News

Space Perspective wants to be your ride to the edges of space all for the cost of $125,000. Which compared to the rumored half a million for Blue Origin’s New Shepard, it might just be the best deal. If you’re willing to compensate.

United Launch Alliance loaded an Atlas V Booster and Dual Engine Centaur onto their Rocketship boat over the weekend. Its destination? Florida. This isn’t just any ordinary Atlas V though, this will be the first one to carry crew to space. The Boeing Starliner Crewed Flight Test (CFT) is still expected NET late 2021. However, a second Orbital Flight Test is needed.

UPDATE: ULA Begins OFT-2 Booster Stacking

UPDATE: RL-10C not to be used for upcoming Atlas missions

Rocket Lab is continuing progress on their latest launch pad located at their New Zealand facility, LC-1B, with the installation of the strongback. The Electron launch vehicle has been grounded since an in-flight failure of the second stage engine. The anomaly investigation is still underway, but the FAA has cleared Electron for flight.

An Atlas V booster and Dual Engine Centaur have arrived at the Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center (ASOC) after being offloaded from the Rocketship transport vessel. Spaceflight media was invited to attend the event to provide coverage. This is the third human-rated Atlas V rocket to be delivered to the Cape, with the first being stacked ahead of the Orbital Flight Test 2.

On this day 17 years ago the age of privately funded space ventures reached a major milestone with Mojave Aerospace Ventures’ SpaceShipOne flight. Mojave Aerospace Ventures is a joint venture between Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites, largely funded by Paul Allen. This marked the first privately funded and developed crewed spaceflight and also led won Mojave Aerospace Ventures the Ansari X Prize.

As SpaceX’s new droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, has been under construction, we’ve said that the design has changed radically. We have been wondering when ASOG would finally gain its wings, and that time seems to be now.

We’ve all been waiting on the debut of United Launch Alliance’s brand new Vulcan rocket, the rightful successor to the Atlas V and Delta IV. But we might have to wait a little long for a payload to be ready to fly on the first mission.

Today marks an important milestone in spaceflight history. For the first time on the Space Shuttle, a woman would fly and bring motivation to little girls everywhere to join the STEM industry.

The United States Space Force operates the GPS constellation that we use every day to know where we are. Tomorrow, SpaceX will launch a new GPS III satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, into orbit to expand and upgrade the constellation that was been active since 1978. The launch window opens at 12:09 p.m. and lasts 15 minutes.

Date: Thursday, June 17th, 12:09 p.m. EDT

Pegasus XL is an air-launched rocket capable of launching ~443kg to Low Earth Orbit. Northrop Grumman conducted a launch of this vehicle over the weekend on a mission for the Space Force. The satellite was named Odyssey and was designed to be a “Space Domain Awareness” Technology Demonstration.

SpaceX’s third droneship has been under construction for the last couple of months now and it is looking very close to being finished. This week, signs of deck work are showing up, which could be a final step before being shipped out.

Today NASA and SpaceX announced a new launch date for the next crew rotation on the ISS this coming fall. The new date is due to “visiting vehicle traffic” with a few missions possibly taking place around the same time.

Today, Blue Origin held the final live auction for a seat on the first crewed launch of their launch vehicle, New Shepard.

Stacking of the SLS Core Stage is well underway at this time with operations beginning on June 10th. This is a major milestone for the Artemis and SLS programs. The launch of Artemis 1 is currently NET November 2021, but this timeframe assumes no complications.

Beginning of this month Blue Origin announced an auction for the first seat on their New Shepard flight in July. Today marked the ending of blind bidding and the minimum price for the seat has been announced, and it’s a lot.

This Thursday, June 10th, a ring-of-fire eclipse will be visible across the northern hemisphere. The Moon will cast its shadow onto the Earth, this is in contrast to the recent Lunar eclipse, where the Earth cast its shadow onto the surface of the moon.

Virgin Orbit has become one of the newest launch providers to come online with the success of their Demo 2 launch earlier this year. Now their first operational mission is nearing launch readiness by the end of this month.

We’ve been talking recently about SpaceX’s newest droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas and that it will be replacing one of SpaceX’s droneships on the east coast. It has become pretty apparent now which droneship it will be replacing.

Relativity Space just announced the successor to the Terran 1 smallsat launch vehicle, Terran R. Coming in at 216 feet tall and producing 2.1 million pounds of thrust, Terran R will be the world’s first fully reusable, 3D printed rocket. The first launch is expected NET 2024 out of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Over the weekend, SpaceX launched their second Falcon 9 of June and this time it wasn’t another batch of Starlink satellites. Read below to view pictures and videos of the launch of the newest SiriusXM satellite captured by our team of photographers.

Axiom Space and SpaceX announced a 3 flight deal to carry private astronauts to the International Space Station on June 2nd. These 3 additional flights will occur through 2023 and will utilize the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule.