Rocket Labs “Electron” made its second successful and first commercial flight on November 11th, 2018, successfully carrying a compliment of small cubesats into orbit. Let’s go over this one more time – it’s the 3rd flight ever of this launch vehicle, and it’s already making full commercial flights. Now that’s success! Electron in flight. #ItsBusinessTime […]
Let’s go back to October 29th, 1998. I was in 8th grade at the time. I don’t recall if I knew the launch of Glenn was happening that day – I want to think I was aware – but for whatever reason early in the afternoon that Thursday the students assembled in the school gym […]
Following up on last nights awesome launch of the BepiColombo spacecraft on its mission to study Mercury, I thought it only fitting to share the launch highlights video on the beginning of the mission – the launch of Arianespace VA245! These videos are similar to the ones United Launch Alliance puts out for their launches, […]
I’m a little late on this one, but here we have the launch highlights video for the AEHF-4 launch from earlier this week. It was all in all another wonderful Atlas V launch. Yep. This video has the usual clips of the assembly and rollout of the Atlas V followed by some nice shots of […]
Mercury isn’t a very well understood planet, and up until relatively recently, it was considered a boring, dead world not worth focusing on. All this changed with NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft and its amazing mission to Mercury discovered evidence of water ice on the incredibly hot planet. BepiColombo is a joint ESA and JAXA mission to […]
The United States Air Force AEHF4 payload was successfully launched on time this morning at 12:15AM Eastern from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on an Atlas V rocket. This launch marks the 131st mission for United Launch Alliance and their 50th launch for the Air Force. It’s the 79th Atlas V rocket launch and the […]
Here we have an interesting clip of the initial launch and ascent of the failed Soyuz MS-10 launch on Thursday, October 11th. This footage looks to have been taken from a drone flying a few hundred feet away, and is indeed good quality, albeit still a “from the ground” view. The video seems to end […]
I certainly wasn’t expecting to wake up to this bit of news, but it’s a statistical probability – this morning Soyuz MS-10 launch ended about 2 minutes into flight with an abort after some kind of anomaly with the Soyuz booster. As of right now, the news is spotty, but the good news is the […]
Here we have an awesome little video that Arianespace produced for the 100th launch of the Ariane 5 – Flight VA243 – showing some awesome views of engine ignition and lift off. I never get tired of seeing this kind of detailed footage of these launches, of the raw power of these machines as they […]
The Ariane 5 launch vehicle made its 100th flight yesterday, September 25th, carrying 2 communications satellites (Horizons-3e and Azerspace-2/Intelsat 38) successfully into their respective geosynchronous orbits high above the Earth. Ariane 5 is another one of those rocket systems that could be described as a workhorse – it’s an incredibly capable booster in the European […]
The 7th of Japan’s “Kounotori” cargo supply crafts launched towards its resupply mission to the International Space Station on Saturday, September 22nd after several delays. Among the supplies being carried are more replacement batteries for the Space Station’s electrical systems, multiple cubesats for independant deployment and research purposes, and the first test of a samples […]
Here we have the launch highlights video for the final Delta II launch – ICESat-2. This early morning flight was a beautiful end to the nearly 30 year Delta II program and was, as expected, a complete success. This marked the 100th successful Delta II flight in a row, also setting a world record for […]
It’s mission complete for the Delta II rocket – today at 6:01 A.M. Pacific Time the final Delta II booster launched on the last mission of the program to deliver ICESat-2 into a polar orbit to begin its mission of studying the Earth’s cryosphere. This launch marks the 155th Delta II launch, the 100th successful […]
At 6:01 A.M. Pacific Time the final Delta II rocket launched from LC-2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying ICESat-2 and a small compliment of CubeSats into orbit. This mission is still underway – as I write these words we’re only 30 minutes into the mission, in a coast phase between burns of the second […]
As is standard fare for a United Launch Alliance flight we have here the ICESat-2 mission profile video. What isn’t standard fare is that this is a Delta II launch. Not just any Delta II launch, but the final flight of the Delta II booster. Yes. That’s it. This will mark flight 155, and the […]