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[ad_1] Planetary scientist Alan Stern, who spearheaded NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, enjoyed a spaceflight of his own Thursday, soaring to the edge of space and back aboard Virgin Galactic's winged spaceplane, chalking up the company's fifth commercial sub-orbital flight . Stern, researcher and STEM "influencer" Kellie Gerardi, Italian investment manager Ketty Maisonrouge, two Virgin Galactic pilots and a company trainer were carried aloft by a carrier jet that released the Unity spaceplane at an altitude of about 44,700 feet above the New Mexico desert. The hybrid motor powering Virgin Galactic's Unity spaceplane ignites high above New Mexico Thursday, propelling the craft to the lower edge of space in the company's tenth sub-orbital flight out of the discernible atmosphere. Virgin Galactic At the controls were Unity commande

[ad_1] A Falcon Heavy rocket launches the USSF-67 mission on January 15, 2023 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX The U.S. military is raising the stakes — and widening the field — on a high-profile competition for Space Force mission contracts. The Space Force plans to buy even more rocket launches from companies in the coming years than previously expected, granting more companies a chance at securing billions in potential contracts. "This is a huge deal," Col. Doug Pentecost, the deputy program executive officer of the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command, told reporters during a briefing this week. Earlier this year the Space Force kicked off the process to buy five years' worth of launches, under a lucrative program known as National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3. Now it's boosting the scale. The U.S. sees a rising impetus to improve its military capabilities in space, spurring the need to almost triple the number of launch