For anyone who was paying extraordinarily close attention to the ULA/Orbital ATK launch of an Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station on Tuesday night, a slight discrepancy in the timing of first stage main engine cutoff might have been noticeable. And if you caught that, then a burn of the Centaur upper stage’s […]
ULA Press Release: United Launch Alliance Completes Preliminary Design Review for Next-Generation Vulcan Centaur Rocket Centennial, Colo., (March 24, 2016) – United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully completed the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle with dual Blue Origin BE-4 engines. The PDR, a major milestone in development of the Vulcan launch […]
In case you missed it, here is the official NASA press release from last night’s launch of the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo vessel to the International Space Station: March 23, 2016 RELEASE 16-036 NASA Sends Fire, Meteor Experiments to International Space Station on Commercial Cargo Spacecraft The station’s Expeditions 47 and 48 crews will employ […]
NASA, United Launch Alliance and Orbital ATK are all counting down to tonight’s scheduled launch of the OA-6 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The ULA Atlas V 401 is scheduled to lift off from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41 at 11:05 PM EDT, at the beginning of a 30 minute launch window. This will be […]
Editorial: It is has not been a particularly good week for United Launch Alliance, and especially for now former VP of Engineering Brett Tobey, who resigned after making a number of controversial comments during a speech at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The story has unfolded in a flurry of articles in Space News, which on […]
An appearance by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell at the Satellite 2016 conference being held in National Harbor, Maryland is shedding a wealth of new information regarding the company’s plans for the remainder of 2016, including a some interesting insight into what it might charge for a re-flight of previously flown Falcon 9 first stage. According […]
XCOR Press Release US AIR FORCE AWARDS ULA AND XCOR CONTRACT FOR UPPER STAGE PROPULSION Midland TX, March 9, 2016, United Launch Alliance (ULA), the nation’s premier launch services provider, has awarded XCOR Aerospace with a new contract through the United States Air Force to develop an upper stage propulsion system for Vulcan, ULA’s next-generation […]
The Air Force has made two more awards in an effort to extricate itself from a controversial, and at times baffling American dependence on Russian rocket engines used to boost some of the nation’s most valuable and sensitive payloads into space. Yesterday’s awards, announced by the Space and Missile Systems PAO, went to Aerojet Rocketdyne […]
Perhaps it is time to change the plucky little spacecraft’s name. In a press conference held Thursday afternoon at NASA’s Johnson Space Center to announce the CRS-2 contract awards, Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane finally caught up with its ambitions, becoming for a day at least, Dream Catcher. In fact, the second Commercial Resupply […]
Is Russia following a path the American space program could have taken? A story in the Russian news agency TASS outlines a lunar exploration program which seems to draw on many of the lessons recently learned, but not applied by NASA for its own “Journey to Mars.” The program, which has yet to be funded, […]
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