News Spacex

1. Fifty years to the day after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, a NASA astronaut, an Italian flight engineer and a Russian commander blasted off from Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Saturday, chased down the International Space Station and glided in for a picture-perfect docking to close out a “textbook” four-orbit rendezvous. A few hours earlier, Vice President Mike Pence celebrated the Apollo 11 anniversary with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, Armstrong family members and scores of space industry executives and lawmakers, reaffirming the Trump administration’s commitment to sending astronauts back the the moon in 2024 as a prelude to eventual flights to Mars. At the White House Friday, President Trump appeared to question the need for a return to the moon, asking Aldrin and Apollo 11 crewmate Mike Collins what they thought of a direct-to-Mars approach. But in an interview with CBS News at the Florida spaceport Saturday, Pence said the moon remains the priority. “That’s 100 percent correct,” Pence said. “We understand when we go to Mars — and Americans are going to Mars —that we’re going to have to develop new technologies, new equipment and gain new experience that we can only gain on the moon. The president fully endorses that. … And I couldn’t be more excited to be part of it.” Half a world away at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, NASA’s former Cold War rivals were focused on getting three fresh crew members to the International Space Station. Soyuz MS-13/59S commander Alexander Skvortsov, Italian co-pilot Luca Parmitano and NASA physician-astronaut Andrew Morgan blasted off from Yuri Gagarin’s launch pad at the sprawling Kazakh space center at 12:28 p.m. EDT (9:28 p.m. local time), the first step in a four-orbit rendezvous with the laboratory complex. The timing of the launch was coincidental with the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. But Morgan said the crew was honored to serve as a symbolic link between the past, when the United States and the former Soviet Union were engaged in a Cold War space race, and today, when international cooperation is the rule and not the exception. “I can’t think of a better way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing than launching on the anniversary with an international crew, especially in light of NASA’s reaffirmation that we intend to land a crew on the surface of the moon in 2024,” Morgan said before launch.