Winter remained with a firm grip on Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on Friday when a Soyuz 2-1A emerged from its assembly hall and rolled to its launch pad for a Sunday liftoff with the Progress MS-08 cargo spacecraft on an expedited, two-orbit rendezvous with the International Space Station.
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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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SpaceX achieved a momentous feat on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 when successfully launching the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket on a high-stakes shakedown mission – successfully boosting into orbit and later off into Deep Space a midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster as a novelty-payload chosen for this flight by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.
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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 discarded Ariane 5 Sylda payload adapter placed into orbit in 2009 re-entered the atmosphere on February 3, 2018 after a nine-year drop from a highly elliptical Geostationary Transfer Orbit, having helped put a pair of communications satellites into orbit.
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The Upper Stage of a Orbital Sciences Minotaur I Rocket re-entered the atmosphere in February 2018 after over a decade in orbit.
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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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Just over a year after crashing into the Pacific Ocean on its first test flight, Japan’s SS-520 sounding-rocket-turned-orbital-launch-vehicle stands ready for another try to become the world’s smallest orbital launch vehicle, just powerful enough to lift a three-Kilogram CubeSat.
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Two Russian Cosmonauts are set for a complex six-hour and 40-minute spacewalk on Friday outside the International Space Station to work on the exterior of the Russian ISS Segment to replace communications gear on the Zvezda Service Module.
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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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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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