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Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Is there a SpaceX rocket launch today? How, where to see liftoff in California
SpaceX's next mission launching from Southern California won't be to deploy its own Starlink satellites, but instead dozens of satellites for paying customers. The commercial spaceflight company founded by billionaire Elon Musk is planning to get another Falcon 9 rocket off the ground from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County. Californians have plenty of locations where they can possibly see an afternoon rocket launch. But it's important to keep in mind that rocket launches can be – and often are – scrubbed or delayed due to any number of factors, including poor weather conditions or unexpected issues with spacecraft. Check back with the VC Star for any updates on the impending rocket launch. Here's what to know about the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, as well as when and where to watch it: California rocket launches: Here's a look at the upcoming liftoff schedule from Vandenberg A Federal Aviation Administration operations plan advisory indicates the launch is scheduled for Saturday, June 21, with backup opportunities available Sunday, June 22. Multiple websites dedicated to tracking rocket launches suggest liftoff is being targeted for 2:19 p.m. PT Saturday, June 21. Neither SpaceX nor the Vandenberg Space Force Base have officially confirmed the launch. The launch will take place from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California. Most launches from Vandenberg fly at a south or southeast trajectory. SpaceX will conduct a dedicated rideshare flight on its famous Falcon 9 rocket to deliver dozens of small satellites for paying customers to a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they will match Earth's rotation around the sun. The spaceflight will make use of the company's famous two-stage 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket, one of the world's most active, to deliver the payloads on behalf of both commercial and government entities. SpaceX typically provides a livestream of launches on its website beginning about five minutes before liftoff, along with updates on social media site X. Because Vandenberg is an active military base, the launch complex does not host public viewings of launches. But if conditions are clear, rocket launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base can be viewed from several locations as far as Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Space Launch Schedule, a website dedicated to tracking upcoming rocket launches, provided a list of places in California to catch the launch in person: 13th Street and Arguello Boulevard, the public site with the closest views of SpaceX launches Floradale Avenue and West Ocean Avenue, officially designated as the 'viewing site for SLC-6' (space launch complex-6) Renwick Avenue and West Ocean Avenue, another intersection close to the base where spectators can park Santa Lucia Canyon Road and Victory Road, provides a partial view of Complex 4 Surf Beach on Ocean Avenue, the only location where the public can view the ignition and liftoff of rockets from Complex 4. Public access is at the Amtrak Surf Station parking area, but the area is closed in the case of back-to-back launches. The city of Lompoc in Santa Barbara County is filled with places to catch a rocket launch. The city's tourism bureau, Explore Lompoc, even maintains this list with additional viewing locations: , 6851 Ocean Park Road, which, while it doesn't have a view of the launch pad itself, is located only four miles from the launch site and provides a good vantage to see rockets get off the ground. Parking is limited, and law enforcement will close the road to the beach once parking is full. , 1 Hancock Drive, a community college located nine miles from the launch site where both the launch pad and rocket's tip can be seen before liftoff. , N A Street and McLaughlin Road, located within 10 miles of the launch site, is filled with large fields for activities or for spectators to set up chairs. Residents of Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo County and Ventura County, California, could hear sonic booms, according to Vandenberg Space Force Base. Sonic booms are brief, thunder-like noises that are often heard from the ground when a spacecraft or aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound. Following the launch, the Falcon 9 rocket's booster will aim to land back at the launch site. This allows for SpaceX personnel to recover the booster so it can be reused in future spaceflights. