A veteran NASA spacewalker and an EVA rookie from Japan ended their week with nearly six hours of work outside the International Space Station on Friday to finish the restoration of the Station’s Mobile Servicing System that started last year and continued in January to provide Canadarm2 with a new pair of grappling hands.
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The Progress MS-08 cargo spacecraft pulled into its orbital docking port on Thursday after a two-day journey to the International Space Station, marking the delivery of 2,494 Kilograms of cargo to the orbiting outpost.
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It was a Déjà vu at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sunday when a Soyuz rocket stood fully fueled for an express cargo delivery to the International Space Station but suffered a last-second abort of its countdown moments before lighting the engines
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The stakes were high for SpaceX on Tuesday when their triple-core monster rocket leapt off from Florida’s Space Coast on an ambitious shakedown mission that held many unknowns for the California-based company.
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A decade-long journey to the launch pad could end on Tuesday for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket with the long-awaited maiden launch of the tri-core rocket. With a commercial launch license from the FAA in hand, a clean Launch Readiness Review and fair weather forecast, SpaceX wheeled the monster rocket up the ramp to Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center Sunday night and placed it in its vertical launch position for liftoff on Tuesday during a two-and-a-half-hour window opening at 18:30 UTC, 1:30 p.m. local time.
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A beefed-up sounding rocket-turned-orbital-launch-vehicle zoomed into the skies over Japan’s Kyushu Island on Saturday in a bid to become the smallest launch vehicle to successfully achieve orbit one year after its inaugural test flight crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
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Two Russian Cosmonauts had a trial of patience on Friday when working on the Service Module of the International Space Station to replace antiquated communications gear with new electronics to enable the Russian ISS Segment to connect to Russia’s Luch satellites positioned in Geostationary Orbit as high-altitude relay points.
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China launched a Long March 2D rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Friday carrying a group of seven satellites from China, Italy, Argentina and Denmark including an innovative experiment to study the ionospheric precursors of Earthquakes to evaluate whether forecasting of strong Earthquakes will be possible from an orbital vantage point.
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Russia’s Soyuz rocket on Thursday lifted off from the frozen grounds of the Vostochny Cosmodrome on a mission to redeem itself after encountering a launch failure on its last flight from the new launch base established in the country’s Far East.
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SpaceX’s sixth flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket – sporting landing legs but flying in throwaway mode – blasted into the afternoon skies over Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Wednesday to lift Luxembourg’s GovSat-1 satellite into a high-energy Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit.
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NASA pronounced it dead over a decade ago – now, amateur satellite trackers found the agency’s 18-year old IMAGE magnetosphere exploration satellite to be actively transmitting signals to Earth
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Europe’s Ariane 5 appears to have gotten away with a black eye on Thursday when its 97th mission veered off course from the onset of the rocket’s climb, but still managed to deploy two innovative communications craft in a stable, but off-target orbit from where it will be up to the SES 14 and Al Yah 3 satellites to rectify the situation and maneuver into their operational slots above the equator.
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Europe’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle, after 82 consecutive successes over a 15-year streak, encountered a potentially serious anomaly on Thursday when lifting a pair of cutting-edge communications satellites into a high-energy Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit.
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A Long March 2C rocket rose from the mountainous terrain of China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Thursday as part of the country’s fifth orbital space launch of the year, deploying the fourth set of Yaogan-30 reconnaissance satellites.
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SpaceX’s tri-core Falcon Heavy rocket breathed fire for the first time on Wednesday atop its Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad, igniting all 27 Merlin engines on the rocket’s business end for a 12-second test firing designed to collect valuable data not only on the behavior of the engines but also the rocket’s structure as a whole.
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Two U.S. spacewalkers successfully changed out a grappling mechanism on the International Space Station’s Canadarm2 on Tuesday, essentially giving the Station’s most important robotic asset a brand new hand to continue grasping external hardware and visiting spacecraft until the end of the ISS program.
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Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle successfully achieved orbit on its second test flight performed on Sunday from the company’s launch base in New Zealand.
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