XCOR Aerospace moved a step closer to moving its headquarters from Mojave, California, to Midland, Texas, on Friday with a ceremony marking the beginning of renovations [...]]]>

A 2012 photo of the hangar at Midland International Airport being renovated for XCOR. That renovation, first announced in July 2012, officially gets underway today. (credit: XCOR Aerospace)

XCOR Aerospace moved a step closer to moving its headquarters from Mojave, California, to Midland, Texas, on Friday with a ceremony marking the beginning of renovations of a hangar that the company will call home. The company, along with airport and other local officials, held a “ceremonial wall breaking” at the hangar at Midland International Airport to mark the beginning of renovations being done by the airport to host the company.

“Midland stands at the heart of the American frontier,” XCOR CEO Jeff Greason said in a statement announcing the beginning of the hangar renovations, “It is a symbol of the American West. As the first tenant in the commercial space industry to plant our home here we are honored to expand those opportunities not westward, but upward.”

Local officials are funding the renovation of the hangar as part of incentives it provided to XCOR two years ago to entice them to move to Midland. Once the hangar is ready and the airport has a spaceport license from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, XCOR will move its operations there. “We look forward to the transformation of Midland International Airport into the ‘Midland International Air and Spaceport,'” said John B. Love, a member of the Midland city council and chairman of the city’s Spaceport Development Board, in the statement.

Getting the spaceport license is likely the next major milestone. Local officials are expecting the FAA to make a decision on its application by next month. One concern that arose during the licensing process was the effect that flights of XCOR’s Lynx would have on the “lesser prairie chicken”, a threatened species. Local media reported earlier this month that the government would monitor early Lynx flights to see if they caused any harm, a decision that appears to allow the spaceport license to go forward.

Renovations of the hangar at the Midland airport will start “immediately” after today’s ceremony, local officials said in the statement, with a goal of completing them by early next summer. XCOR would presumably then be able to start moving in.

As for XCOR’s work on Lynx, company president Andrew Nelson said in the statement that the flight test program will start this winter. “As XCOR commences the Lynx flight test program this winter, the hangar construction signals the end of the beginning for our team. The next step is to get Lynx flying,” he said.

Like XCOR’s development of Lynx, getting Midland ready for the company has taken a little longer than expected. When the deal was announced in July 2012, XCOR said that the renovation of the hangar would start in early 2013 and be done by late autumn of that year.

Early Tuesday morning, SpaceX performed the latest launch of its Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket, placing the AsiaSat 8 satellite into orbit. While the launch was originally scheduled for 1:25 am EDT (0525 GMT), [...]]]>

A Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 5, carrying the AsiaSat 8 satellite. (credit: SpaceX)

Early Tuesday morning, SpaceX performed the latest launch of its Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket, placing the AsiaSat 8 satellite into orbit. While the launch was originally scheduled for 1:25 am EDT (0525 GMT), a problem with the vehicle’s first stage—never explained in detail by SpaceX—pushed the launch back towards the end of an unusually long launch window. The problem was resolved, though, and the Falcon 9 lifted off at 4:00 am EDT (0800 GMT), releasing the AsiaSat 8 satellite into geostationary transfer orbit.

While SpaceX didn’t issue a press release about the launch, AsiaSat did, confirming the launch was successful and that the Space Systems Loral-built satellite was operating normally. The launch is the first of two back-to-back missions for AsiaSat: a second Falcon 9 will launch AsiaSat 6 towards the end of the month. (This launch demonstrated a three-week turnaround between launches, so assuming that can be maintained, another launch at the end of the month is feasible.)

Unlike the previous two launches, SpaceX did not attempt to “land” the first stage in the ocean, citing the need to reserve the rocket’s performance for the payload. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk did tweet that they did relight the first stage’s engines after stage separation, though:

That launch took place less than a day after SpaceX confirmed it eventually shift commercial launches like this one from Texas. Gov. Rick Perry announced that SpaceX has agreed to build its planned commercial launch complex on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville. That announcement was expected after the FAA completed an environmental review of the proposed spaceport and gave its OK last month for the project to proceed.

Texas is providing a relatively modest amount of funding for the project: it will provide $2.3 million from the Texas Enteprise Fund, plus $13 million from a separate Spaceport Trust Fund to Cameron County to support infrastructure work needed for the spaceport. The release from Perry’s office cites “$85 million in capital investment into the local economy” from the spaceport, suggesting that SpaceX will provide the bulk of that funding for the project.

And there was a smaller development for SpaceX as well this week: a new landlord. Chambers Street Properties announced it was buying the building that serves as SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for $46.7 million. SpaceX leases the building under an agreement that runs through January 2023, and there’s no indication that the sale would affect the company in any significant way.

