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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A flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 21:25:00 UTC on January 31, 2018 with the SES 16 / GovSat-1 communications satellite operated by LuxGovSat.
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Russia’s Soyuz rocket stands ready for liftoff from the Far Eastern Vostochny Cosmodrome on Thursday with a cluster of eleven satellites, set to rehabilitate the Soyuz/Fregat combination after encountering a failure on its last Vostochny launch in November.
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SpaceX delayed the launch of the company’s sixth flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday due to a faulty transducer on the launch vehicle, putting in motion a 24-hour recycle to Wednesday’s backup launch window of 21:25 to 23:46 UTC.
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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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International Space Station managers decided on Sunday to postpone a scheduled spacewalk from Monday after additional diagnostics performed on the Station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm showed a connectivity problem on the primary command string of the newly-installed Latching End Effector could be solved through software.
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The re-entry of an eight-metric-ton Zenit rocket stage was observed from the Peru/Brazil border in the afternoon skies of January 27, 2018, one month after the rocket took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to lift a communications satellite into orbit for Angola.
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Spacewalkers aboard the International Space Station will be forced to backtrack on Monday, reversing work completed on a January 23 excursion after controllers on the ground were unable to establish a redundant command path to the newly-installed grappling hand on the Station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.
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While all eyes were on Falcon Heavy’s milestone Static Fire Test this week, SpaceX continued preparations for the company’s next Falcon 9 mission from Florida’s Space Coast, culminating on Friday in a successful Static Fire Test of the flight-proven booster that will be tasked with lifting the SES 16 communications satellite as early as next Tuesday.
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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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Planet’s Flock 2E-2 Earth-imaging satellite re-entered the atmosphere on January 23, 2018 – decaying 20 months after being released from the International Space Station to join Planet’s orbiting constellation of Doves that image the entire Earth at least once per day.
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Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket rolled out to its French Guiana launch pad in preparation for liftoff on Thursday on the vehicle’s year-opening mission, tasked with deploying a pair of innovative satellites to a Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit peaking 45,000 Kilometers above the planet.
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Rocket Lab – after successfully demonstrating the company’s Electron launch vehicle last weekend – had another surprise in store this week when revealing the mission had successfully executed an orbit circularization maneuver with a previously unknown Kick Stage and deployed a reflective satellite named “The Humanity Star”.
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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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A large number of space reporters and enthusiasts were on hand for Wednesday’s Static Fire Test of SpaceX’s tri-core Falcon Heavy rocket, capturing the milestone from different perspectives.
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