Bidding to ride on the first passenger flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft closed at $28 million, with the unnamed winner to join company founder and funder Jeff Bezos, his brother and one other person for a ride slated for July 20.

Hard mate between the 212-ft. tall, 188,000-lb. core stage and the Northrop Grumman five-segment booster rockets occurred at about 7 a.m. EDT on June 13 in High Bay 3 of Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building. 

This could be final year of observations with SOFIA as the White House 2022 budget proposal for NASA calls for the cancellation of the airborne observatory.

The June 13 launch came less than four months after contract signing, demonstrating a responsive space capability for the U.S. Space Force.

Despite being responsible for two very different areas of the world, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Northern Command are both seeking additional funding in fiscal 2022 for satellite communications, according to documents obtained by Aerospace DAILY.

The European Space Agency has chosen its next medium-class space science mission—a Venus orbiter that will join a pair of NASA probes, selected last week to help resolve questions about why Earth’s sister planet evolved so differently.

NASA’s recently extended Juno mission to Jupiter this week transmitted its first close-up images of the giant planet’s icy moon Ganymede, the Solar System’s largest lunar companion.

Shenzhou-12 will be the first of four manned missions to support the construction of the Tiangong space station.