Will Cygnus be on the Manifest? Image Credit SpaceX One week after the loss of an Antares launch vehicle carrying a Cygnus cargo vessel bound for the International Space Station, Orbital Sciences Corporation held a conference call with investors to discuss what it has learned about the accident thus far, and its plans for going […]
Waiting on a new day / Image credit Orbital Sciences It was a beautiful evening for a rocket launch. Unfortunately, it was also an equally beautiful evening to do a little boating. Ordinarily not a problem, but in this case the unidentified vessel in question was downrange of the Orbital Sciences Antares booster which was […]
CRS-4 Dragon Returns / Image Credit : SpaceX Completing its five week mission, the SpaceX CRS-4 Dragon capsule departed from the International Space Space Station at 8:57 AM CDT Saturday morning. A little under six hours later, it was floating in the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles west of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Following the Dragon’s […]
Image Credit: Boeing Note: NASA’s start work /stop work/ start work edicts to Boeing and SpaceX due to the Sierra Nevada Commercial Crew bid protest do not apply to the work being performed under CCiCap. The timing of this announcement is also a little strange. Boeing announced in August that it had completed all of […]
Still Holding On: Image Credit Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Wall Street Journal (yes, Andy Pasztor) reports that Sierra Nevada has taken its protest of NASA’s Commercial Crew award to a new level. According to the story, SNC has filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. seeking to prevent NASA […]
Image Credit : SpaceX On Monday, Innerspace reported on a story in Space News about an excerpt from a letter sent by U.S. Representatives Lamar Smith (Tx) and Steven Palazzo, (Ms) to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden regarding the possible use of Orion as a backup to Commercial Crew. Significantly, the letter also questioned whether or […]
Image Credit: Boeing The NASA source selection statement for Commercial Crew is still not publicly available, at least officially, but Aviation Week has obtained a copy, and the resulting article sheds some light on what its says. From the article: “The internal document, signed by NASA Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier on Sept. 15, the day […]
In case anyone thought NASA’s announcement of two winners in the Commercial Crew program, one of which was Boeing, signified a new era of cordial relations between “NewSpace” advocates for Commercial Crew and those who remain firmly in the camp of the “OldSpace” approach as represented by the SLS/Orion program, a letter from two key […]
Note: NASA has made the right call here. The SNC protest can go on, even as work does as well. One wonders why this took as long as it did. Presumably it took until today to get a legal opinion. NASA News Story: NASA Exercises Authority to Proceed with Commercial Crew Contracts On Sept. 16, […]
The Wall Street Journal’s Andy Pasztor has a less than stellar record when it comes to reporting on SpaceX, as readers may recall from this confused mishmash of story conflating an upcoming announcement from Blue Origin with NASA’s entirely separate announcement of the results of its Commercial Crew awards which came out the next day. […]
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