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 […]
Vostochny Under Construction. Image Credit The Moscow Times One question which defines the NewSpace movement, is which individuals, companies, or governments are investing in technologies or systems which have the capacity to significantly reduce the cost of access to space. In the case of the latter, governments, all too often it is just as easy […]
NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a report yesterday outlining several issues facing NASA as it seeks to extent the operating life of the International Space Station from current threshold of 2020, until at least 2024. The good news is that there are no outstanding technical issues which seriously threaten the ability to keep the […]
Long time Russian space observer James Oberg has penned a very interesting article at NBCnews.com which suggests that Russia is subtly attempting to get the U.S. government to acknowledge its absorption of the Crimea by shifting some mandatory cosmonaut training to that region. From the article: “Shifting the survival training to Russian-occupied Crimea will require […]
Innerspace.net Commentary With the passing of the first week in September, NASA is presumably within a few weeks of announcing the winner or winners in the next phase of its Commercial Crew program. That phase, labeled Commercial Crew Transportation Capability or CCtCap, will see the selection of which firm is going to provide crew transport […]
Image Credit: Russian Space Agency The headlines (particularly those from Britain) focused on the prurient: Russia: SEXY LIZARDS which landed FROM SPACE are ALL Dead (The Register) Russia confirms death of five geckos on space sex mission (The Guardian) Sex geckos die in orbit on Russian space project (The BBC!) But what deserves a bit […]
It was something of a Black Friday for the launch industry yesterday. In addition to the SpaceX F9-R “explosion” in Texas, a bizarre story has emerged regarding an Arianespace launch which happened the same day. The launch, which took place aboard a Russian built commercial Soyuz out of French Guiana and under the Arianespace banner, […]
Russia’s long awaited Angara booster lifted off today on a suborbital test flight which carried with it the hopes of a revival in the Russian launch industry after years decades of reliance on Soviet era boosters. The Angara 1.2PP or ML (Maiden Launch) Integrated Launch Vehicle (ILV) lifted off from the far northern Plesetsk cosmodrome […]
For the moment at least, India is standing atop the world launch industry. On June 30, India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C23) lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharti flying over the Bay of Bengal into a Sun Synchronous Orbit where it successfully placed its main payload, the 714 kg Spot-7 Earth […]
Last week, a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee passed an FY 2015 bill for NASA, one with ominous portents for the Commercial Crew program. As pointed out in several media sources, the bill contains a “poison pill” provision which appears to be deliberately calculated to increase the administrative costs of the program to contractors, with SpaceX […]
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