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, founded SpaceX in 2002. The commercial spaceflight company is headquartered at Starbase in South Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border. The site, which is where SpaceX has been conducting routine flight tests of its 400-foot megarocket known as Starship, was recently voted by residents to become its own city. SpaceX conducts many of its own rocket launches, most using the Falcon 9 rocket, from both California and Florida. That includes a regular cadence of deliveries of Starlink internet satellites into orbit, and occasional privately-funded commercial crewed missions on the Dragon. The most recent of SpaceX's private human spaceflights, a mission known as Fram2, took place in April. SpaceX was also famously involved in funding and operating the headline-grabbing Polaris Dawn crewed commercial mission in September 2024. SpaceX additionally benefits from billions of dollars in contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense by providing launch services for classified satellites and other payloads. The Vandenberg Space Force Base is a rocket launch site in Santa Barbara County in Southern California. Established in 1941, the site was previously known as the Vandenberg Air Force Base. Though it's a military base, the site also hosts both civil and commercial space launches for entities like NASA and SpaceX. Space Launch Delta 30, a unit of Space Force, is responsible for managing the launch operations at Vandenberg, as well as the missile tests that take place at the base. This article has been updated to add new information. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: SpaceX rocket launch: Where to see Falcon 9 liftoff from California
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Dazed and amused, ‘Elio' is Pixar on a spaced-out psychedelic trip
'Elio' is a breezy Pixar adventure, the studio's pivot back to making original, rip-roaring children's yarns. Launched by 'Coco' co-director Adrian Molina and steered to completion by Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, it's got a setup simpler than whatever credit negotiation happened behind the scenes. An 11-year-old boy, Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), looks at the sky and wonders who's up there. This classic plot hook harkens back to 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'A Trip to the Moon,' and if I had to place a bet, it's the oldest story mankind's got. Depending on the era and zeitgeist, the heavenly strangers gazing down upon us in judgment could be anyone from Zeus to 'Dr. Who's' Zygons, and their interest in us capricious or cruel or kind. We've got lightyears' worth of these speculative tales. They're really asking: Does our species have value? In Elio's case, he's a recent orphan living with his aunt Olga (a warm and frazzled Zoe Saldaña), a major in the Space Force who monitors satellite debris (which the film convinces us is more exciting than it sounds). Everyone in the movie is surrounded by technology — radios, computers, monitors — and yet most of them seem disconnected. Olga thinks that alien chatter is for crackpots like her colleague Melmac (Brendan Hunt), so named for Alf's home planet. She's paused her own astronaut dreams to take care of her brooding nephew. In return, the boy wants little to do with her or any other earthling. Preteen Elio is on a misanthropic trajectory that, if not recalibrated, could result in him growing up to marry a pillow. When Olga takes Elio to a space museum, he falls in love with the solitary crusade of the Voyager probe whose golden record of wonders, curated by the astronomer Carl Sagan, is hurtling through the galaxy in search of someone who will listen. (Sagan's own voice is heard throughout the movie, though he goes uncredited.) Enthralled, Elio plops a colander on his head and pleads for aliens to touch down and 'take me with you — but not in a desperate way.' Elio doesn't do too much sulking before he's beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary take on the United Nations. He's not alone in the universe, but now he has to earn his place. From there, his quest vrooms at the pace of a Flash Gordon serial — or, for that matter, the first 'Toy Story.' Kids Elio's age have mostly seen Pixar rehash itself with sequels or hunt for Oscars in a therapist's couch (where lately