Here’s a 4K video with surround audio of the launch:
On January 28, 2024, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from Pad SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral, sending over 8,000 pounds of supplies aboard a Northrup Grumman (NG) Cygnus cargo craft to the International Space Station. This was NG’s 20th resupply mission.
Official NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 portrait: (L-R) Stephanie Wilson, Aleksandr Gorbunov, Nick Hague, and Zena Cardman. NASA
NASA today announced the four astronauts that will travel aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station later this year: Zena Cardman will be the Mission Commander, Nick Hague will be the Pilot, along with Stephanie Wilson and Russian Mission Specialist Aleksandr Gorbunov will travel to ISS no earlier than August 2024.
Explorer 1 launching aboard a Jupiter-C Booster on January 31, 1958 Photo: NASA Archives
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 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.
Northrup Grumman Cygnus NG-20 inside its launch fairings. Photo: NASA
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.”
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.
Launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 with four astronauts aboard on the Axiom-3 Mission. Photo: Charles Boyer
Minutes before a warm front brought heavy showers to Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX launched the Axiom 3 mission on a 16 day round trip to the ISS. Four Axiom Space astronauts rode the chartered Space-X Crew Dragon module to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 booster at 4:49 PM EST this evening. The all-European crew is expected to dock at ISS in two days’ time and stay aboard the station until February 3, 2024.
Falcon 9 with Crew Dragon sitting on Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center on January 17, 2024 Photo: Charles Boyer
Earlier today, SpaceX announced that they are delaying their planned launch of Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts to orbit aboard a Crew Dragon to the International Space Station for “teams to complete pre-launch checkouts and data analysis on the vehicle.”
The mission on behalf of Axiom Space is dubbed Axiom-3 and will now launch NET on Thursday, January 18, 2024, at 4:49 PM EST.
Axiom Space’s third commercial astronaut mission, Ax-3, is set to be a historic event as the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The mission underscores a new era in space travel, where access to low-Earth orbit (LEO) is becoming increasingly commercialized and international.
Credit: left – Mike McMillan/USFS, center – Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right – NASA.
Washington, D.C.– NASA said in a news release last week that their latest climate change analysis has determined that 2023 was the warmest year on record for Earth’s average surface temperature.
Shining brightly in this Hubble image is our closest stellar neighbor: Proxima Centauri. Although it looks bright through the eye of Hubble, as you might expect from the nearest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri is not visible to the naked eye. Space Initiatives, Inc. in Titusville plans to study the possibility of a mission to this star in this century. Photo: Creative Commons
It sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie: a space mission to visit another star to find out if life or the potential of it exists there.