The FAA has given its environmental approval for a proposed Texas launch site for SpaceX, one of the last milestones before the company makes a decision on a new commercial launch [...]]]>

Illustration of SpaceX’s proposed launch site near Brownsville, Texas. The FAA gave its environmental approval to the site on July 9. (credit: SpaceX)

The FAA has given its environmental approval for a proposed Texas launch site for SpaceX, one of the last milestones before the company makes a decision on a new commercial launch facility.

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) issued Wednesday its “Record of Decision” on the proposed launch site on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, east of Brownsville and just north of the Mexican border. The decision came at the end of a long environmental impact assessment of the proposed facility, which SpaceX would use for commercial launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. The FAA had released the final environmental impact statement (EIS) report in late May.

The FAA concluded that the environmental assessment supported what the report called the “selected action,” namely, the construction of the spaceport. “I find that the Selected Action described in this Record of Decision is reasonably supported,” concluded George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, in a statement he signed at the end of the memo.

The memo does lay out a number of steps SpaceX will have to take in order to minimize the environmental impact of the proposed facility, which would support up to a dozen launches per year, up to two of which would be of the Falcon Heavy. These include a number of “reasonable and prudent measures” to protect local wildlife, steps to prevent pollution of the site by hazardous materials, protection of several historical sites in the area, and noise mitigation measures. For example, in the case of noise mitigation, “SpaceX will make hearing protection devices available to residents to reduce noise levels below 115 dBA at distances up to approximately 2.1 miles for the Falcon Heavy.”

The decision has bene widely seen as the final milestone before SpaceX formally announces its plans to develop the launch site in Brownsville. A SpaceX spokesperson told the Rio Grande Valley Morning Star newspaper that no decision has been made yet, though. “There remain several criteria that will need to be met before SpaceX makes a decision,” Hannah Post told the newspaper. “We are hopeful that these will be complete in the near future.”

While Post said that the Brownsville site was “a finalist” for that commercial launch site, company officials have made in clear in recent statements that it was their preferred site. At the May 29 rollout of the company’s Dragon V2 crew vehicle, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mentioned the environmental impact statement final report that had just been released. “We’re pretty excited about building that out,” he said of the Brownsville site.

In fact, in the Record of Decision, SpaceX all but indicated they were interested in only the Brownsville site. “SpaceX considered sites in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas (City of McGregor, Kenedy County, Willacy County, and other properties in Cameron County),” the Record of Decision memo states. “None of the alternative sites sufficiently met SpaceX’s criteria; therefore, they were not evaluated in detail in the EIS.”

Earlier this week, a leading Florida official all but conceded that SpaceX would not choose a proposed commercial launch site near the Kennedy Space Center. Frank DiBello, the CEO of Space Florida, said Tuesday he expected SpaceX to announce it had decided on Brownsville site in the next week or two. “I am mad as hell, however, that we could not offer him a comparable alternative business site and environment here in time,” he said in a luncheon speech, as reported by Florida Today.

Ellington Airport in Houston is a former military base best known as being the airfield [...]]]>

Illustration of a Dream Chaser vehicle landing at Ellington Airport in Houston. Sierra Nevada Corporation and the Houston Airport System agreed April 10 to study the feasibility of using Ellington as a landing site for the vehicle. (credit: SNC)

Ellington Airport in Houston is a former military base best known as being the airfield used by NASA astronauts at the nearby Johnson Space Center (JSC) for training flights on their T-38 jets. In the last couple of years, the Houston Airport System (HAS), the agency that operates Ellington as well as the city’s two major commercial airports, has expressed an interest in using Ellington as a spaceport, an interest that extends to doing the groundwork for a spaceport license application to the FAA. But who would be interested in using a facility limited to horizontal takeoffs and/or landings that hasn’t already made arrangements with other facilities, like Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America, or XCOR Aerospace and Midland Airport in west Texas?

Late last week, HAS announced it had found someone who at least showed an initial interest in the site. At a press conference Thursday afternoon at the Rice University Space Institute, HAS and Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) signed a letter of intent to study using Ellington as a landing site for SNC’s Dream Chaser orbital crew vehicle. While Dream Chaser will still launch from Cape Canaveral, HAS and SNC will look at the feasibility of having Dream Chaser land at Ellington.

The letter doesn’t commit SNC to using Ellington, but instead will allow the company and the airport authority to study having Dream Chaser use Ellington. At the briefing, SNC corporate vice president Mark Sirangelo, who heads the company’s space systems unit, said the study would cover three areas: a review of the logistics needed to handle Dream Chaser at Ellington, based on actual Dream Chaser data; support for HAS’s spaceport license application; and to “begin a really good dialogue here in Houston about what is the future of space.”

