For nearly 50 years, NASA's Voyager 1 mission has competed for the title of deep space's little engine that could. Launched in 1977 along with its twin, Voyager 2, the spacecraft is now soaring more than 15 billion miles from Earth.

On their journeys through the solar system, the Voyager spacecraft beamed startling images back to Earth—of Jupiter and Saturn, then Uranus and Neptune and their moons. Voyager 1's most famous shot may be what famed astronomer Carl Sagan called the "pale blue dot," a lonely image of Earth taken from 6 billion miles away in 1990.

But Voyager 1's trek could now be drawing to a close. Since December, the spacecraft--which weighs less than most cars--has been sending nonsensical messages back to Earth, and engineers are struggling to fix the problem. Voyager 2 remains operational.

Fran Bagenal is a planetary scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. She started working on the Voyager mission during a summer student job in the late 1970s and has followed the two spacecraft closely since.

To celebrate Voyager 1, Bagenal reflects on the mission's legacy—and which planet she wants to visit again.

After two days of scrubs, SpaceX pulled out some Friday night lights sending up another batch of Starlink satellites from Florida's Space Coast using a first-stage booster for a record-tying 19th time.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39-A at 8:21 p.m. carrying 23 of SpaceX's internet satellites. Two previous launch attempts were called off with about two minutes left on the countdown clock, the most recent because of an "issue with the transporter erector's cradle arms."

But despite venturing two hours deep into a four-hour window, the launch took off without a hitch.

The first-stage booster equaled the total number of flights by two of SpaceX's other boosters, one of which, though, was destroyed when it toppled over at sea.

This booster's resume includes two human spaceflights, the Inspiration4 orbital mission flown by billionaire Jared Issacman and the first private spaceflight for Axiom Space on its Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station. It has also flown the GPS III Space Vehicle 04, GPS III Space Vehicle 05, Nilesat 301, OneWeb Launch 17, ARABSAT BADR-8 and 11 Starlink missions.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, Reuters reported, citing five people familiar with the program.