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It's become a routine, and a successful one at that for the SpaceX team at the Kwajalein Atoll of the Marshall Islands. A static flight was conducted today, Saturday, of the Falcon 1 Flight 4, and launch is planned for sometime between Tuesday and Thursday (California time).
Read MoreNASA would be the first one to tell you that it takes a ton of help to get their rockets out the door and up into space, and so it goes with the Ares I rocket. Described as America's next flagship in space, the Ares I is now in development by NASA and its industry partners, to carry human explorers and new missions of discovery to the moon and beyond.
Read MoreSpace Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has been granted an Operational License by the U.S. Air Force for the use of Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida coast. Receipt of the license, in conjunction with the approved Site Plan, paves the way for SpaceX to initiate Falcon 9 launch operations later this year.
Read MoreGeoEye-1 satellite, designed and built by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, has a big job ahead of it after its launch on Thursday, September 4, from Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California. The satellite will be able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond but also map the location of an object that size to within about nine feet (three meters) of its true location on the surface of the Earth without need for ground control points. Together, GeoEye's IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites can collect almost one million square kilometers of imagery per day.
Read MoreA major accomplishment, to be sure as the five-satellite RapidEye constellation was successfully launched onboard Dnepr from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at 0715 UTC today. Following this morning's launch, the spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle in slightly different orbits to allow constellation phasing and will eventually be positioned equally spaced within the same orbit about 19 minutes apart.
Read MoreKorean Telecom Corporation (KT Corporation) has selected Arianespace to launch their next communications satellite. To be known as Koreasat-6, the satellite will be boosted into geostationary transfer orbit by an Ariane 5 or Soyuz launcher from the Guiana Space Center, Europe's Spaceport, French Guiana, during the second half of 2010. Koreasat-6 is the second satellite to be launched by Arianespace for the Korean operator, following Koreasat-3, orbited in 1999.
Read MoreThe European Space Agency (ESA) is about to launch the most sophisticated mission ever to investigate the Earth’s gravitational field and to map the reference shape of our planet, known as the geoid, with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) will be placed into a low altitude near sun-synchronous orbit by a Russian Rockot vehicle launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia, some 800 km north of Moscow.
Read MoreInternational Launch Services (ILS) now has a contract today with Inmarsat for the launch of an S-band satellite to provide mobile broadcast and two-way telecommunications services throughout Europe.M/b> The contract follows last week’s successful launch of the Inmarsat-4 F3 satellite on an ILS Proton Breeze M vehicle.
Read MoreNASA destroyed an unmanned experimental rocket carrying a pair of research satellites Friday when it veered off course shortly after an early morning liftoff. At 5:10 a.m. Friday, August 22, the rocket was destroyed by range safety officials after liftoff from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. No injuries or property damage have been reported.
Read MoreOn August 2nd, Falcon 1 executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. At this point, we are certain as to the origin of the problem. Four methods of analysis — vehicle inertial measurement, chamber pressure, onboard video and a simple physics free body calculation — all give the same answer.
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