A streak of 36 successful launches over a period of 18 years ended on Thursday when India’s PSLV rocket suffered an in-flight failure that left its payload – a replacement satellite for the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System – in a lower- than-planned orbit and possibly trapped underneath the rocket’s payload fairing.
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More trouble appears to be brewing in Geostationary Orbit as reports emerged this week of a satellite breaking apart in prime orbital real estate – the second such incident in as many months, adding to an already significant population of debris and zombie satellites
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Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser took to the skies over California’s Edwards Air Force Base on Wednesday for the first captive carry flight in the craft’s current round of testing that will ultimately see the space plane fly freely for approach and landing tests as part of its flight qualification for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services 2 contracts.
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NASA’s TDRS-M satellite this week reached its high-altitude perch in Geosynchronous Orbit and completed all major deployment events on its solar arrays and antennas in preparation for a multi-month commissioning phase before entering an active role within the agency’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System.
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The Indian Space Research Organization is counting down to the launch of a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on Thursday with a revamped IRNSS navigation satellite set to provide critical replacement capacity to begin dealing with a systemic clock issue that is affecting India’s first IRNSS generation.
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The next crew trio headed to the International Space Station made a short visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome Sunday & Monday as part of an unusual flight preparations schedule laid out for the upcoming Soyuz MS-06 mission.
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A previously unknown ‘Inspector Satellite’ separated from the Russian military-operated Kosmos-2519 satellite last week, the Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed on Wednesday and reported the small sub-satellite would be tasked with tasked with inspecting an unspecified Russian satellite via photo surveys.
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The Centaur upper stage that sent four magnetospheric probes into an elliptical orbit around Earth re-entered the atmosphere on August 28, 2017 after slowly decaying from orbit over the course of two and a half years.
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Orbital ATK’s Minotaur IV rocket shot up into the night skies over Florida’s Space Coast in the early hours on Saturday, carrying out its debut launch from Cape Canaveral to dispatch the ORS-5 Space Situational Awareness Satellite
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An Orbital ATK Minotaur IV rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 46, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:04 UTC on Saturday, August 26, 2017, carrying into orbit the ORS-5 mission for the U.S. Air Force.
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An Orbital ATK Minotaur IV rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 46, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:04 UTC on Saturday, August 26, 2017, carrying into orbit the ORS-5 mission for the U.S. Air Force.
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Orbital ATK’s Minotaur rocket is set for its first launch from Cape Canaveral Friday night, tasked with carrying into orbit the ORS-5 mission for the U.S. Air Force comprising the SensorSat space surveillance spacecraft and three CubeSats riding shotgun with the primary payload.
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Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin, completing his ninth career spacewalk, and Sergey Ryazansky, venturing into the void for the fourth time, spent seven hours and 34 minutes working outside the International Space Station
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A very lightly-loaded Falcon 9 departed its Pacific Coast launch pad on Thursday, carrying into orbit the FormoSat-5 Earth Observation Satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization – a contract left over from SpaceX’s Falcon 1 days that ended up creating the most colossal waste of rocket performance in recent history.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base at 18:51 UTC on August 24, 2017 on a long-delayed mission with the FormoSat-5 Earth Observation Satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base at 18:51 UTC on August 24, 2017 on a long-delayed mission with the FormoSat-5 Earth Observation Satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization.
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The International Space Station received a new flagship particle detector earlier this week when the CREAM instrument package was retrieved from the Dragon spacecraft’s Trunk Section and transferred – via robotic arm handshake – to the Exposed Facility of the Station’s Kibo module
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