it's been coming up with lint balls). Here, trauma is merely the framework, not the focus. The highfalutin prestige animation studio is signaling to the 'Minecraft' generation that they can do fun new movies too. The film's earthbound sequences boast staggeringly beautiful shots of the ocean under a night sky. But the galaxy above is a fractalized freak-out: a psychedelic rainbow of delights that makes you think that more than one animator has spent time grooving to Phish in a Berkeley dorm. (No doubt some of the grade-schoolers seeing the movie on opening weekend will, a decade from now, watch it again in their dorms under heightened circumstances.) Multiple extraterrestrials appear inspired by a lava lamp. Others resemble wireless earbuds and stress balls and decks of cards, the type of creature design that might happen when you're in your own alternate dimension grokking at the stuff on your dresser. I'm not casting aspersions on anyone's sobriety, I'm just noting that Pixar was founded on musing, 'What if my lamp could jump?' Elio will befriend Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a larval goofball from the Crab Nebula who has a dozen wiggling limbs with various protuberances. Off-planet, the boy readily drops his defensive shields and opens himself to the excitement that's been promised since the epic opening notes of Rob Simonsen's eclectic score. In a sequence set to a Krautrock-esque banger, Elio and Glordon enjoy a montage that's essentially a teaser for an amusement park experience that's probably already in its drafting stage, with the buddies frolicking in waterslides and chugging a beverage called Glorp, styled so that it can be readily re-created with boba. As ever, everything is tethered to what our earthbound brains can imagine. Even the names Glordon and Glorp might be a nod to the Voyager's known flight plan, which in 40,000 years is expected to have its first-ever close encounter with a star named Gliese 445. Bonding with the miscellaneous beings of the Communiverse does spur Elio to be nicer to Olga, but admirably, the script (credited to Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones) doesn't take the easy escape hatch of sending the earth boy into the beyond only to realize that everywhere else is even worse. Space isn't the enemy. If anything, space is too nice. Most of the aliens Elio meets insist that they believe in tolerance and open-mindedness. You're waiting for that to be a big lie, but it's not. Voiced by Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson, Atsuko Okatsuka and Matthias Schweighöfer, they can get a tad snippy, but otherwise these galactic Neville Chamberlains cower when a bruiser named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who stomps around on thick metal legs, lands on their base spoiling for a fight. The cartoon well calibrates its PG thrills to give kids a mild case of the shivers. More spunky than saccharine, Elio spends most of the film wearing a bandage over a black eye. Back home, he's pursued through the woods by masked bullies (and when he gets an opportunity, he kicks one of them in the head). In space, Elio stumbles across adorable skeletons and shimmies through gacky pipes. Meanwhile, Lord Grigon's dastardly hobby is skeet-shooting fragile, flowerlike critters. When hit, these living daisies don't die — they're just pitifully embarrassed to lose their petals. It's refreshing to see a romp this spry. 'Elio' isn't trying to reinvent the spaceship — it's after the puppyish charm of sticking your head out the window as marvels whiz past. Some of my favorite gags just sparked to life for an instant, like an all-knowing supercomputer who is a bit put out that Elio accesses its wisdom simply to learn how to fight. It's offering to teach our species the meaning of life; we want the art of war. 'Why should an advanced society wish to expend the effort to communicate such information to a backward, emerging, novice civilization like our own?' Carl Sagan wrote in his 1973 book, 'The Cosmic Connection.' Yet more than half of Americans believe that aliens exist. A third think they've already come to visit. Like Elio, we yearn for cosmic validation. The great scientist wouldn't have put 'Elio' on his golden record. It's a trifle, not a cultural touchstone. But while Pixar has anthropomorphized ants and rats and cars and dolls and emotions, this lonely boy feels stirringly human. Yes, the movie says, go ahead and look for connection up in the sky or under your feet. But also seek it out in each other.
