Space

The U.S. Space Force and SpaceX has launched the fifth GPS III satellite from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, marking the first time a national security space launch reused a booster.

NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency on June 16 were prevented from equipping the International Space Station (ISS) with the first of six planned Roll Out Solar Arrays, due to a spacesuit issue and hardware misalignment.

At around 4:30 p.m. local time, Shenzhou-12 successfully docked with the Tianhe core module using an autonomous docking system.

Russia says it is ready to discuss the future of the International Space Station (ISS) despite earlier threats to withdraw from the program after 2024.

The U.S. military plans to become an early adopter of using rockets to move cargo.

Shenzhou-12 will blast off on a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan satellite launch center in the Gobi Desert at 9:22 a.m. local time on June 17.

Space situation-awareness startup LeoLabs plans to locate its next space radar in the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic.

The head of Russia’s Roscosmos State Corp., Dmitry Rogozin, has proposed creating a legal responsibility for leaving debris in orbit.

Russian intends to fly cosmonauts to the Chinese Space Station, launching Soyuz capsules from its own Vostochny Cosmodrome or Europe’s Kourou, French Guiana, spaceport, though neither site has yet supported a human spaceflight, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian State Space Corp., said on June 15.

Rocket Lab will provide two Photon satellites for a NASA-backed small-science mission to explore the magnetosphere of Mars.

An office within the U.S. Commerce Department will launch a space traffic management pilot program this summer.

The U.S. Space Force is gearing up for the first-ever National Security Space Launch featuring a reusable booster that is scheduled to send the fifth GPS III satellite into space.

Bidding to ride on the first passenger flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft closed at $28 million, with the unnamed winner to join company founder and funder Jeff Bezos, his brother and one other person for a ride slated for July 20.

Hard mate between the 212-ft. tall, 188,000-lb. core stage and the Northrop Grumman five-segment booster rockets occurred at about 7 a.m. EDT on June 13 in High Bay 3 of Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building.

This could be final year of observations with SOFIA as the White House 2022 budget proposal for NASA calls for the cancellation of the airborne observatory.

After years of development, the FAA is bringing to bear a new capability for tracking spacecraft.

The June 13 launch came less than four months after contract signing, demonstrating a responsive space capability for the U.S. Space Force.

Despite being responsible for two very different areas of the world, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Northern Command are both seeking additional funding in fiscal 2022 for satellite communications, according to documents obtained by Aerospace DAILY.

The European Space Agency has chosen its next medium-class space science mission—a Venus orbiter that will join a pair of NASA probes, selected last week to help resolve questions about why Earth’s sister planet evolved so differently.

NASA’s recently extended Juno mission to Jupiter this week transmitted its first close-up images of the giant planet’s icy moon Ganymede, the Solar System’s largest lunar companion.

Shenzhou-12 will be the first of four manned missions to support the construction of the Tiangong space station.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter completed a seventh excursion through the skies of Mars on June 8, traveling south 348 ft. in 62.8 sec. as part of a series of flight tests to prepare for future aerial planetary exploration campaigns.

NASA’s Lunar IceCube has completed prelaunch environmental testing at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in preparation for its flight as a secondary payload aboard the Artemis I mission later this year.

An upcoming Pentagon report concludes that classified U.S. technology is not behind the hundreds of UAP sightings by military pilots and other credible witnesses.

City of Houston officials joined with Collins Aerospace on June 7 to ceremonially break ground on the construction of an 8-acre campus on the grounds of Houston Spaceport.