Spaceflight Insider

News Archive / Author: Patrick Attwell

Patrick Attwell is a native of Houston, Texas but he currently resides in Austin, Texas where he studies accounting at Concordia University Texas. Atwell has had a passion for all things pertaining to aerospace, rocketry, and aviation. Atwell has worked to cover these fields for more than a decade. After he attended and watched the launch of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission it gave him what is known in the space community as “rocket fever.” Since that time, Atwell has followed his dreams and has covered events dealing with NASA’s Commercial Crew flight assignments at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and other space-related events in the Lone Star State.

Articles By Patrick Attwell

  • SpaceX’s Starship toppled, severely damaged during overnight storm

    January 23rd, 2019

    In the overnight hours of Jan. 22 and 23, SpaceX's Starship Hopper test article was severely damaged by strong winds at the SpaceX South Texas launch facility.

  • NROL-71 kicks off ULA’s 2019 launch manifest

    January 19th, 2019

    LOMPOC, Calif. — United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully completed its first flight of 2019. Today's launch utilized the largest rocket in the Colorado-based company's arsenal to send a classified payload into space. In doing so the company finally managed to move past a saga of delays.

  • SpaceX not alone in 2018’s high launch rate

    January 7th, 2019

    United Launch Alliance (ULA), Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and Virgin Galactic conducted 14 launches from the United States this past year.

  • Shutdown: What’s open at NASA?

    December 29th, 2018

    With no sign that it will be resolved soon, the ongoing partial U.S. government shutdown looks to continue well into the first days or weeks of 2019. As such, it is having wide-reaching effects on NASA's operations.

  • Classified: A review of US defense missions launched in 2018

    December 5th, 2018

    LOMPOC, Calif. -- 2018 has seen five payloads launched for the Department of Defense. Two of these missions were classified and one failed. With the upcoming flight of a ULA Delta Heavy with the NROL-71, SpaceFlight Insider takes a look back at the DoD's 2018 launch manifest.

  • SpaceX expands range of landing sites with SAOCOM-1 flight

    October 8th, 2018

    SpaceX has just demonstrated its ability to land Falcon 9 first stages from each U.S. coast.