The COVID-19 pandemic has forced Rocket Lab to postpone its next mission.
The California-based company announced earlier this week that it would be suspending its next launch, a mission nicknamed ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ that was scheduled to take-off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia peninsula on March 30.
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Starhopper test rocket has made its highest and final test flight.
SpaceX Starhopper prototype took flight around 5 p.m. CT on August 27 and successfully completed its 150-meter test. The whole flight lasted a little under a minute. You can watch whole launch right here.
From start to finish, the test rocket spent almost a full minute, approximately 57 seconds, in-flight, showing off the first-ever public view of a Raptor engine fired in daylight.
The Falcon Heavy rocket launched early Tuesday, two cores made it back safely.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launched at 2:30 am ET from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday morning. It sent its payload of 24 satellites into space. Less than three minutes after the launch, the rocket’s two side-mounted boosters separated as planned from the first stage’s center core and subsequently returned to make a safe landing near KSC. Over the next 3 hours and 30 minutes, the Falcon Heavy’s upper stage separated from the center core and flew onward, into the first of several orbits. One of its missions was to drop off 24 satellites into three different orbits.
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After nearly a week in space, the SpaceX Crew Dragon hit its splashdown time of 8:45 a.m. ET right on target Friday. It landed in the Atlantic Ocean after undocking from the International Space Station and re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The successful demonstration mission for the capsule that SpaceX is “an amazing achievement in American history,” according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who called the flight the “dawning of a new era in American human space flight.”
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SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy rocket flight could take place five weeks from now , if everything goes according to plan.
The California-based company has applied for two Federal Communications Commission licenses it needs for its next Falcon Heavy liftoff – revealing a second launch date for the world’s biggest modern rocket.
More »Elon Musk shares some surprising details about the materials used to create the massive new rocket.
SpaceX managed the record-breaking 21 launches in 2018, but it has also currently been working on some bigger plans for the future. In the early morning of Christmas Eve, Musk released on Twitter a photo of prototype of his spacecraft, now known as Starship, and previously as Big Falcon Rocket. This is the ship that SpaceX plans to use to send people to the moon, to Mars and on other super-fast international flights to space.
SpaceX has said the spacecraft, being built at the SpaceX test facility in Texas, will be bigger and considerably more powerful than the Saturn V that took Apollo astronauts to the moon. The nose cone is multiple stories tall. Musk tweeted that the massive rocket prototype has a stainless steel skin and its steel will perform better than lighter weight carbon fiber material at high temperatures.
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