Image Credit: NASA Photo / Tom Tschida SpaceX is not the only organization making significant strides in autonomous landing technology. NASA.gov as a has a good writeup on the results of tests conducted last December using Masten’s Zombie low altitude rocket to simulate Mars landings. The key difference here is that by using the imaging […]
Morpheus : Image Credit NASA Bit by bit, NASA’s vision of the Kennedy Space Center as a 21st century spaceport is taking shape, offering an interesting mix of public and private spaceflight. And bit by bit, the spaceport which launched mankind to the Moon, is helping to send machines back. As Florida Today reports, as […]
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 […]
One of the more innovative smaller efforts underway at NASA is the Flight Opportunities Programs, which offers researchers access to the suborbital and high altitude environment on a variety of platforms. The range of the experiment portfolio is impressive, and it has already hosted a number of experiments which could be important stepping stones on the path to permanent and expanding presence in space. For instance, much […]
While SpaceX has been getting the lion’s share of RLV publicity lately with an increasingly ambitious set of tests for the Grasshopper test vehicle, (and a posthumous nod from Johnny Cash) it is by no means the only company pushing the envelope of closed loop control. Working with NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and Draper Labs, Masten Space System’s Xombie technology […]
After riding on the coattails of larger satellite launches, the increasing demand for smaller satellites and cubesats are beginning to drive the introduction of a new generation of air launched commercial rockets. Two new ventures, one in the U.S. and the other from Europe, are planning to join Virgin Galactic and Stratolaunch in the rapidly expanding field of air launched rockets. The first, based out of […]
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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