Mission success! Space rocket Vega carried Proba-V, VNREDSat-1 and ESTCube-1 into orbit!

(Source: knowledgethroughscience, via knowledgethroughscience)

Orbital Sciences Antares rocket successfully launched at 5 p.m., Sunday, April 21 from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

All system nominal. The Antares launch vehicle made its maiden flight Sunday, launching from Pad 0A at the Wallops Flight Facility, Va. at 5 p.m. Eastern time on a test flight that served as the precursor for a demonstration flight of its Cygnus resupply ship to the International Space Station later this year. Antares will be delivering a mass simulator payload to orbit 10 minutes after launch designed to mimic the Cygnus spacecraft’s weight and characteristics.

via NASAtelevision

for-all-mankind:

Antares rocket on the pad, 17 April 2013. Liftoff is scheduled for 1700 EST. Known as the Antares A-ONE flight, it will launch 8 cubesats while hoisting a weight simulator of the Cygnus spacecraft.

Extrawelt | 8000.
This is dope. Thanks to relax-yo-mind for this…much needed.

Cosmic tunes. Enjoy.

(via likeaphysicist)

(via astronautjimblows)

crookedindifference:

Zenit Launch Failure from Sea Launch Platform

A commercial Zenit 3SL rocket operated by Sea Launch fell into the equatorial Pacific Ocean moments after lifting off from a mobile platform Friday, destroying the Ukrainian booster and an Intelsat communications satellite.

The 20-story rocket, loaded with more than 900,000 pounds of flammable propellant, blasted off at 0656 GMT (1:56 a.m. EST) from Sea Launch’s Odyssey launch platform stationed in the Pacific Ocean about 1,400 miles south of Hawaii.

But something almost immediately went wrong with the launch, and the three-stage rocket appeared to fly off course before its RD-171 main engine switched off about 25 seconds after liftoff, apparently as a safety measure. Sea Launch’s rockets carry an on-board health monitor to turn off their engines in the event of a problem, according to the company’s website.

crookedindifference:

Rollback from GRAIL’s Rocket

This dramatic time-lapse photo traces a 20 minute long, late evening rollback of the lighted Mobile Service Tower at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 17. Twin spacecraft are snug inside the 13 story tall Delta 2 rocket poised for launch. The duo travelled to the Moon on NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission, GRAIL, using precision formation flying to map the Moon’s gravity field. The scene was captured prior to the first launch attempt, canceled due to upper level winds, on September 8.

discoverynews:

SpaceX Aims for March 1 Dragon Launch

Like the company’s two previous flights, the rocket will carry a Dragon cargo capsule loaded with food, supplies and science experiments for the International Space Station, a permanently staffed research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above Earth. Read more…

SpaceX is getting stuff DONE!

crookedindifference:

Altas V rocket and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)

charlottepenelope:

I started this video thinking, “Woah! That’s so cool! I’m going to watch this in fullscreen!” and then it was really poignant and now I’m going to do a crapton of research on space shuttle launches.

(Source: ziggytechblog.com)

almajnun:

Space Shuttle Launch Audio - play LOUD (no music) HD 1080p (by indiegun)

(via almajnun-deactivated20130224)

spaceplasma:

Liftoff of Apollo 7

Credit: NASA/The Project Apollo Archive

spaceplasma:

Expedition 34/35 Launches to the International Space Station

Expedition 34/35 Soyuz Commander Roman Romanenko, Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn of NASA and Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency launched on the Russian Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft on Dec. 19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin a two-day journey to the International Space Station. The trio will dock to the station Dec. 21 to start a five month mission, joining station Commander Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin, who have been on the outpost since late October.

fyeahcosmonauts:

And they’ve launched! Everything nominal so far.