Artemis 1 mission, “and it is our priority-one objective for a reason,” said mission manager Mike Sarafin.
“There is no arc jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic reentry with a heat shield of this size,” he said. “And it is a brand new heat shield design, and it is a safety-critical piece of equipment. It is designed to protect the spacecraft and (future astronauts) … so the heat shield needs to work.”
Launched November 16 on the maiden flight of NASA’s huge new Space Launch System rocket, the unpiloted Orion capsule was propelled out of Earth orbit and on to the moon for an exhaustive series of tests, putting its propulsion, navigation, power and computer systems through their paces in the deep space environment.
While flight controllers ran into still-unexplained glitches with its power system, initial “funnies” with its star trackers and degraded performance from a phased array antenna, the Orion spacecraft and its European Space Agency-built service module worked well overall, achieving virtually all of their major objectives to this point.
“We’ve collected an immense amount of data characterizing system performance from the power system, the propulsion, GNC (guidance, navigation and control) and so far, the flight control team has downlinked to over 140 gigabytes of engineering and imagery data,” said Jim Geffre, the Orion vehicle integration manager.
The team is already analyzing that data “to help not only understand the performance on Artemis 1, but play forward for all subsequent missions,” he said.
If all goes well, NASA plans to follow the Artemis 1 mission by sending four astronauts around the moon in the program’s second flight — Artemis 2 — in 2024. The first moon landing would follow in the 2025-26 timeframe when NASA says the first woman and the next man will set foot on the lunar surface.
The unpiloted Artemis 1 capsule flew through half of an orbit around the moon that carried it farther from Earth — 268,563 miles — than any previous human-rated spacecraft. Two critical firings of its main engine set up a low-altitude lunar flyby last Monday that, in turn, put the craft on course for splashdown Sunday.
This graphic illustrates the skip re-entry the Orion spacecraft will perform on Dec. 11 as it plunges into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. Credit: NASA
NASA originally planned to bring the ship down west of San Diego, but a predicted cold front bringing higher winds and rougher seas prompted mission managers to move the landing site south by about 350 miles. Splashdown is now expected south of Guadalupe Island some 200 miles west of Baja California.
Approaching from nearly due south, the Orion spacecraft, traveling at 32 times the speed of sound, is expected to slam back into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of 400,000 feet, or about 76 miles, at 12:20 p.m.
NASA planners devised a unique “skip-entry” profile that will cause Orion skip across the top of the atmosphere like a flat stone skipping across calm water. Orion will plunge from 400,000 feet to about 200,000 feet in just two minutes, then climb back up to about 295,000 feet before resuming its computer-guided fall to Earth.
Within a minute and a half of entry, atmospheric friction will generate temperatures across the heat shield reaching nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, enveloping the spacecraft in an electrically charged plasma that will block communications with flight controllers for about five minutes.
After another two-and-a-half minute communications blackout during its second drop into the lower atmosphere, the spacecraft will continue decelerating as it closes in on the targeted landing site, slowing to around 650 mph, roughly the speed of sound, about 15 minutes after the entry began.
Finally, at an altitude of about 22,000 feet and a velocity of around 280 mph, small drogue parachutes will deploy to stabilize the spacecraft. The ship’s main parachutes will deploy at an altitude of about 5,000 feet, slowing Orion to a sedate 18 mph or so for splashdown at 12:39 p.m.
Expected mission duration: 25 days 10 hours 52 minutes, covering 1.4 million miles since blastoff November 16.
NASA and Navy recovery crews aboard the USS Portland, an amphibious dock vessel, will be standing by within sight of splashdown, ready to secure the craft and tow it into the Navy ship’s flooded “well deck.”
Once the deck’s gates are closed, the water will be pumped out, leaving Orion on a custom stand, protecting its heat shield, for the trip back to Naval Base San Diego.
But first, the recovery team will stand by for up to two hours while engineers collect data on how the heat of re-entry soaked into the spacecraft and what effects, if any, that might have on the crew cabin temperature.
“We are on track to have a fully successful mission with some bonus objectives that we’ve achieved along the way,” Sarafin said. “And on entry day, we will realize our priority one objective, which is to demonstrate the vehicle at lunar re-entry conditions.”
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch a commercial lunar lander for the Japanese company ispace. Follow us on Twitter.
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NASA’s Artemis Mobile Launcher rolls into High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building on Friday, Dec. 9. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky
The mobile launch platform for NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket rolled back into the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center Friday for inspections and repairs after liftoff of the Artemis 1 moon mission last month, setting the stage for upgrades to the 380-foot-tall structure before the first crewed Artemis moon flight scheduled for 2024.
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A Russian Soyuz rocket lifts off Nov. 28 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome with a Glonass navigation satellite. Credit: Russian Ministry of Defense
Russia launched two Soyuz rockets Nov. 28 and Nov. 30 from the country’s northern cosmodrome, hauling a Glonass navigation satellite and a military spy satellite into orbit.
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Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch 40 broadband satellites for OneWeb. Follow us on Twitter.
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Forty OneWeb satellites mounted on a dispenser before encapsulation inside a SpaceX payload fairing. Credit: OneWeb
OneWeb’s broadband network will get a boost from SpaceX, which operates its own internet constellation, with the launch of 40 satellites on top of a Falcon 9 rocket set for Thursday from Kennedy Space Center.
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The Orion spacecraft captured this stunning view of a crescent Earth and the limb of the moon after completing the return powered flyby maneuver for the Artemis 1 mission Monday. Credit: NASA TV / Spaceflight Now
Flying just 80 miles (130 kilometers) off the lunar surface, NASA’s Orion capsule fired its main engine Monday to slingshot around the moon and set a course for splashdown Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean to complete the Artemis 1 test flight.
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Live coverage of the flight of the Space Launch System moon rocket and Orion spacecraft on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission . Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
NASA TV Coverage of Orion's Outbound Powered Flyby
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From left to right: Commander Chen Dong, astronaut Liu Yang, and astronaut Cai Xuzhe after landing on the Shenzhou 14 spacecraft. Credit: China Manned Space Agency
Three Chinese astronauts landed Sunday after 182 days on China’s Tiangong space station, completing the busiest mission yet for the country’s human spaceflight program. The astronauts performed three spacewalks and assisted in the arrival and outfitting of two new lab modules at the Tiangong outpost.
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Live coverage of China’s Shenzhou 14 mission, a six-month expedition to the Chinese space station. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
CCTV Landing Webcast (Clean Feed)
CGTN Landing Webcast (English)
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On the left: Shenzhou 14 astronauts Cai Xuzhe, Chen Dong, and Liu Yang on the Tiangong space station. On the right: Shenzhou 15 astronauts Deng Qingming, Fei Junlong, and Zhang Lu. The launch of the Shenzhou 15 crew marked the first time six Chinese astronauts have been in orbit at the same time. Credit: China Manned Space Agency
Three Chinese astronauts were greeted by three of their colleagues Tuesday as they floated into the Tiangong space station following a launch on a Long March rocket earlier in the day, marking the first time China’s space program has had six astronauts in orbit at the same time.
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