Image Credit: OneWeb OneWeb has announced what is being described as the largest single launch order ever placed. The order, which will eventually cover some 900 of its planned fleet of broadband internet satellites in Low Earth Orbit, will be split between the Arianespace marketed version of the Soyuz booster, and Virgin Galactic’s much smaller LauncherOne, which is under development. […]
Image Credit : Blue Origin After a four year hiatus, Blue Origin to the skies in West Texas yesterday, and it may well have been worth the wait. Here is the announcement from Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on the company website. Apr 29, 2015 First Developmental Test Flight of New Shepard Today we flew […]
LauncherOne Factory Launch / Image Credit : Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic announced on Thursday that its is opening a dedicate factory in Long Beach, California for producing the LauncherOne small booster. Here is an excerpt from the press release, absent the obligatory statements from local officials:: LONG BEACH, Calif. – February 12, 2015 – Virgin […]
LauncherOne Image Credit Virgin Galactic An interesting story is unfolding regarding what appears to be two separate efforts at establishing very large constellations of small, broadband satellites. In an interview with Bloomberg which came out Tuesday, Elon Musk provided a few more details about the office SpaceX is opening in Seattle. Musk stated that office […]
Image Credit: IEEE / Emily Cooper In the immediate aftermath of the Virgin Galactic disaster, SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor came under suspicion as the most likely culprit. And, although subsequent updates by the NTSB team investigating the accident have instead centered on a problem with the craft’s feathering device and likely human error, many articles […]
Image Credit: Interstellar In what has at times appeared to be a headlong rush to write off the future of space tourism as a response to the Virgin Galactic accident, a surprising (or perhaps not so) number of media sources have completely overlooked the fact that there are two other U.S. based companies, XCOR Aerospace […]
Only two days in to an investigation which was expected to take up to a year, the National Safety Transportation Board team looking in to Friday’s Virgin Galactic crash at the Mojave spaceport has made a surprising discovery, one which overturns almost all of the early assumptions about what led to the disaster. Speaking at […]
Two days after Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo broke up in the skies over the Mojave Desert, the National Transportation Safety Board “go team” is on site. B Roll video release of the accident site is beginning to reveal some aspects of the disaster which took the life of Scale Composites test pilot Michael Alsbury, badly injured […]
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground In the second major disaster to strike commercial space in the same week, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo broke up in the air above the Mojave desert shortly after igniting its new plastic compound based hybrid motor in what would have been its first powered test flight. […]
Coming together. Image Credit: XCOR Aerospace Coming on the heels of the 10th anniversary lamentation/celebration of SpaceShipOne’s winning the Ansari XPRIZE, an event which saw more than a little criticism aimed at Virgin Galactic for its frequent delays with SpaceShipTwo, the other company racing to introduce a commercial suborbital spaceplane, XCOR, announced major progress in […]
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