Cape Canaveral

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A private space company will attempt the first-ever commercial cargo run to the International Space Station in February.

WASHINGTON -- The design for NASA's newest behemoth of a rocket harkens back to the giant workhorse liquid rockets that propelled men to the moon. But this time the destinations will be much farther and the rocket even more powerful.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and several members of Congress joined Wednesday in unveiling the Obama administration's much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System. The multibillion-dollar program will carry astronauts in a capsule on top and start test launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in six years.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A sun-powered robotic explorer named Juno rocketed away Friday on a five-year journey to Jupiter, the solar system's most massive and ancient planet.

Hundreds of scientists and their families and friends watched from just a few miles away, cheering and yelling, "Go Juno!" as the NASA spacecraft soared into a clear midday sky atop an unmanned rocket.

After days of gloomy forecasts full of rain and heavy cloud cover, the spaceship lifted off at 11:29 a.m. — just 2 1/2 minutes late — and embarked on the 135th shuttle mission. The crowd of spectators was estimated at nearly 1 million.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- This week's launch of space shuttle Atlantis came about almost as an afterthought.

If weather permits, Atlantis will roar aloft at 11:26 a.m. Friday -- culminating the 30-year run of what aerospace experts call the most amazing space vehicle ever built, and paying homage to the 14 astronauts who died aboard Challenger and Columbia and the 355 others who returned safely during 134 previous missions.

It might not happen on schedule. NASA officials said Wednesday that an incoming tropical wave offers a 70 percent chance that the launch will be scrubbed. If so, they'll try again Saturday or Sunday morning.

And whenever it flies, Atlantis' final mission hardly compares in complexity or significance to its previous flights that launched satellites and space probes; carried astronauts and components to the International Space Station; and ventured more than 400miles above Earth to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Its four-member crew is the smallest since the earliest shuttles in 1982: commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim.

HOUSTON -- And now there is only one.

With Wednesday's landing of Endeavour, just one more space shuttle flight remains, putting an end to 30 years of Florida shuttle launches and more than 535 million miles of orbits controlled at Houston's Johnson Space Center. Now a sense of melancholy has permeated the community that calls itself "the space shuttle family."