A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 3:22 p.m. EDT, launching Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a 19-hour ride aboard the company’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station, Reuters reported.

Just before liftoff, Hurley said, “SpaceX, we’re going for launch. Let’s light this candle,” paraphrasing the famous comment uttered on the launch pad in 1961 by Alan Shepard, the first American flown into space.

Minutes after launch, the first-stage booster rocket of the Falcon 9 separated from the upper second-stage rocket and flew itself back to Earth to descend safely onto a landing platform floating in the Atlantic.

High above the Earth, the Crew Dragon jettisoned moments later from the second-stage rocket, sending the capsule on its way to the space station.

The exhilarating spectacle of the rocket soaring flawlessly into the heavens came as a welcome triumph for a nation gripped by racially-charged civil unrest as well as ongoing fear and economic upheaval from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Falcon 9 took off from the same launch pad used by NASA’s final space shuttle flight, piloted by Hurley, in 2011. Since then, NASA astronauts have had to hitch rides into orbit aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

“It’s incredible, the power, the technology,” said US President Donald Trump, who was at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida for the launch. “That was a beautiful sight to see.”

The mission’s first launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes remaining on the countdown clock. Weather again threatened Saturday’s launch but cleared in time to proceed with the mission.

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine has said resuming launches of American astronauts on American-made rockets from US soil is the space agency’s top priority.

“I’m breathing a sigh of relief, but I will also tell you I’m not gonna celebrate until Bob and Doug are home safely,” Bridenstine said.

For Musk, the launch represents another milestone for the reusable rockets his company pioneered to make spaceflight less costly and more frequent. And it marks the first time commercially developed space vehicles — owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA — have carried Americans into orbit.

The last time NASA launched astronauts into space aboard a brand new vehicle was 40 years ago at the start of the space shuttle program.

Musk, the South African-born high-tech entrepreneur who made his fortune in Silicon Valley, is also chief executive of the electric carmaker and battery manufacturer Tesla Inc. He founded Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, in 2002.

Hurley, 53, and Behnken, 49, NASA employees under contract to fly with SpaceX, are expected to remain at the space station for several weeks, assisting a short-handed crew aboard the orbital laboratory.

Boeing Co, producing its own launch system in competition with SpaceX, is expected to fly its CST-100 Starliner vehicle with astronauts aboard for the first time next year. NASA has awarded nearly $8 billion combined to SpaceX and Boeing for the development of their rival rockets.

Trump also hailed the launch as a major advance toward the goal of eventually sending humans to Mars.

He was joined at the viewing by Musk, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, and Senator Rick Scott.

Earlier on Saturday, the crew bid goodbye to their families. Prior to climbing into a specially designed Tesla automobile for the ride to the launch site, Behnken told his young son, “Be good for mom. Make her life easy.”

During the drive, Behnken and Hurley passed former astronaut Garrett Reisman who held a sign saying, “Take me with you.”

The post NASA resumes historic SpaceX launch appeared first on Iran News Daily.

SpaceX is not having the best of luck this week – first, the Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed Wednesday and now the firms’ a prototype Starship rocket has exploded, the Daily Mail reported.

The failure comes days after SpaceX had to abort the blastoff of their Falcon 9 rocket, in what would have been the first manned launch from US soil in nine years.

That launch has now been rescheduled for tomorrow.

This is the fourth Starship rocket that has been lost while testing – all of the previous vessels also imploded during testing.

Starship, a rocket standing 394 feet tall, is designed to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond.

The SN4 had passed several important milestones during development, including a pressurization test that had foiled previous models.

The massive rocket is SpaceX’s planned next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle, the center of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel affordable.

The first rocket was tested in 2019, Mk1 prototype, but was engulfed in flames during a cryogenic pressure test.

The second rocket, dubbed Serial Number 1 (SN1), fell victim to another pressure test when it failed to contain its liquid nitrogen.

However, this time the stainless steel cylinder flew off the stand and came down crashing.

And the third time SpaceX saw its third catastrophic failure was last month -again the Starship prototype imploded during the cryogenic pressure test.

Musk had high hopes that Starship would be ready for its first orbital test flight sometime this year, which would send the rocket over 12 miles into orbit and land the craft back in the same spot it took off from.

SpaceX was among the three companies awarded a combined $1 billion by NASA last month to develop rocket systems capable of ferrying cargo and humans to the moon. SpaceX proposed Starship for the award.

The FAA granted the space company a license Thursday to begin Starship’s first suborbital flight tests, though it was unclear when those tests would occur.

