SpaceX

Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, left, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chub, right, are seen in quarantine behind glass during a press conference, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023 at the Cosmonaut Hotel in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. O’Hara, Kononenko, Chub are launched aboard their Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft on Sept. 15. Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko continues to cement a place in the annals of space history with his historic mission on board the International Space Station. On Wednesday, he became the first person to reach 1,000 cumulative days in space. The milestone comes amid his fifth flight to space and during his third stint as the commander of the ISS. Back in February, Kononenko broke the cumulative in-space record of 878 days, which was previ...

A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 8-5 mission on June 4, 2024. The mission coincided with the 14th anniversary of the first Falcon 9 launch in 2010. Image: Spaceflight Now SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday night, 14 years to the day when the rocket made its launch debut from the same pad. Since that day, SpaceX launched more than 340 Falcon 9 rockets, 285 of which were using previously flown boosters. The Starlink 8-5 mission lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:16 p.m. EDT (0216 UTC). The Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number B1067 in the SpaceX fleet, launched for a 20th time. It previously supported the flights of two Crew Dragon astronaut missions, two Cargo Dragon resupply mission...

A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 7, 2024. The mission, Starlink 10-1, was the first to send Starlink satellites to this shell of the mega constellation. Image: Spaceflight Now Update 8:57 p.m. EDT: SpaceX adjusted the T-0 liftoff time. SpaceX followed up its fourth test flight of its massive Starship rocket in southern Texas with a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The Friday night flight marked the 344th Falcon 9 to launch, a little more than 14 years after its launch debut on June 4, 2010. The Starlink 10-1 mission added another 22 satellites to the massive constellation consisting of more than 6,000 active satellites in low Earth orbit, according to expert orbital tracker and astronomer, Jonathan McDowell. Lifto...

For a fourth time in program history, SpaceX launches its Starship rocket from its Starbase facility in southern Texas. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now Update 2:32 p.m. EDT: Added mission details. For a fourth time in a little more than a year, SpaceX launched a test mission of its massive Starship rocket from its development facility in southern Texas called Starbase. The launch, dubbed Flight 4, push the launch vehicle towards its goal of being a mostly reusable rocket. Similarly to the previous three launches, Flight 4 did not include a payload and flew a suborbital trajectory. Unlike the preceding missions, Flight 4 saw a soft splashdown of the Super Heavy Booster (Booster 11) and of the Starship upper stage (Ship 29). Liftoff took place at 7:50 a.m. CDT (8:50 a.m. EDT, 1250 UTC)...

The Hubble Space Telescope is seen after its release from the space shuttle Columbia during a 2002 servicing mission. Credit: NASA Trouble with one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s three remaining gyroscopes, critical for aiming and locking onto targets, has prompted mission managers to switch to a backup control mode that will limit some observations but keep the iconic observatory running well into the 2030s, officials said Tuesday. “We still believe there’s very high reliability and likelihood that we can operate Hubble very successfully, doing groundbreaking science, through the rest of the 20s and into the 2030s,” Patrick Crouse, the Hubble project manager, told reporters during an afternoon teleconference. At the same time, Mark Clampin, director of astrophysics at NASA Headquarte...