Genesis 2 launch delay

A SPACE.com article today provides an update on plans to launch Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 2 spacecraft, a small-scale demonstrator of the company’s planned inflatable orbital habitats. The launch, which earlier had been pushed back to January 2007, is now planned for “the early end” of the first quarter (which sounds like sometime in late February or early March), still on a Dnepr. The reason for the slip isn’t discussed in the article, although the Dnepr has yet to return to service following a launch failure just two weeks after the successful Genesis 1 launch.

The article also recaps the agreement announced in September between Bigelow and Lockheed Martin to study human-rating the Atlas 5, a plan described by a Lockheed official as an effort “to evaluate the market of space tourism and research to determine if Atlas could be a part of this potential new market area.” While there were rumors earlier this month that another Bigelow-Lockheed announcement was imminent, there’s no indication in this article of anything like that in the works.