Today, July 30, 2020 at 7:50 a.m. EDT (11:50 UTC) NASA’s Mars 2020 rover Perseverance launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a ULA Atlas V 541 rocket. The weather at the Cape was picture-perfect and the launch went smoothly, sending NASA’s newest robotic mission to Mars on its way for an anticipated arrival and landing…
Tag: rocket
Watch Incredible Launch Pad Footage of the Apollo 11 Liftoff
The Saturn V line of heavy launch vehicles used for NASA’s Apollo program were still to this day the most powerful rockets successfully flown, and this video shows an intimate on-pad view of the ignition and liftoff of the Saturn V SA-506 that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon at 13:32 GMT on July 16, 1969….
NASA’s Launching Rockets in Alaska to Study Ozone-Killing Compounds
A Black Brant IX sounding rocket was launched 175 miles high early Friday morning, Jan. 27, 2017, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Poker Flat Research Range to study levels of nitric oxide in the atmosphere as part of the Polar Night Nitric Oxide Experiment (PolarNOx). “The aurora creates nitric oxide, but in the polar night there is no significant…
First Flight of the Lunar Module, 49 Years Ago Today
49 years ago today, at 5:48 p.m. on Jan. 22, 1968, a stocky Saturn IB roared into the sky from Pad 37B at Kennedy Space Center taking the Lunar Module on its first flight into space. The uncrewed Apollo 5 mission would put LM-1 through a series of tests in low-Earth orbit, making sure that…
SpaceX Nails Another Landing at Sea—This Time in the Pacific!
Today, January 14, 2017, SpaceX achieved another commercial launch success with the delivery of ten Iridium satellites to orbit—the first of 70 that will comprise the next generation IridiumNext constellation—as well as a new milestone in its ongoing trek toward reusable launch capability: the first successful landing of a Falcon 9 first-stage booster on…
2017 Will Be a Busy Year for Florida’s Space Coast
Florida’s Space Coast is anticipating 32 rocket launches in 2017, according to the USAF’s 45th Space Wing which manages Patrick AFB and the launch region around Cape Canaveral. This is nine more than the amount that launched from the Cape in 2016 (two of which I was lucky enough to be present for) but still…
Watch Incredible High-Speed Footage of the Apollo 11 Saturn V Liftoff
The Saturn V line of heavy launch vehicles used for NASA’s Apollo program were to this day the most powerful rockets ever used, and this video shows an intimate on-pad view of the ignition and liftoff of the one that carried Apollo 11 into space on July 16, 1969. Captured at 500 frames per second, the…
Space Is Hard, and So Are the Decks of Drone Ships
On Tuesday, April 14, SpaceX launched its Dragon cargo vehicle aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, sending over two tons of supplies up to the crew of the ISS. While the launch was a success and everything went smoothly for Dragon’s CRS-6 mission (despite a single day’s launch delay due to weather) the…
Spaceflight is Still Hard: Antares Explosion Destroys Station Supplies
This past Tuesday, October 28, at 6:22 p.m. EDT, an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket lifted off from the shorefront pad at NASA’s Wallops Space Flight Facility in Virginia, the Cygnus vehicle inside its fairing . The third of eight planned launches in Orbital Sciences’ $1.9-billion NASA contract, the Orb-3 mission was to deliver over 5,000 lbs…
A Frog Makes One Giant Leap for Lunar Exploration
At 11:27 pm EDT on September 6, 2013, NASA’s LADEE mission lifted off aboard a Minotaur V rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia shore, a launch visible across the entire northeast coast as it arced beautifully over the Atlantic on its way to the Moon. Sadly, at least one frog may have…
To The Moon! Apollo 11 Liftoff (HD Video)
On this day, July 16, in 1969, a Saturn V rocket — still the most powerful rocket ever built — launched Apollo 11 on its historic journey to take astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon — the first two becoming the first humans to ever step foot on another world…
How a Falcon Carried a Dragon Into the Future
In the dark hours before dawn this morning, Tuesday May 22, 2012, history was once again made along Florida’s warm and humid space coast. After a series of extensions and delays — and even one literal last-second scrub — SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket… a trailblazing event that opens…
Lights in the Dark 