CEO of Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit joins to talk about their plans for suborbital flights, orbital payloads and touches on point to point travel around the planet.
Space news topics:
Falcon 9 SES-10 re-launch and re-landing Juno flies over Jupiter clouds on fourth science pass Spacewalkers improvise after fabric shield floats away Twin solid rockets set for Endeavour display Europe’s ExoMars Orbiter to begin lowering orbit
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The all-sky TESS mission will soon revolutionize our view of planets transiting the nearest, brightest stars to the Sun, just as the four-year survey by NASA’s Kepler mission transformed our understanding of exoplanet demographics. Using the repurposed Kepler spacecraft, the ongoing K2 mission provides a natural transition from Kepler to TESS in terms of sky coverage, survey duration, and intensity of ground-based follow-up observations. For the past three years I have led a large, multi-institutional team to discover, follow up, validate, and characterize hundreds of new candidates and planets using data from K2. I will highlight some of our key results from the first two years of K2 data, and will conclude with a discussion of the path forward to future exoplanet discovery and characterization.
SpaceX today successfully launched a communications satellite into orbit and also flew the first stage booster back down for a safe landing onto a floating platform at sea. This launch and landing are historic because the booster had flown once before (April 2016). This was the first time an orbital rocket booster had been re-flown.
Screen capture of SpaceX webcast shows the booster shortly after it landed on the company’s floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
Here is a video clip from the webcast showing video from the booster as it came down towards the sea. The video transmission dropped out briefly (the antenna on the platform is shaken by the plume of the rocket) but then the image comes of the rocket in the center of the ship:
Some words from Elon Musk about the successful mission:
