At their closest point in orbit, Earth and Jupiter are separated by almost 600 million kilometers. At the time of writing, five months after launch, Juice has already traveled 370 million kilometers, yet in time it's only 5% of the way there. Why is it taking so long?

The answer depends on a variety of factors that flight dynamics experts at ESA's Mission Control know well, from the amount fuel used to the power of the rocket, mass of a spacecraft and geometry of the planets.

A SpaceX launch from Cape Canaveral lit up the Space Coast for the 50th time this year while also achieving a milestone for the company.

The Falcon 9 rocket carrying up another 22 of the company's Starlink satellites made a record 17th flight with liftoff at 11:38 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 40.

The booster previously launched on the GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, Transporter-6, and 11 Starlink missions. It made another recovery landing on the droneship A Short Fall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceX has flown all but three of the Space Coast launches this year with United Launch Alliance sending up two and Relativity Space the only other one.

With this mission, SpaceX has flown 37 from Cape Canaveral and another 10 from Kennedy Space Center including all three human spaceflights to orbit from the U.S. this year as well as three powerhouse Falcon Heavy launches.

The launch manifest for the remainder of the year should see the Space Coast beat the record 57 launches it saw in 2022.

The four astronauts headed to the moon next year on the Artemis II mission suited up and took a practice run to the launch pad in the new crew transport vehicles at Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen donned orange spacesuits and climbed into the curvy electric vehicles officially referred to as CTVs, as in crew transportation vehicles, and took the 9-mile ride from the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building to Launch Pad 39-B.

The dry run is to demonstrate normal launch day procedures as they gear up for the mission that could fly as early as November 2024, taking the first crewed flight on NASA's powerful Space Launch System rocket riding in the Orion space capsule on what is planned to be a 10-day mission that will take them out and around the moon, but not land.

NASA's Artemis III mission is still planned to be the one to take humans back to the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.