The failure is just the icing on the cake for Musk this week, as of Wednesday the billionaire had to scrub the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket due to poor weather.

The mission, called ‘Launch America,’ was set to take astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station.

However, with just 16 minutes and 54 seconds left on the countdown clock, the mission was aborted.

The rocket launch has now been rescheduled for 3:22 pm Saturday, but bad weather is still on the minds of the team, as there is currently a 50 percent probability Falcon 9 will head to space.

If successful this would be the first time American astronauts have been launched from US soil in nine years.

The ground crew needed to pass three weather criteria in order to launch at the 4:33 pm liftoff time, but officials had to stop the countdown – even though the weather would have cleared 10 minutes afterward.

But the launch could not wait, because the fast-changing position of the International Space Station (ISS) meant the rocket would have missed the target even leaving just seconds after the scheduled liftoff time.

The space station orbits some 250 miles above Earth and travels more than 17,000 miles per hour.

This means NASA needs to stay with a precise launch schedule in order for the Crew Dragon to successfully dock on the ISS.

The current forecast for Saturday calls for precipitation, anvil clouds and cumulus clouds – three key factors that could keep Launch America grounded.

According to the reports, Sunday holds just a 40 percent chance of bad weather for liftoff – making it a 60 percent chance the mission will be a go.

The bad weather looming over Florida is related to Tropical Storm Bertha, which made landfall in South Carolina Wednesday morning.

The National Weather Center said the storm’s center was near the Great Lakes by the end of the day on Thursday and is expected to dissipate in the next two days.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstein hosted a live press conference today to discuss the details of Saturday’s event.

‘One of the things we are going to do this afternoon is getting another weather brief and we might make the decision that Sunday is the day and not Saturday,’ he said.

‘It will depend on the probabilities, it will be arranged by what the probabilities are on Saturday and what the probabilities are on Sunday.’

‘If it is a high enough probability on Saturday, we target that day.’

‘The question is, if we have a 50 percent probability and the next opportunity is on Sunday, we could put ourselves in back-to-back wet dress rehearsals Saturday and Sunday.’

However, NASA has recently noted that the final decision on Saturday’s launch will be made tomorrow morning.

The post SpaceX Starship Prototype Explodes in Texas appeared first on Iran News Daily.

In a pair of tweets late Sept. 13, the company said it has signed up a person to fly around the moon on the company’s next-generation launch system, formally known as Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), and that it would announce the identity of that person in an event Sept. 17 at 9 p.m. Eastern.

“SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle — an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space,” the company tweeted. “Find out who’s flying and why on Monday, September 17.”

SpaceX announced plans to fly humans around the moon in February 2017. At the time, the company said it would fly two people around the moon on a Crew Dragon spacecraft, launched on its Falcon Heavy rocket then under development, as soon as late 2018. The company said it had signed up two people for the mission, but did not disclose their identities.

“I think this should be a really exciting mission that gets the world really excited about sending people into deep space again,” said SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk during a call with reporters. “I think it should be super inspirational.”

SpaceX, though, made no subsequent announcements about the proposed mission, and did not reveal the identities of the customers. Asked about the lunar mission during a conference in Luxembourg last November, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell offered no updates on the development of the mission.

There was, though, interest in such missions, she added. “The most surprising thing about that is that there are as many people as there are who want to go do that, and can seemingly afford to do that.”

During briefings for the first launch of the Falcon Heavy in February, nearly a year after SpaceX’s original announcement, Musk indicated that the company wasn’t planning to pursue those original plans, as it would not human-rate the Falcon Heavy rocket.

“It looks like BFR development is moving quickly, and it will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed spaceflight,” Musk said during a pre-launch call with reporters. “We kind of tabled the Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy in favor of focusing our energy on BFR.”

The BFR concept features two reusable stages, a booster and a spaceship capable of carrying dozens of people on missions to the moon or Mars. Musk has said that initial work has focused on the spaceship element, which could be ready for small suborbital “hops” next year from a launch site the company is developing in South Texas.

While Musk said earlier this year those tests could begin in the first half of 2019, Shotwell suggested recently that date had slipped. “I think we’ll be hopping that second stage next year, late next year,” she said during a panel at DARPA’s D60 conference Sept. 6 near Washington.

Shotwell, speaking at the World Satellite Business Week conference here Sept. 11, didn’t discuss lunar missions but did emphasize the importance of human spaceflight to the company’s long-term ambitions. “I do think ultimately — and I’m not going to talk about timelines — but I do think that will probably be the majority of our business in the future, flying people,” she said.

