January 30, 2017
Breaking News
Mission Reports

Soyuz rocket supplies sendoff for multi-national telecom payload

January 28, 2017

Launching from the edge of the Amazon jungle in South America, a Russian-built Soyuz booster fired into orbit Friday night with a Spanish-owned communications satellite built in Germany to test new commercial telecom technologies and provide video, voice and data relay services.

News Headlines

  • Video: 31 years since Challenger tragedy

    January 28, 2017

    President Reagan addressed the nation with this speech 31 years ago today, following the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and crew on Jan. 28, 1986.

  • Apollo 1 tragedy remembered 50 years later

    January 27, 2017

    With the first Apollo launch less than a month away, America’s race to the moon was in high gear. The three-man crew of the first Apollo test flight — commander Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee — strapped into the cockpit of their spacecraft on Jan. 27, 1967 — 50 years ago Friday — for a dress-rehearsal countdown.

  • Video: Apollo 1 tribute opens at the Kennedy Space Center

    January 27, 2017

    On the 50th anniversary of the launch pad fire that killed the Apollo 1 astronauts, an immersive exhibit area paying tribute to the three men has opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Saturn V Center.

  • Timeline for Soyuz launch with Hispasat 36W-1

    January 27, 2017

    Follow the key events of the Soyuz rocket’s ascent into orbit from the Guiana Space Center with the Hispasat 36W-1 communications satellite.

  • Japanese cargo craft departs space station

    January 27, 2017

    Japan’s sixth HTV supply ship departed the International Space Station on Friday and headed for a destructive re-entry over the South Pacific with trash and disused batteries from the research lab, but engineers will first use the spacecraft for a pioneering experiment to investigate a new way to remove space junk from orbit.

  • NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

    January 25, 2017

    Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month to a restraint holding part of the observatory’s giant segmented mirror in place for launch.

  • China sets November launch for lunar sample return mission

    January 25, 2017

    China plans to launch a robotic mission to return samples from the lunar surface, the first such mission in four decades, in November on top of the country’s new heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket, according to state media reports.

  • Soyuz rolled to launch pad for first geostationary launch from French Guiana

    January 24, 2017

    A Russian-built Soyuz rocket moved to its launch pad on the northeastern coast of South America on Tuesday ahead of a Friday night flight with a Spanish-owned communications satellite to relay video and broadband signals between the Americas and Europe.

  • Japan puts its first military communications satellite into orbit

    January 24, 2017

    A Japanese H-2A rocket took off Tuesday with a communications satellite to relay messages and commands among the country’s defense forces, part of a $1.1 billion program to reduce Japan’s reliance on commercial and international providers to connect its military units.

  • European engineers studying string of clock failures on Galileo navigation satellites

    January 23, 2017

    A wave of clock failures on Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites has not knocked any of the craft offline, but officials want to better understand the problem before launching more satellites into the fleet.

© 1999-2017 Spaceflight Now Inc.