Construction delay at Spaceport America

The Air Rescue Fire Facility (ARFF) at Spaceport America, seen earlier this month. (credit: Spaceport America)

Spaceport America officials have stopped work on one of the facility’s buildings until as late as next spring in order to reevaulate the design of its interior, the Albuquerque Journal reported Tuesday. The Air Rescue Fire Facility (ARFF), […]

SpaceX gets its reentry license; Masten and Space Florida announce a deal

SpaceX announced Monday afternoon (in a press release that, curiously, was not on their web site as of late Tuesday morning) that they have received a commercial spacecraft reentry license from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST), the first since license issued by that office:

Next month, SpaceX is planning to launch […]

Third glide flight for SpaceShipTwo

SpaceShipTwo during its first glide test on October 10, 2010. (credit: Mark Greenberg/Virgin Galactic)

Scaled Composites carried out a third glide test flight of SpaceShipTwo (SS2) on Wednesday. According to the company’s WK2/SS2 flight test logs, SS2 flew free for 11 minutes and 39 seconds after its release from WhiteKnightTwo. There were no major […]

A spaceflight raffle – with a change in rules

Last week a Florida nonprofit, the Aerospace Research and Engineering Systems (ARES) Institute, announced a competition titled “Win A Trip To Space!”. The idea was simple: buy a raffle ticket, and one lucky winner will get a ticket on a suborbital spaceflight. But the contest rules appear to have quietly changed since last week’s announcement, […]

A blast from the past: Rotary Rocket video

Robin Snelson recently posted on Ustream a video press release from the legendary Rocket Rocket Company, an entrepreneurial RLV developer from the late 1990s:

The 15-minute video from 1998 starts with an animation of the unique flight profile of the company’s Roton SSTO RLV: launch vertically into orbit, deploy its payload, then land vertically using […]

SpaceX raises another round

SpaceX has raised another round of financing, to the tune of $50 million, according to an SEC filing by the company on Tuesday. A company spokesman told Business Insider that the additional funding came from existing investors, which would include the Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. However, there appears to be a new (or […]

Flybys: commercial space conference, TSC factory groundbreaking, SpaceX rescheduling

Special Aerospace Services, a Colorado aerospace company, announced Monday they would host the first Commercial Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder this coming January. The one-and-a-half-day conference is designed to give attendees “insight to techniques that will be required to successfully achieve NASA human rating certification and FAA commercial spaceflight licensing”, according to the conference […]