Rockets

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The International Space Station should be getting its first commercial cargo shipment in early May.

OGDEN -- When Heather Wokurka considered updating her Weber State University electronics engineering technology degree with night classes in WSU's new electronics engineering department, the decision wasn't exactly rocket science.

Rocket science is Wokurka's day job.

CLEARFIELD -- Families of ATK rocket engineers get to watch test motors fired at Promontory, but half a mile away is as close as they get.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER -- ATK Space Systems and NASA announced a new partnership Tuesday to work together on development of ATK's Liberty commercial launch system.

ATK and NASA said they have signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement that allows NASA and the Liberty Program Office to share technical information during the preliminary design review phase of the program.

Kent Rominger, ATK vice president and program manager for Liberty, said the agreement "enables us to exchange information with NASA and receive valuable insight as we develop our fixed-price commercial crew vehicle and prepare it for test flight as early as 2014."

JERUSALEM -- Gaza militants launched barrages of rockets deep into Israel early Friday and Israeli aircraft struck targets in the Palestinian territory in the aftermath of the deadliest attack against Israelis in three years.

Gunmen who appear to have originated in Gaza and crossed into southern Israel through the Egyptian desert ambushed civilian vehicles traveling on a remote road, killing eight people. Six were civilians, and two were members of Israeli security forces responding to the incursion.

HUALAPAI INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. — Swiss “JetMan” Yves Rossy canceled his first U.S. flight in a jet-propelled wing suit Friday, deciding at the last minute that he hadn’t done enough training to complete the challenging stunt.

LOS ANGELES -- Work is quietly under way on a massive 22-story rocket whose power is rivaled in the U.S. only by the mighty Saturn V rocket, which took man to the moon, in a risky private venture that could herald a new era in space flight.

Dubbed Falcon Heavy, the 27-engine booster is being assembled by rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, at its sprawling complex in Hawthorne, Calif., where it has about 1,100 workers.

The rocket has twice the lifting capability of the next largest launcher built by a U.S. company.

"We're embarking on something that's unprecedented in the space industry," Elon Musk, the company's chief executive, told the Los Angeles Times. "This is territory that has only belonged to the U.S. government -- with its tens of billions of dollars."

Musk's company is building the 227-foot-tall Falcon Heavy even though there are no guarantees that the military or NASA will step forward to pay for the rocket to lift its payloads -- or even astronauts -- into space someday.

SpaceX hopes to launch it in a demonstration flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif., at the end of next year.