Unfortunately, history repeated itself when Starship‘s upper stage made it into space only to start spinning uncontrollably before losing contact and breaking apart, sending debris cascading back to earth early Thursday evening.
One of the goals of the flight was to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, which was completed successfully.
A SpaceX Starship spacecraft, the upper portion of the most powerful launch system ever built, exploded during its eighth test flight Thursday, disrupting air traffic and marking the second consecutive failure for the vehicle this year.
The uncrewed Starship mission lifted off at 5:30 p.m. CT (6:30 p.m. ET) from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, with the spacecraft riding atop a 232-foot-tall (71-meter-tall) Super Heavy rocket booster.
SpaceX launched Starship for 5th time on Oct. 13, 2024 from Starbase in south Texas. The Super Heavy booster was caught by the launch tower‘s ‚chopsticks‘ shortly after separation from Starship.
The company successfully used the arms of its launch tower to catch the rocket’s booster, a major milestone toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.
Starship continued on into space, traveling halfway around the world before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
Watch LIVE as SpaceX launches Polaris Dawn on its multi-day mission to orbit, which will see Dragon and its crew fly to the highest Earth orbit ever flown since the Apollo program and participate in the first-ever extravehicular activity (EVA) by commercial astronauts wearing SpaceX-developed EVA suits.
(October 13, 2023)
To accomplish the rest of the mission, the van-size spacecraft will rely on its new solar electric propulsion system, powered by Hall-effect thrusters, Oh said. The thrusters will utilize the spacecraft’s large solar arrays and “use electricity to ionize xenon gas and accelerate those charged ions through an electric field to very, very high speeds,” Oh said. (…)
Also along for the ride is the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration, or DSOC. Occurring during the first two years of the journey to Psyche, it will be NASA’s most distant experiment of high-bandwidth laser communications, testing the sending and receiving of data to and from Earth using an invisible near-infrared laser.
The crew is riding aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance capsule on the mission, dubbed Crew-7. The spacecraft launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:27 a.m. ET Saturday.
The four astronauts on the mission include NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, who is serving as mission commander; Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen representing the European Space Agency; Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA; and Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos.
The US launch of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle with the Dragon spacecraft, has been cancelled due to weather conditions, the American company SpaceX twitted on Saturday.
The launch was the 382nd flight mission for the Long March series carrier rockets.
The launch of Nauka was originally scheduled for 2007 but has repeatedly been delayed due to technical problems. The module‘s systems have since been modernized and underwent repairs.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei lifted off from Russia‘s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at the expected time of 0742 GMT, footage broadcast by NASA TV showed, with docking expected at 1107 GMT.
Three Americans — Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker — and Japan‘s Soichi Noguchi will blast off at 7:27 pm Sunday (0027 GMT Monday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The satellites, including 10 commercial remote sensing satellites developed by Argentine company Satellogic, blasted off atop a Long March-6 carrier rocket at 11:19 a.m. (Beijing Time).
For the first time, they tried a two-orbit approach and docked with the space station in just a little over three hours after lift-off. Previously it took twice as long for crews to reach the station.
Nine satellites, belonging to the Jilin-1 Gaofen 03-1 group, are launched by a Long March-11 carrier rocket at the Yellow Sea, on Sept. 15, 2020. China successfully sent nine satellites into planned orbit at the Yellow Sea Tuesday. The nine satellites blasted off atop a Long March-11 carrier rocket, China‘s first sea-launched rocket, at 9:23 a.m. (Beijing Time).
Carrying satellites from the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, the Electron launcher lifted off from Rocket Lab’s privately-run spaceport on New Zealand’s North Island at 5:19:36 p.m. EDT (2119:36 GMT).
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed the Long March 3B launch vehicle had successfully placed the Beidou-3 satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit shortly after. The satellite was later reported catalogued in a 218 x 35,784-kilometer orbit.
A Long March-2C rocket, carrying the satellite HY-1D, lifted off at 2:31 a.m. (Beijing Time), according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA)
Watch live coverage as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA make a second attempt at liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule with two U.S. astronauts. This is the first mission of its kind to the International Space Station in nearly a decade.
NASA and SpaceX now are targeting 3:22 p.m. EDT Saturday, May 30, for the launch of the first commercially built and operated American rocket and spacecraft carrying astronauts to the space station.
SpaceX scrubbed plans to launch the first American astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil on Wednesday as thunderstorms tore through Florida’s Space Coast, temporarily thwarting a highly anticipated test that could determine the future of American space flight.
Astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken were slated to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s Dragon Crew capsule at 4:33 p.m.
This fresh take on a vintage look will be on full display Wednesday when SpaceX plans to launch NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station — a first for a private company.
NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley are set to arrive at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, one week before the pair’s scheduled launch to the International Space Station on the SpaceX Demo-2 mission.
18.5.2020 This will be the first launch of American astronauts on an American rocket from American soil to the International Space Station since the final flight of the space shuttle in 2011.
The Falcon rocket blasted off with 4,300 pounds (1,950 kilograms) of equipment and experiments for the International Space Station. Just minutes later, the spent first-stage booster made a dramatic midnight landing back at Cape Canaveral, its return accompanied by sonic booms.
The U.N. bans North Korea from launching satellites because it is considered a forbidden test of long-range missile technology.
After repeated failures, North Korea successfully put a satellite into orbit for the first time in 2012 in a launch from the same site. North Korea had another successful satellite launch in 2016.
It wasn‘t immediately clear what criticism the president was referring to, as the officials had not issued public statements on Trump‘s tweet or his decision to release an image taken by U.S. forces of a damaged Iranian rocket facility. Trump has faced criticism from some Democrats for releasing the image due to its high resolution and concerns over whether it should have remained classified.
A mysterious explosion on Thursday at an Iranian space center prompted speculation that it was American sabotage, rather than an accident, that was responsible for the third successive failure of Tehran’s efforts to show it could loft satellites into orbit.
As pictures from commercial satellites of a rocket’s smoking remains began to circulate, President Trump denied Friday on Twitter that the United States was involved.
A revised policy for approving the launch of spacecraft with nuclear power systems is the latest measure intended to support greater use of nuclear power systems in orbit and beyond.
The policy, formally issued by President Trump Aug. 20 to coincide with the latest public meeting of the National Space Council, updates guidelines for how both government and commercial spacecraft carrying space nuclear systems are reviewed and approved for launch.