CBS News
2 days ago
- CBS News
Former U.S. Space Force sergeant found guilty of murdering Colorado teenager
A Colorado jury has found a former U.S. Space Force sergeant guilty of second-degree murder in the shooting death of a teenager and guilty of second-degree attempted murder in the shooting of another teen. Then Sgt. Orest Schur killed one teen and wounded another on July 5, 2023, who he believed had been trying to steal a family car. Aurora Police According to prosecutors, Schur's wife told 911 dispatchers that it was the third time that someone had tried to steal a car from the Schur family home in Aurora. They said two teenagers crashed a stolen car, a Hyundai Elantra, in the 19500 block of East 58th Circle as Schur pursued them and fired on them. CBS A representative with Air Force Public Affairs confirmed to CBS Colorado that Schur's end of service was Aug. 8, 2024. Schur had been working as a signals intelligence analyst for the Space Force at Buckley after transferring from the Army with the rank of sergeant. With the Army, he did two tours of service in Afghanistan and earned 14 service awards said a military spokesperson. Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 15. The second-degree murder conviction carries a sentence range of 16-48 years and the second-degree attempted murder conviction carries a sentence range of 10-32 years. The sentences are mandated to be served consecutively, so Schur is facing 26-80 years in prison.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Is there a rocket launch today? Upcoming liftoff schedule from Vandenberg in California
The first half of June saw three SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets soaring over Southern California to deliver Starlink satellites into orbit – and more are likely on the way. In fact, the next Starlink deployment could get off the ground as early as Monday, June 16 from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County. If you miss it, don't stress: Californians should likely still have multiple chances to catch a rocket launch in June. SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, could launch a rideshare mission later in June to deliver dozens of small satellites for paying customers, as well as a government satellite-deploying mission. Vandenberg and SpaceX don't typically officially confirm California launches until about a day ahead of time, and the Federal Aviation Administration's operations plan advisory is constantly updating. Still, multiple online websites that track launches suggest that at least another three are so far being targeted for the rest of June from California – likely with more to be added to the schedule throughout the month. It's also important to keep in mind that rocket launches can be – and often are – delayed due to any number of factors, including poor weather conditions or unexpected issues with spacecraft. Make sure to visit VC Star for the latest mission updates. Here's a look at the upcoming June 2025 launch schedule (so far) at Vandenberg Space Force Base. What is the Vandenberg Space Force Base? 4 things to know about California rocket launches Agency: SpaceX Mission: Deploy Starlink V2 mini satellites into low-Earth orbit Rocket: Falcon 9, a 230-foot, two-stage rocket Launch window: 8:36 p.m. PT Monday, June 16 Rocket launch location: Space Launch Complex 4E from Vandenberg Space Force Base Booster landing: SpaceX drone ship, nicknamed "Of Course I Still Love You," in the Pacific Ocean Agency: SpaceX Mission: Dedicated rideshare flight to deliver dozens of small satellites to a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they will match Earth's rotation around the sun, for paying customers Rocket: Falcon 9, a 230-foot, two-stage rocket Launch window: 2:19 p.m. PT Friday, June 20 Rocket launch location: Space Launch Complex 4E from Vandenberg Space Force Base Booster landing: return to launch site Agency: SpaceX Mission: Deploy a Luxembourg military reconnaissance satellite known as NAOS (National Advanced Optical System) Rocket: Falcon 9, a 230-foot, two-stage rocket Launch window: TBA Rocket launch location: Space Launch Complex 4E from Vandenberg Space Force Base Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Is there a California rocket launch today? Schedule from Vandenberg
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
This Week In Space podcast: Episode 165 — Guardians of Space
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On Episode 165 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the first U.S. Space Force Guardian to launch to the International Space Station in that role. Space is rapidly becoming a critical domain for so much of 21st-century living. Banking, transport across the sea and land, agriculture, and dozens of other things we take for granted all depend on satellites, and tracking them to avoid collisions. We invited Hague to talk to us about the Space Force, living on the ISS, his frightening abort on a Soyuz rocket in 2018, how the Space Force tracks orbital objects, and much more. He's a very accomplished guy who makes it all sound routine — and we suspect, for him, it is. Join us for this very special interview. Download or subscribe to this show at: episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at European Space Agency reveals 3 key space missions threatened by Trump's NASA budget cuts Trump's 2026 budget cuts would force the world's most powerful solar telescope to close Humanity takes its 1st look at the sun's poles: 'This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's stairway to heaven' Wanted: One NASA administrator Nick Hague Space Force Space Force Guardian returns to Earth after six-month space mission Why Cislunar Security Must Be a Space Force Concern How do Astronauts Sleep on Space? TOP TELESCOPE PICK: Looking for a telescope to see planets and comets? We recommend the Celestron Astro Fi 102 as the top pick in our best beginner's telescope guide. Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars? Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.
