The US Orbited Its First Satellite 66 Years Ago Today

Cape Canaveral Every four or five days, Space Coast residents hear or see a rocket taking flight from the Cape, often carrying thirty or more satellites to low-Earth orbit. It happens so often that people will shrug and say something like, “It’s just another Starlink flight,” and not think twice about it.

SpaceX Launches Northrup Grumman NG-20 From the Cape

SpaceX Falcon 9 Lifts off from Pad SLC-40 at Canaveral Space Force Station on January 30, 2024.
Photo: Chris Leymarie, Florida Media Now

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Jan. 30, 2024 SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Northrup Grumman NG-20 mission toward ISS this afternoon. The launch was at 12:07 PM EST from the company’s launch pad at SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Once it had completed its part of the mission, Booster 1077 completed its tenth flight when it safely touched down at Landing Zone 1, about 5.6 miles to the south of where it launched a little more than eight minutes earlier.

Italy As A Key Player in Commercial Spaceflight: The Ax-3 Mission Tells Only A Small Part Of The Story

 Thales Alenia factory in Turin, Italy.   Credit:  Axiom Space
Axiom Station pressure vessel under construction at the Thales Alenia factory in Turin, Italy.   Credit:  Axiom Space

Italy is well-known to world travelers for its culinary expertise, and that skill is now being added to the country’s many contributions to space exploration on the Axiom 3 mission.

What “Last Minute Cargo ” Will Be Loaded On The Cygnus Mission?

New access door for Cygnus resupply module
Northrop Grumman’s NG-20 Cygnus resupply spacecraft, named the S.S. Patricia “Patty” Hilliard Robertson, is moved in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as it is prepared for its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

In an NG-20 pre-launch media teleconference on January, 26, 2024, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX VP  Build and Flight Reliability, revealed that a new access door had been added to the fairing that protects the Cygnus spacecraft atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. But Why?

SpaceX Delays NG-20 Launch By One Day

The launch of Northrup-Grumman’s Cygnus NG-20 has been delayed until Tuesday, January 30th at 12:07 PM EST.

William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said in a news conference on January 26th that, “it’s taken a lot of modifications on our part to get this hardware ready to go fly, and we want to make sure it goes right. We think it is good to delay a little bit and make sure we get all this activity right and we’re ready to get this cargo inserted into Cygnus and get ready to fly on Tuesday.”

A Day of Remembrance and Reflection Through the Eyes of Photographer Richard Gallagher

Space Mirror Memorial
Remembering the Astronauts who are no longer with us. Above is the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Image by Richard P Gallagher

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex held its annual Day of Remembrance ceremony yesterday, commemorating the brave astronauts who lost their lives in pursuit of space exploration and discovery. The event, a solemn tribute to their sacrifices, specifically honored the memory of those involved in the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia tragedies, as well as other astronauts lost in training accidents before ever reaching space.