PIONEERING SPACEX ROCKET LAUNCH ABORTED - Private spaceflight company SpaceX scrubbed a scheduled rocket launch Tuesday, in which it planned to attempt the pioneering step of landing the rocket's first stage on a floating platform. The next possible launch attempt is at 5:09 a.m. ET Friday, NASA said via Twitter, "pending resolution of the issue." NASA and SpaceX said the problem was with the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage, rather than the section it plans to try to land.    More
(Source: CNN - Jan 6)

SPACEX LAUNCH SET FOR TUESDAY - SpaceX and NASA plan to launch a rocket Tuesday morning to send supplies and equipment to the International Space Station — the first such mission since another company's effort blew up in Virginia in October. The SpaceX rocket Falcon 9 is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:20 a.m., lifting the company's Dragon capsule toward rendezvous later this week with the space station. The launch has been postponed several times since an early December attempt was scrubbed. The capsule carries a new global-weather-monitoring instrument and 4,100 pounds of supplies and equipment for the six astronauts aboard the space station, including replacements for several items lost when an Orbital Sciences resupply rocket exploded on launch Oct. 28 at NASA's Wallops Island, Va., launch complex.   More
(Source: Orlando Sentinel - Jan 6)

SPACECRAFT WITH A LASSO ON TOP SET FOR LAUNCH - If your houseplants look thirsty, you can stick your finger in the soil to see if they need water. But if you want to check the whole planet's moisture level, you need something a bit more high tech. NASA has just the thing. It's called the Soil Moisture Active Passive, or SMAP, satellite. It's currently scheduled to launch at 6:20 a.m. PT (9:20 a.m. ET) on January 29 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The satellite has the largest rotating mesh antenna ever deployed in space. "We call it the spinning lasso," said Wendy Edelstein, the SMAP instrument manager said in a NASA press release.    More
(Source: CNN - Jan 5)

IN AN EERIE SCENE, CHINESE VILLAGERS VISIT ROCKET CRASH SITE - The expended first stage of a Long March rocket tumbled into a forested region of southwestern China a few minutes after successfully blasting off Dec. 31 with a Chinese weather satellite, and photographers were there to capture the booster’s fall back to Earth. The images released on the website of the state-owned China News Service show the rocket’s descent and crumpled debris along a rural roadside near Fuquan, a small city in southwestern China’s Guizhou province. The crash site more than 300 miles east of the rocket’s launch pad at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jan 5)

SOUTH KOREAN SATELLITE FACES COLLISION WITH SPACE JUNK - A South Korean geological monitoring satellite is on course to come within close hazardous proximity with space debris, Yonhap reports. The South Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning specialists are preparing measures to avert a highly probable collision that could be fatal for the Science and Technology Satellite 3. They will try to change the spacecraft’s altitude so that it will dodge the space junk. US scientists were first to figure out the satellite’s upcoming collision and raised the alarm, warning their South Korean colleagues on Friday, Arirang conveys.   More
(Source: Sputnik International - Jan 4)

NAVY PREPARES FOR COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE LAUNCH - Navy military and civilian engineers are preparing the latest military communications satellite for a planned Jan. 20 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The satellite is part of MUOS, or Mobile User Objective System, which operates like a smartphone network from space, vastly improving secure satellite communications for mobile U.S. forces.   More
(Source: Product Design & Development - Jan 3)

CHINA LAUNCHES METEOROLOGICAL SATELLITE FENGYUN-II 08 - China successfully launched Fengyun-II 08, its meteorological satellite, at 9:02 a.m. on Wednesday from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province. The satellite will collect meteorological, maritime and hydrological data; and transmit information that will be used for weather forecasting and environment monitoring. Both the Long March 3A rocket, which was used to propel the satellite into space, and the satellite were made by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.   More
(Source: Xinhua - Jan 1)

SPACE STATION CREW GETS TO CELEBRATE NEW YEAR'S EVE 16 TIMES - Recovering from one New Year's Eve can be bad enough. Imagine experiencing 16 of them — all in one day. Such is the case for the crew on the International Space Station, which is in orbit about 220 miles above Earth. In one orbital day, as the space station zooms around the globe at 17,500 miles an hour, the crew will pass 16 times over a part of the planet where the clock is striking midnight. No need for a designated driver, however: Cmdr. Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew, which includes NASA's Terry Virts, Russian cosmonauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov, and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, plan to celebrate with fruit juice toasts, NASA says. The new year starts officially for the crew at 7 p.m. EST Jan. 31, which is midnight by the Universal Time Clock (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).    More
(Source: NBC News - Jan 1)

ESA TO TEST NEW GALILEO SATELLITE - According to an ESA statement, the agency has received its next Galileo satellite from the German manufacturer OHB, in Bremen. The satellite was carried by truck and encased in an environmentally-controlled container. It arrived at the cleanroom of ESTEC, the ESA’s technical facility in the Netherlands, on December 18. The satellite, dubbed Flight Model 6 (FM06), will undergo a round of tests before being launched into Earth orbit. At ESTEC, FM06 will endure simulated aspects of the space environment, including an acoustic chamber, shaker tables, and anechoic and vacuum chambers. If FM06 succeeds in its evaluation, it will be flown to Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.   More
(Source: The Space Reporter - Dec 31)

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