Byeric Ralph News Today

SpaceX says a Falcon 9 rocket is on track to launch Egypt’s Nilesat 301 communications satellite no earlier than (NET) 5:04 pm ET (21:04 UTC) on Wednesday, June 8th. Built by Franco-Italian aerospace company Thales Alenia Space, Nilesat 301 is a fairly standard 4.1-ton (~9000 lb) geostationary communications satellite designed to provide large swaths of […]

SpaceX has begun staging and assembling parts of a giant crane it will soon need to stack Starship’s first East Coast launch tower and install other major launch pad components. The presence of the base of that crane at SpaceX’s NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A was visually confirmed by NASASpaceflight.com photographers during […]

The US military has awarded providers SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) another eight launch contracts worth a total of $846 million that the companies will be tasked with completing over the next two or so years. The US Space Systems Command (SSC) announced the decision on May 26th, providing some basic information about […]

SpaceX’s first dedicated Falcon Heavy launch for NASA has been hit by a seven-week delay after spacecraft engineers discovered a software anomaly during preflight processing. Named after the exotic metallic asteroid it’s designed to explore, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft completed its journey from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch […]

SpaceX appears to be on track to launch its fifth dedicated Falcon 9 rideshare mission as early as 2:27 pm EDT (18:27 UTC) on Wednesday, May 25th, carrying a wide variety of interesting payloads into Earth orbit. SpaceX has reportedly assigned Falcon 9 B1061 to the mission and Transporter-5 will be its eight launch and […]

A handful of days after a pair of Falcon 9 rockets launched 106 Starlink satellites in less than 23 hours, SpaceX has already raised another Falcon 9 rocket vertical for another Starlink mission – set to be the fourth this month. That mission – Starlink 4-18 – will see SpaceX launch another batch of 53 […]

SpaceX has completed its 21st Falcon 9 launch of 2022, continuing an impressive average cadence of more than one launch per week. After an unexplained 40-minute delay from 6:20 am EDT, former Falcon Heavy booster B1052 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A shortly after sunrise at 6:59 am EDT (10:59 UTC) on […]

Two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets have completed back-to-back Starlink launches less than 24 hours apart, successfully delivering 106 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO). Originally scheduled just a handful of hours apart, slight delays eventually saw Starlink 4-13 and Starlink 4-15 settle on 6:07 pm EDT, May 13th and 4:40 pm EDT, May 14th, […]

Update: Next Spaceflight reports that SpaceX has delayed Starlink 4-15 to 4:38 pm EDT, May 14th, ending the immediate possibility of a new SpaceX record for time between launches. After a few days of delays pushed the missions closer together, SpaceX is now preparing to launch two batches of 53 Starlink satellites just eight hours […]

In a significant achievement, public launch provider Rocket Lab has – with a few caveats – successfully used a helicopter to catch the booster of its Electron rocket out of mid-air on the very first attempt. The company began working on ways to recover and reuse the booster of its tiny Electron rocket in 2019, […]