A Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, attached to its L-1011 aircraft, prior to the launch of the ICON satellite Oct. 10.

A long-delayed NASA space science satellite finally reached orbit Oct. 10 on a Pegasus rocket, a launch vehicle with an uncertain future.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...