An illustration posted with the tweet about the lunar mission announcement appeared to show minor changes to the BFR spaceship design since Musk’s last major speech about it last September at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Australia. Those changes include larger tail fins and seven engines in its base, versus six. Musk, ased on Twitter if the illustration represented the current design of the BFR, responded simply with “Yes.”

Musk introduced the BFR concept at the 2016 IAC in Mexico as a key part of the company’s plans to send humans to Mars and establish a permanent settlement there. In the Australia speech last year, he also showed that the BFR could land on the moon. Musk is not currently scheduled to speak at the next IAC, taking place in early October in Bremen, Germany.

The post SpaceX to announce new lunar mission plans appeared first on Iran News Daily.

The white supply vessel detached from the orbiting outpost at 1323 GMT, fired its engines three times and slowly began its journey to Earth.

“Release confirmed,” commentator Rob Navias said on NASA TV, noting that separation occurred as the ISS was 256 miles (411 kilometers) above the Earth, passing over just south of Australia.

“Dragon is safely on its way.”

The spacecraft is bringing back a host of science experiments, including lab mice that were studied in orbit to see how their bones changed in weightlessness.

“Other critical biological samples preserved in science freezers, such as plants, insects and human tissue, have also been transferred into Dragon for retrieval and analysis,” said a NASA statement.

SpaceX’s Dragon is currently the only cargo ship designed to return to Earth intact. The other US commercial supply ship, Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo carrier, burns up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

The cargo ship arrived at the ISS April 4 after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with 5,800 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments to enable the study of thunderstorms, anti-cancer drugs and technology to remove debris in orbit.

The mission was the 14th for SpaceX under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to resupply the space station over multiple years.

The post SpaceX’s Dragon cargo ship returns to Earth appeared first on Iran News Daily.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is “in excellent health and remains ready for launch,” SpaceX said on Twitter.

“Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional guidance navigation and control analysis.”

The postponement was announced about two hours before the planned blast off from a NASA launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The washing machine-sized spacecraft is built to search the nearest, brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming. These so-called “transits” may mean that planets are in orbit around them.

TESS is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, NASA said.

Its discoveries will be studied further by ground- and space-based telescopes for signs of habitability, including rocky terrain, a size similar to Earth and a distance from their sun — neither too close nor too far — that allows the right temperature for liquid water.

NASA predicts that TESS could find more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth.

TESS will survey far more cosmic terrain than its predecessor, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which launched in 2009, taking in some 85 percent of the skies.

“TESS is equipped with four very sensitive cameras that will be able to monitor nearly the entire sky,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect.”

– Kepler vs TESS –

“One of the many amazing things that Kepler told us is that planets are everywhere and there are all kinds of planets out there.

“So TESS takes the next step. If planets are everywhere, then it is time for us to find the planets that are closest to us orbiting bright nearby stars, because these will be the touchstone system.”

TESS and Kepler use the same system of detecting planetary transits, or shadows cast as they pass in front of their star.

While Kepler confirmed some 2,300 exoplanets and thousands more potential planet candidates, many were too distant and dim to be studied further.

With Kepler running low on fuel and nearing the end of its life, TESS aims to pick up the search while focusing closer, on planets dozens to hundreds of light years away.

“TESS is going to dramatically increase the number of planets that we have to study,” said Ricker.

The Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2020, should be able to reveal more about planets’ mass, density and the makeup of their atmosphere — all clues to habitability.

The first data from TESS is expected to be made public in July, and NASA says citizen astronomers are welcome to help study the planets.

It may be decades before astronomers know whether or not life exists elsewhere.

“TESS is the first step,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

The post SpaceX postpones launch of NASA’s planet-hunter spacecraft appeared first on Iran News Daily.

Original story: Today, SpaceX will once again send cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, but this time, the company is employing mostly used hardware for the job. A Falcon 9 rocket that the company previously launched to the ISS in June will loft a used Dragon cargo capsule, filled with supplies and science experiments for the station crew. It’s the first time SpaceX will fly a used rocket for one of its NASA resupply missions.

SpaceX finally started re-flying its used rockets earlier this year, after years of landing the vehicles post-launch. But so far, only a few of the company’s commercial customers have taken the plunge and put their satellites on previously flown Falcon 9 rockets. Now, NASA has signaled that it’s willing to fly on SpaceX’s used vehicles, too — a big endorsement for the company’s reusable rocket technology. Moving forward, NASA says it will make the decision to fly used rockets for resupply missions on a case-by-case basis.

The post SpaceX launches and lands its first used rocket for NASA appeared first on Iran News Daily.