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 […]
It has been a wild week in world of digital currency known as bitcoins, beginning with a high profile theft, and culminating with NewsWeeks’s claim that it has identified its enigmatic creator. Somewhere in the middle comes a new piece of evidence that bitcoins may have a future as interplanetary currency. Virgin Galactic has received another […]
Although NewSpace companies are already revolutionizing some market segments such as the the smallsat industry, progress in other areas, notably launch systems, has been much slower, with the clear exception of SpaceX. Two companies which harbor long term crew capable orbital ambitions, Virgin Galactic and XCOR, are on the threshold of beginning suborbital passenger flights, […]
The week ended on a high note for the Kennedy Space Center with the announcement today that NASA and Space Florida are hammering out a partnership agreement which would see the State of Florida development agency assume responsibility for the Shuttle Landing Facility.The agreement which is still being worked out could see Space Florida ease the entry of a number […]
It has been an interesting couple of weeks for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and what appears to be the growing trend among high profile celebrities to sign up for flights aboard the V.S.S. Enterprise. Two weeks ago a Russian businessman reportedly paid the equivalent of $1.5 million at a benefit auction for the right to share a flight with Leonardo […]
Earlier this week, yet another Congressional committee held hearings on the direction of NASA and future of human spaceflight. Even for policy wonks, this gets old. Maybe though, that is about to change. It has been a long eight years since SpaceShip 1 won the Ansari X-Prize and began to focus the world’s attention on the […]
A NASA Commercial Crew Program update highlights one of the clear cases where progress in NewSpace suborbital space tourism is helping the orbital Commercial Crew program. Update below Virgin Galactic used a hybrid engine built by Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) Space Systems last Monday for the first powered test flight of the SpaceShipTwo, which is being […]
The suborbital space transportation industry took one of its biggest steps to date this morning, with the first powered test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, the complete details of which are included in the press release below. Coming as it does in the same month which saw Orbital Sciences complete the first launch of the Antares booster, and looking […]
This week could see significant developments for two of the most visible companies in NewSpace. Things got off to an early start with a tweet from Elon Musk dated 5:54 AM Sunday, announcing an ignition test for the “Falcon 9-R (reusable) ignition system.” The nomenclature is interesting, as it might have been expected to be identified as the […]
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 […]
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