Page 16 - For Launch News Today

NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency are scheduled to launch April 22 at 6:11 a.m. They’ll ride in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Capsule atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, both of which were recycled from previous crewed missions.

On April 12, 1981, Columbia roared off launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center with veteran astronaut John Young of Orlando and space rookie Robert Crippen aboard.

SpaceX finally got its latest Starship prototype to land without blowing up. Well at least for a little bit.

Orlando night skies in March are gonna be lit with stunning-stellar events, a rocket launch and the emergence of the Worm Moon.

“Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars!” That was the callout from NASA’s ground team after the agency’s $2.7 billion rover landed in one piece on Mars, completing a 300 million mile-journey through space that started in Cape Canaveral.

A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and scout for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a landmark step in the country’s most ambitious deep-space mission yet.

A United Arab Emirates’ orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s rover, the cosmic caboose, will arrive on the scene a week late.

Commercial space launches from companies like SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, helped drive the Space Coast economy in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Signs point to an even stronger 2021, especially for the private space industry.

NASA announced details of why a weekend hot fire test of the core stage for the forthcoming Artemis I mission to the moon cut off after only one minute into a planned eight-minute test.

The International Space Station bid adieu Tuesday to 12 bottles of French Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science. The wine made it home when the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida late Wednesday.