SPACE reports, “A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soared into a blue sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7:41 a.m. EDT (1141 GMT) on Saturday, sending Northrop Grumman’s ‘Cygnus XL’ resupply freighter toward the International Space Station (ISS).”
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SpaceX launches Cygnus XL cargo ship to ISS from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday at 7:41 a.m. EDT (Launch at the 00:12 mark)
VideoFromSpace; YouTube
SPACE reports, “A Virtual Telescope Project livestream will track NASA’s Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft as it races back toward Earth. Here’s how to watch it live.”
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VTP’s official WebTV
Scientific American reports, “If NASA’s ambitious lunar exploration plans succeed, scientists will cover the moon with sensors—and find answers to several long-standing questions about the inner solar system.”
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SPACE reports, “NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission just etched its name in the record books. The four Artemis 2 astronauts have now traveled farther from Earth than any people in history, breaking the mark set by the Apollo 13 crew on April 15, 1970.”
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The New York Times reports, “Early on Monday morning Eastern time, the astronauts of Artemis II will enter the lunar sphere of influence, when the pull of the moon’s gravity becomes stronger than Earth’s. That is when their spacecraft will start speeding up for the main event of the 10-day mission, swinging around the moon for a first close-up look by astronauts in more than 53 years.”
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Defense Daily reports, “SpaceX has received a more than $178 million task order from U.S. Space Force’s Systems Command (SSC) for two National Security Space Launch Phase 3, Lane 1 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., and Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., for the Space Development Agency-4 (SDA-4) mission in fiscal 2027. The latter includes ‘dozens of missile tracking satellites’ by Sierra Space, SSC said on Tuesday.”
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The Wall Street Journal reports, “NASA’s Artemis II mission is designed to power a crew of four astronauts out to the moon, zip them around it and safely bring them back to Earth. It is a big test for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a swarm of contractors, including Boeing, which developed the core stage of Artemis’s towering Space Launch System rocket, and Lockheed Martin, the company behind the Orion crew capsule.”
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As NASA counts down to the Artemis II launch, AIAA is pleased to release the most recent technical content published on the Artemis program from the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets and meeting papers at AIAA SciTech Forum (2024–2026). These original research results and technological progress on Artemis have been published in AIAA’s Aerospace Research Central (ARC). The Artemis II collection is complimentary this year as we celebrate the Artemis II mission.
Via Satellite reports, “SpaceX launched 119 payloads into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) at 4:02 a.m. PT on Transporter-16, a dedicated smallsat rideshare mission, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday morning. The mission was the first stage booster’s 12thflight. It landed vertically on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean after releasing its payloads.”
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SpaceX launches 119 payloads on Transporter-16 mission. (Launch occurs at the 0:10 mark)
VideoFromSpace; YouTube
Space News reports, “While the Artemis 2 mission is primarily a test flight, the four astronauts on board will conduct some science during the nearly 10-day mission. ‘Science wasn’t in the driver’s seat to define what Artemis 2 is,’ said Jacob Richardson, deputy lead of Artemis 2 lunar science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a panel discussion at the Goddard Space System Symposium March 12. ‘Instead, we are using Artemis 2 as an opportunity to get science to prepare for our later Artemis missions when science is more of a driver.’”
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