Covering All Things Florida
Artemis II made the trip from Launch Complex 39B to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building today. The approximately 4-mile trek aboard Crawler-Transporter 2 began at around 9 AM ET and lasted until around 8 PM, when it arrived inside Bay 3 for repairs and battery updates.
Axiom Space has secured another trip to the International Space Station after NASA selected the Houston-based company for a fifth commercial crew mission to the orbital outpost.
The Federal Aviation Administration released the Final Environmental Impact Statement and its Record of Decision regarding the matter this morning. The Record of Decision approves SpaceX to operate Starship-Super Heavy at Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, clearing the final major regulatory hurdle for the company’s next-generation launch vehicle on Florida’s Space Coast.
Virginia firm lands multi-year deal to keep America’s other East Coast spaceport humming.
NASA has selected ARES Technical Services Corporation to run its launch range operations at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. They awarded the McLean, Virginia-based company a contract worth up to $339.8 million.
2026 promises to be the most transformative year in American spaceflight since the Apollo era. From Artemis II astronauts circling the Moon to the first commercial space stations, here’s what’s coming.
Today, in 1968 aboard Apollo 8, NASA astronaut Bill Anders captured “Earthrise” — one of the most iconic photographs of the Apollo era. For the first time, humans were able to the Earth from the perspective of the moon. Later, Anders recalled seeing “…a very fragile looking Earth, a very delicate looking Earth, I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.” Using a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera outfitted with a 250mm telephoto lens, Anders, with a click of the button had captured a moment epiphany and perhaps one of the great works of art of our time.
In a flawless early-morning liftoff, Rocket Lab successfully deployed four disk-shaped satellites into a very low earth orbit. The mission, named “Don’t Be Such a Square,” was Rocket Lab’s first public mission from Wallops in well over a year.
Space X’s massive Starship has been designed with the capacity to boost up to 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, far more than rockets currently in common use. With its success, the potential for launching larger payloads — whether cargo, satellites, or entire interplanetary spacecraft — becomes more tantalizing to deep space mission designers looking to explore other planets and asteroids.
Aside from the launchpads at KSC and Vandenberg, MARS, or the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, is the third busiest launch site in the United States. MARS, also called Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), offers different launch trajectories that are not available at Florida launch sites. Typically, Wallops supports the launch and recovery of sounding rockets, which are small payloads compared to what is launched in Florida.
Blue Origin notched a major success this afternoon as its towering New Glenn rocket roared away from Launch Complex 36, completing the company’s second orbital flight and sending a pair of NASA spacecraft on a long journey toward Mars. The launch, designated NG-2, lifted off at 3:55 p.m. Eastern after a week marked by weather delays, solar activity concerns, and heightened anticipation along Florida’s Space Coast.
