In a week likely to be dominated by news from both United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin, the company which began the ongoing disruption in the launch industry kicked things off with an early morning announcement regarding two new contracts. From SpaceX: SpaceX Signs New Commercial Launch Contracts Hawthorne, CA/Paris, France, September 14, 2015 — […]
Boeing officially opened its Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center today in a televised event which culminated in the name reveal for the CST-100 spacecraft which will be the focus of operations. The name for the partially reusable spacecraft which will transport astronauts to ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial […]
Following another delay in selecting winners for the second round of its Commercial Resupply Program (CRS2), NASA has ordered two more Cygnus cargo missions from Orbital ATK (SpaceNews). That order raises the total number of missions from eight in the original $1.9 billion dollar to ten. Terms of the two order extension have not been […]
The twin failures of both the Orbital Sciences Antares and SpaceX Falcon launch vehicles have made for a challenging 10 months for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, a period further complicated by the loss of a Russian Progress cargo ship between the two U.S. accidents. At the same time, the program’s core philosophy of […]
Image Credit : NASA NASA has announced its selection of the first four astronauts which will fly under the Commercial Crew program. Given the last two weeks and the inclusive results regarding the CRS-7 mishap investgation relayed by Elon Musk earlier this week, the announcement comes as a refreshing bit of forward looking news. July […]
SpaceX is set to launch its 7th Commercial Resupply mission to the International Space Station on June 28th, but based on a notice posted by NASA last Friday, it may be adding at least for more missions to the count through an extension which would see the original contract run through 2018. Fellow supplier Orbital-ATK, […]
The SpaceX CRS-7 cargo mission to the International Space Station has been moved from Friday to Sunday, June 28th with a new liftoff time of 10:21 AM EDT from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40. If liftoff, which must take place exactly on time, is delayed for any reason, a backup slot on Monday the 29th is reserved. […]
Last week, a Senate Appropriations Committee “marked up” the FY 2016 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill which funds among other things, NASA. For supporters of several NASA programs, including Commercial Crew, it was a simply put, a very bad day. Despite repeated impassioned pleas from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to fully fund Commercial Crew at the requested […]
In case you missed it, last week SpaceX released new camera footage from its successful May 6th Pad Abort Test of the Commercial Crew version of the Dragon spacecraft.
4 Frames of Pad Abort Test : Image Credit NASA SpaceX took a major step towards regaining U.S. domestic crew launch capability today with a successful Pad Abort Test of its Commercial Crew Dragon capsule. The test widow was originally scheduled to open at 7:00 AM EDT, but was subsequently moved back two hours to […]
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