Image Credit: Virgin Galactic If 2014 really is the year the commercial suborbital industry finally takes off, one NASA program is ready to take advantage of the opportunity and help it gain altitude. It is the agency’s Flight Opportunities Program, which originally began in 2009 as the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program. Since then, it […]
Only hours after NASA announced the latest winners in its Flight Opportunities Program housed in the Office of the Chief Technologist, researchers announced a major scientific discovery made possible by a similarly brief suborbital launch conducted on a Black Brant sounding rocket on July 11 as part of NASA’s separate Low Cost Access to Space program. The High Resolution Coronal […]
Virgin Galactic, Masten Space Systems and UP Aerospace were among the winners in the latest round of research flight assignments as part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, which makes use of a variety of reusable assets to host small, low-cost research payloads. Altogether, the agency made 13 awards, but only four were for payloads on reusable commercial suborbital vehicles, with […]
The SpaceX Grasshopper makes another small leap in the pursuit of first stage reusability in this video tweeted by Elon Musk on Saturday, November 3. While there are a number of efforts to develop reusable launch vehicles underway, most, like Blue Origin, are taking an incremental, scaled approach to the issue starting with subscale, suborbital systems and working their way up. […]
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