Tuesday’s announcement of the plans by startup Stratolaunch Systems to develop an air launch system attracted considerable attention and excitement, and understandably so. The world’s biggest airplane! A “dream team” that reunited Paul Allen and Burt Rutan for the first time since SpaceShipOne! An industry team that includes Scaled Composites and SpaceX! A [...]
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Late last week members of the media received a notice of a press conference at 2 pm EST (1900 GMT) Tuesday about a new space travel venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. No other details were provided until a short time ago, when Allen announced via Twitter that “I have an [...] Illustration of Orbital's Antares (formerly Taurus 2) rocket lifting off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. (Credit: OSC) Orbital Sciences Corporation announced Monday that it has renamed the Taurus 2 rocket it’s been developing as part of its commercial cargo system. Henceforth, the rocket will now be called Antares. “We are [...] Exactly 366 days—one year and one day—after SpaceX flew its first Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration mission, NASA announced it had agreed to a date for the second flight. Speaking at the NASA Future Forum in Seattle Friday, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver announced that NASA had agreed to a launch date of [...] The ranks of companies with Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) awards from NASA has quietly grown by one. The charter for a hearing on the program today by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee reveals that NASA has signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement with Excalibur Almaz on October 17. There are no other [...] In July, NASA alarmed much of the entrepreneurial space community when it announced it was considering shifting from a Space Act Agreement (SAA) approach to a something closer to a conventional contract for the next round of its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. The first two rounds of CCDev, as well as the earlier [...] Last Friday NASA announced that the space agency and ATK would announce an agreement this Tuesday “that could accelerate the availability of U.S. commercial crew transportation capabilities”. (The announcement was originally going to be only available to media calling into a telecon line, but NASA said Monday the announcement will be on NASA TV [...] Last Thursday, as most expected, Boeing announced it had selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket to launch its CST-100 commercial crew vehicle, at least for a series of three test flights in 2015. (John Elbon, Boeing’s program manager for the CST-100, said that the company would recompete launches for the operational CST-100 missions, [...] Much of the attention commercial spaceflight has been getting recently has been focused on NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, including, as noted here, concerns about contracting mechanisms for future phases of the program. But CCDev is very much based on the earlier Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program for developing commercial cargo transportation [...] Illustration of a Soyuz spacecraft and habitation module en route to the Moon for a circumlunar flight Space Adventures has proposed. A decade after the flight of Dennis Tito, widely if not universally acknowledged as the first space tourist, the company than brokered his flight sees a bright future ahead for commercial human [...] |
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