Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. Virgin Orbit fails first rocket launch attempt from modified plane

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit company aborted its first attempt to launch a rocket into space from the belly of a 747 airplane on Monday, the company said. In a test of the company's plan to launch satellites into space, the 70-foot (21.34 m) rocket called LauncherOne was to blast into orbit at about 6.5 miles altitude from a modified airplane named Cosmic Girl. NASA set to resume human spaceflight from U.S. soil with historic SpaceX launch

SpaceX, the private rocket company of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, was set to launch two Americans into orbit on Wednesday from Florida on a mission that would mark the first spaceflight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nine years. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was due to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center at 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT), launching Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a 19-hour ride aboard the company's newly designed Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. Elon Musk's SpaceX raises $346 million ahead of debut astronaut mission

Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday that it raised $346.2 million in a new round of funding, a day before it launches two American astronauts to the International Space Station. The private rocket company's launch of its first crewed mission on Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida will put an end to the U.S. space agency's nine-year hiatus in human spaceflight. Collision of galaxies may have spurred our solar system's formation

A violent event on a colossal scale - the crash of two galaxies - may have paved the way for our solar system's birth. A star-formation binge in the Milky Way spanning the time when the solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago was apparently precipitated by the collision between our galaxy and a smaller one called Sagittarius, scientists said on Tuesday.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)