Posted: Sun, Dec 16 12:38 PM ET (1738 GMT)
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo flew to the edge of space for the first time Thursday. The vehicle, named VSS Unity, took off Thursday morning from Mojave Air and Space Port attached to its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. At 11 a.m. Eastern, SpaceShipTwo separated from WhiteKnightTwo and fired its hybrid rocket motor for 60 seconds. The vehicle reached a peak altitude of nearly 83 kilometers and top speed of Mach 2.9 before gliding back to Mojave. Virgin Galactic declared the flight a success and called it its first space flight, noting that it exceeded the altitude of 50 miles used by U.S. government agencies to award astronaut wings even though it did not reach the 100-kilometer Karman Line. Besides testing the performance of the vehicle, SpaceShipTwo carried for experiments for NASA's Flight Opportunities program.

Related Links:

•  SpaceNews article
•  Washington Post article
•  Los Angeles Times article
•  CNN article
•  Virgin Galactic press release

Posted: Sun, Dec 16 12:36 PM ET (1736 GMT)
Russian cosmonauts identified the site of a leak on a Soyuz spacecraft during a long and, at times, dramatic spacewalk Tuesday. Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev spent 7 hours and 45 minutes outside the station, spending the first few hours moving over to the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. Cosmonauts then cut through the insulation surrounding part of the spacecraft's orbital module, including using a knife that scattered flakes of the material all around them. They did find the site of the hole, which caused an air leak briefly in August until cosmonauts patched it with epoxy. The spacewalkers collected materials for analysis back on Earth before wrapping up the EVA. The Soyuz spacecraft will depart the station Dec. 20 to return three crew members to Earth, but the orbital module where the hole is located will be jettisoned before re-entry.

Related Links:

•  CBS News article
•  Space.com article
•  NASASpaceFlight.com article
•  AP article
•  TASS article

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