Space

Here are the highlights from a busy year in space launches

astronauts traveling to the ISS

Astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Soichi Noguchi headed from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to the International Space Station in November.

Official SpaceX Photos/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

By Lisa Grossman

So many things launched into space this year: Six humans traveled aboard commercial crew vehicles, three spacecraft began journeys to Mars and several hundred distractingly shiny satellites took to the sky.

Commercial crew

On May 30, SpaceX ferried a pair of astronauts to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Fla.