The final building block in a critical global missile warning system operated by the Pentagon took flight on Friday atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasting off into the night over Florida’s Cape Canaveral.
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China continued its January launch frenzy on Friday with a tube-launched Long March 11 rocket blasting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 4:12 UTC with a group of six satellites – five from China and one from Canadian start-up company Kepler Communications.
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Japan’s third Epsilon rocket fired into the pre-dawn skies over Kyushu Island Thursday morning, carrying into orbit the ASNARO-2 radar-imaging satellite setting out to demonstrate a compact satellite platform capable of hosting high-performance instruments matching large flagship satellite missions in data quality.
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SpaceX’s Dragon C108.2 spacecraft departed the International Space Station after a month-long stay on Saturday via the first-ever ground-controlled release of a visiting vehicle, sending the spacecraft on a five-and-a-half hour return journey expected to culminate with a parachute-assisted splashdown landing
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A United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket thundered off from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday on classified government business, lifting the secret NROL-47 satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office to replenish the U.S. spy satellite fleet.
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India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle opened the country’s space flight year 2018 on Friday with an impressive Return-To-Flight mission lifting into orbit an assortment of 31 satellites of vastly different shapes and sizes for operators in seven different countries.
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China continued its busy beginning of year push on Thursday with the launch of a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, carrying the next two Beidou-3 navigation satellites to join the country’s growing global navigation satellite system
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There are unconfirmed reports the secretive Zuma spacecraft may have been dead on arrival in orbit or has even re-entered the atmosphere after failing to separate from the Falcon 9 second stage.
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China opened its 2018 space launch campaign on Tuesday with the launch of the second pair of Gaojing Earth-Imaging Satellites joining the growing SuperView constellation delivering observation products for the commercial market.
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral under a veil of darkness Sunday night, both literally and figuratively with launch occurring at 1:00 UTC Monday morning, carrying into orbit the top-secret Zuma spacecraft which, from a public perspective, has all traits of a black project.
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The year 2017 saw a total of 90 known orbital launch attempts from seven nations and space ports in eight different countries. 2017 had the second most orbital launch attempts of any year in the current century, short of 92 launches in 2014 and showing a slight increase from 2016 that had 85 known launch attempts.
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The thunder of a Zenit rocket returned to Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome Tuesday night for the first time in two years as the Russian-Ukrainian booster made its long-awaited return to lift Angola’s first communications satellite into Geostationary Orbit.
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Two days after placing an Earth-imaging satellite into orbit, China was in action again on Monday for the country’s fourth launch of the month and the final expected Chinese mission in 2017, involving a Long March 2C rocket lifting the third group of Yaogan-30 electromagnetic-sensing satellites into orbit.
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A Russian-Ukrainian Zenit booster was moved to its Baikonur Cosmodrome Launch Pad on Sunday as the first of its kind to take flight in over two years, starting what is hoped to be Zenit’s resurrection
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Japan’s H-IIA rocket leapt off its sea-side launch pad on Tanegashima Island at 10:26 a.m. local time, 1:26 UTC on Saturday, soaring into orbit with a high-profile climate observation satellite and a technology demonstration spacecraft set for a mission orbiting the edge of the atmosphere to develop previously unused orbital real estate.
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A flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket lit up the evening sky over California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday to deploy ten more Iridium-NEXT communications satellites to take the largest satellite constellation upgrade ever undertaken across the halfway point to the finish line.
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Japan’s H-IIA rocket is gearing up for its sixth and final launch of the year, set for a Saturday liftoff from the picturesque Tanegashima Space Center to send a pair of very different satellites into orbit
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