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Starliner has finally come home, more than three months after it launched on a planned 10-day mission.. Starliner's long space odyssey is over. The Boeing capsule, named Calypso, returned to Earth early this morning (Sept. 7), touching down in the New Mexico desert at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT; 11:01 p.m. local time on Sept. 6). "Great landing of Calyspo!" NASA astronaut Suni Williams said on the agency's webcast. "I don't think that could have gone better." The landing was long-delayed, coming more than three months into an orbital mission originally expected to last about 10 days. And, while Starliner...

'This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test currently docked to the orbiting laboratory.' ================================================================== SpaceX's next astronaut mission won't get off the ground this month after all. Crew-9, SpaceX's ninth operational flight to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA, had been targeted to lift off on Aug. 18. But it has been pushed back to no earlier than Sept. 24, the agency announced today (Aug. 6). "This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test currently docked...

The CAPSTONE team is working to understand the problem and how to fix it. CAPSTONE in its halo-shaped lunar orbit. Artist's illustration of NASA's tiny CAPSTONE probe in its halo-shaped lunar orbit. CAPSTONE is scheduled to arrive at the moon on Nov. 13, 2022, but that future is in doubt; mission team members lost contact with the cubesat shortly after it began flying freely on July 4. (Image credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter) CAPSTONE has gone dark. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) NASA probe ceased communicating with its handlers yesterday (July 4), shortly after it deployed successfully from Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft bus...

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket is scheduled to launch the Space Test Program-3 (STP-3) mission at 4:04 a.m. EST (0904 GMT) Tuesday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. You can watch the launch live here at Space.com, courtesy of ULA, or directly via the company. STP-3 was originally supposed to launch on Sunday (Dec. 5), but that plan was nixed after crews discovered a leak in the ground system that stores rocket propellant at Cape Canaveral. Fixing the leak and verifying that all is now well with the system resulted in a 48-hour delay... STP-3...

Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle will launch on its 11th test flight this morning (May 2), and you can watch the spaceflight action live. The reusable rocket-capsule combo is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas testing ground at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time). The uncrewed flight will carry 38 microgravity research payloads to suborbital space and back, company representatives announced via Twitter Wednesday You can watch live here at Space.com, courtesy of Blue Origin, or directly via the company's website. New Shepard is designed to carry paying customers, offering them great...

Planet Nine - a newly proposed but not yet confirmed world perhaps 10 times more massive than Earth that's thought to orbit far beyond Pluto — probably could not have triggered such "death from the skies" events, researchers said. Planet Nine likely has an elliptical orbit, coming within 200 to 300 astronomical units (AU) of the sun at its closest approach and getting as far away as 600 to 1,200 AU, Brown said. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun - about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). Neptune orbits about 30 AU from the sun,...