Tuesday’s Ariane 5 mission is carrying the 6,438-Kilogram Intelsat 37e satellite in the upper payload slot while the lighter, 3,520kg BSat-4a rides in the lower payload berth for separation 47 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff.

It will be an eventful Saturday night for the returning crew trio, sealing themselves off aboard their Soyuz spacecraft at 18:40 UTC to gear up for undocking from the International Space Station at 21:58 UTC. Soyuz will circle the Earth one and a half times before firing up on a rocket-powered braking maneuver at 0:29 UTC on Sunday that will put the craft and its three crew members on an arc intercepting Earth’s atmosphere over the Middle East, en-route to an early morning landing. Descending under its large orange-and-white parachute, Soyuz is expected to land in a remote location in south-central Kazakhstan at 1:22 UTC, just half an hour after sunrise.

Still missing its semi-classified payload, Falcon 9 fired up its nine first stage engines at 20:30 UTC on Thursday to gather performance data as part of a final end-to-end test of the integrated launch system prior to launch day – designed to uncover any issues and eliminate any surprises on launch day. Completing the hold-down fire test, Falcon 9 will return to its hangar at LC-39A to await the arrival of the X-37B that was readied for flight at Orbiter Processing Facility 1 which had been taken over by X-37B prime contractor Boeing after the Space Shuttle sailed into retirement.

According to the Indian Space Research Organization, the fate of the PSLV was sealed three and a half minutes into its planned 19.5-minute mission when the protective payload fairing failed to separate from the ascending rocket. Dragging the dead weight of the fairing, the rocket did not have the energy needed to attain its planned orbit peaking 20,650 Kilometers in altitude and only reached a much lower orbit of 167 by 6,555 Kilometers.

More trouble appears to be brewing in Geostationary Orbit as reports emerged this week of a satellite breaking apart in prime orbital real estate – the second such incident in as many months, adding to an already significant population of debris and zombie satellites that have to be dealt with by operators of the world’s communications and TV satellites residing within the Geostationary Belt along with vital weather satellites and national security assets.

The winged space plane spent over one and a half hours in the air on Wednesday, suspended under a 234-UT lifting helicopter to gather data on the craft’s aerodynamic behavior and guidance & control system before the craft was gently set down on its main gear and nose skid to end the day’s operation. Another captive carry test is expected to follow before upgrading to free flight tests that will be the ultimate test for the craft’s autonomous control system and clear the way for the initial cargo-delivery mission to the International Space Station in 2020.

TDRS-M is the 13th TDRSS satellite to reach orbit and the third and final in the program’s third generation that offers greater capacity than its predecessors to respond to growing communication demands, supporting 40+ NASA missions as well as other government satellites, commercial launch vehicles and airborne assets.

Liftoff from the Satish Dhawan Space Center is planned at 13:30 UTC and the four-stage PSLV will be in action for 19.5 minutes to deliver the IRNSS-1H satellite into a sub-GTO orbit from where it will maneuver up into an inclined Geosynchronous Orbit to replace the constellation’s first satellite that has lost all its onboard clocks due to short circuits.

The Soyuz MS-06 crew of Commander Aleksandr Misurkin and Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba are working toward liftoff at 21:17 UTC on September 12 for a nine-minute ride into orbit atop a Soyuz FG rocket followed by an expedited four-orbit rendezvous with the orbiting laboratory, targeting docking at 2:57 UTC on September 13th.