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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...