Helmed by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX has made a name for itself as a leading rocket launch provider. We bring you complete coverage of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launches and landings, as well as SpaceX’s more ambitious exploration goals. That includes flying people around the Moon in the company’s Dragon capsule and starting a human colony on Mars.
Right on schedule, the Dragon capsule deployed its parachutes and landed off the coast of Florida as recovery crews began the process of bringing the capsule onboard a recovery ship and extracting its crew.
The Dragon spacecraft is fewer than 20 minutes out from splashdown in Florida. As noted on NASA’s livestream, it has completed the deorbit burn that lasted about seven and a half minutes at 5:18PM ET, and is entering a period of communications blackout as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere.
Its drogue parachutes will deploy four minutes before splashdown, beginning the process of slowing it down from 350 miles per hour before its targeted landing at about 5:57PM ET.
Last night, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, along with Crew-9 members Aleksandr Gorbunov and Nick Hague, left the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft now that the Crew-10 mission has arrived to relieve them. NASA will resume coverage of their return mission this afternoon, as they are expected to splash down off the coast of Florida at about 5:57PM ET, ending a voyage that started last June.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will soon return to Earth — following an unexpectedly long stay in space due to issues with Boeing’s Starliner craft — after the Crew-10 mission’s SpaceX Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station early this morning.
Here, in a video shared by NASA, the newcomers are greeted by the ISS crew. NASA said Friday that Wilmore, Williams, and two others “will return to Earth no earlier than Wednesday, March 19.”
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on schedule in its second attempt Friday night, sending the Crew-10 mission on its way to the International Space Station.
Commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, pilot, along with mission specialists Takuya Onishi and Kirill Peskov are back in the Dragon spacecraft, ahead of the mission’s launch, which is scheduled for 7:03PM ET.
According to NASA, once the craft takes off, it will be about 28.5 hours before it meets up with the ISS.
Now that SpaceX ground teams have “successfully flushed a suspected pocket of trapped air” in the ground support hydraulics system used for the clamp arm supporting the Falcon 9 rocket, there will be another attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission to the ISS tonight, after the first one on Wednesday was scrubbed.
It’s scheduled for 7:03PM ET on Friday, March 14th, and once it reaches the space station, that will mean it’s time for Crew-9 and the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts to make their way back to Earth, which could happen as soon as March 19th.
With less than an hour to go on the countdown, NASA announced tonight’s launch attempt to send a capsule to the ISS on a Falcon 9 rocket is off. There is a backup lunch opportunity already scheduled for tomorrow night, on March 13th at 7:26PM ET, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet.
The latest update about the status of the Crew-10 launch scheduled for 7:48PM ET shows the view from inside the capsule as the hatch door closed.
SpaceX recently listed some explanations for how its seventh Starship flight test ended, and now another report is coming. Flight 8’s launch and Super Heavy booster rocket separation was successful, with the booster returning to the pad.
However, before reaching the engine cutoff point nearly nine minutes into the flight, the Starship began to tumble, then exploded (according to SpaceX, “...experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost”) without attempting its planned payload deploy demo.
The resulting debris field caused the FAA to issue a ground stop order at several Florida airports until 8PM ET.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick plans to make an internet infrastructure investment program “technology-neutral,” according to The Wall Street Journal, meaning Elon Musk’s Starlink could more easily benefit. The program currently favors investment in fiber.
SpaceX called off Starship’s eighth flight test yesterday after the countdown timer was put on hold at T-minus 40 seconds to resolve issues with the Super Heavy booster. The new launch will happen as soon as Wednesday, March 5th.
Reuters has a good summary of what’s going on. The Department of Justice initially sued SpaceX in 2023 over alleged hiring discrimination.
[reuters.com]
Elon Musk, the US’s would-be dictator, isn’t content with lying about the Boeing Starliner astronauts, who unexpectedly spent much longer in space than they planned after the Boeing craft had thruster failures. When Andreas Morgensen, a Danish astronaut, called the lies what they were, Musk replied with offensive name-calling.
According to Android Police, T-Mobile has added Google’s latest phones to its beta test of direct-to-cell satellite service powered by SpaceX’s Starlink. iPhones and a select few Samsung phones were already in the beta.
The Pixel 9 series also has Google’s own Satellite SOS, which is only designed for emergency messaging. T-Mobile’s beta adds full SMS support, with voice and data planned in the future — while Europe might get full satellite broadband this year.
[androidpolice.com]
Ars Technica explains why even as off-the-cuff maybe-trolling, Musk’s recent comments about the ISS crew put a strain on NASA. Here’s the crux:
The “stranded” astronauts on the space station probably could come home as early as next week. But if they were to do so, it would create a lot of headaches for NASA, its international partners, and probably even for Musk’s human spaceflight team at SpaceX.
According to Bloomberg and user reports, T-Mobile’s list of eligible devices for beta testing Starlink direct-to-cell connections now includes iPhones. While only a few Samsung Galaxy devices were supported at first, now iPhone owners with the most recent update can reportedly connect, as well as some people with Android 15 devices.
That gives those owners an alternative to Apple’s Globalstar-connected service while off the grid that works without pointing their phone at the sky first.
The Minor Planet Center (MPC), which tracks and reports minor planet discoveries, recently removed a new listing of a near-earth object after the amateur astronomer who found it realized it was just the Tesla Roadster that was stuck to a rocket that SpaceX launched in 2018, according to Astronomy Magazine.
Such misidentifications are common, the outlet writes, highlighting a growing issue of unregulated manmade stuff junking up space.
[Astronomy Magazine]
Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions.
SpaceX noted that for this seventh Starship flight test, “a significant number of tiles will be removed to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle.”
We don’t know if that had anything to do with the vehicle experiencing “a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” but the aftermath of its destruction was visible to at least a few tourists in Turks and Caicos.
Qantas airlines airline has delayed some flights to avoid the rockets’ splashdown in the Indian Ocean, reports The Guardian. Some at the last minute, says Ben Holland, head of Qantas’s operations center:
“While we try to make any changes to our schedule in advance, the timing of recent launches have moved around at late notice which has meant we’ve had to delay some flights just prior to departure.”