From a basic technical standpoint, it appears that Ellington can support Dream Chaser: the vehicle requires the same runway as a Boeing 737 jetliner, something that Ellington, with runways currently as long as about 2,750 meters (9,000 feet) can handle. The Kennedy Space Center would remain the primary landing site for Dream Chaser, Sirangelo said, but Ellington could be a secondary site, and also allow opportunities to do things like return experiments directly to researchers at JSC or in Houston’s large medical research community.

“The experiments we bring back from the space station, instead of splashing down in an ocean half a world away, land at Ellington and move over to Rice or the Houston Medical Center, and do that within hours of coming off the space station,” he said. “We want to bring that home as benignly as possible and get it to where it needs to go as quickly as possible.”

HAS is currently working on its spaceport license application with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and has the support of the Houston City Council. “We expect to file the application in June or July of this year,” said HAS aviation director Mario Diaz. “We’re confident that, in January or February of 2015, we’ll be issued the ninth spaceport license in the United States.”

Actually, by the time HAS gets its license early next year, it might not be the ninth site with a license. Eight sites currently have spaceport licenses (“launch site operator licenses,” as they’re officially known), but others, particularly Midland Airport, are working on theirs. Midland has already completed its draft environmental assessment, a document that’s usually the pacing element of a license application.

Whether they’re ninth, tenth, or in some other position, HAS officials indicated SNC’s interest helped bolster their case for turning Ellington into a spaceport. “From our perspective, we can say that being able to have Sierra Nevada land at Ellington Spaceport makes our project a reality,” said Arturo Machuca, HAS business development manager. Many people, he said, had dismissed the spaceport plans as a fantasy or something in the far future. “This project is a reality. It is happening.”

All has been quiet on the SpaceShipTwo test flight front in recent weeks, after the vehicle’s third powered test flight a month ago and a glide test a week later. Despite the lack of public [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo fires its hybrid rocket engine during its third powered test flight on January 10, 2014. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

All has been quiet on the SpaceShipTwo test flight front in recent weeks, after the vehicle’s third powered test flight a month ago and a glide test a week later. Despite the lack of public test activity—and continued speculation of problems with the vehicle’s development, including in a recent book—Sir Richard Branson remains confident that SpaceShipTwo will enter commercial service later this year, perhaps after just a few more test flights.

Branson, speaking at the 2014 United Arab Emirates Government Summit Monday in Dubai, said he was still confident that SpaceShipTwo would stary carrying customers on suborbital space tourism flights before the end of the year. “We have 300 engineers beavering away on it,” Branson said, according to Arabian Business. “We have two more test flights [and we should] go into space in three to four months time.”

Last May, Branson, also speaking in Dubai, said he expected to fly in space by Christmas 2013, a date that long since has come and gone. Yesterday, he said he would be worried if he doesn’t fly by the end of this year: “If myself and my family are not in space by the end of the year, I would be very, very worried.”

Branson, at a later event in Dubai, addressed criticism of Virgin Galactic in Tom Bower’s new book. “There are some people who seem to want things to fail and I think he falls into that category,” he said, Bloomberg News reported. “The best way of dealing with people like that is to prove them wrong and we will prove them wrong in the next few months.”

Branson also said Virgin was still planning to develop a spaceport in the UAE. “I hope we’ll have a space hub in Abu Dhabi in a couple of years,” he told the UAE publication The National. In April 2012, Virgin Galactic hired Steve Landeene, the former head of Spaceport America in New Mexico, as its “Chief Advisor, Spaceport Abu Dhabi”.

Virgin Galactic commercial director Stephen Attenborough, though, said that it would be some time before a formal announcement about the spaceport would be ready, and likely not until SpaceShipTwo begins commercial flights from Spaceport America. “Once that is established, we may seek the necessary US export approvals to operate from locations outside the US with Abu Dhabi as a likely first overseas base, should those approvals be forthcoming,” he told The National

This is a big week for those who both support and oppose plans to develop a commercial launch complex north of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On Tuesday [...]]]>

Map of the proposed Shiloh Launch Complex, featuring two pads (lower right), a business park (lower left) and an industrial site (top center). (credit: FAA)

This is a big week for those who both support and oppose plans to develop a commercial launch complex north of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On Tuesday and Wednesday evening, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation will hold “scoping” meetings for a planned Environmental Impact Study (EIS) for what’s known as the Shiloh Launch Complex, named after a former community at the site. The proposed commercial launch site would feature two pads on the Atlantic coast straddling the boundary between Brevard and Volusia counties, a short distance north of KSC, as well as a business park and industrial site. Each pad would be designed to accommodate 12 launches and an equal number of static fire tests per year.

The public hearings—in the city of New Smyrna Beach on Tuesday and Titusville on Wednesday—are intended to solicit input from the community about what should be included in the EIS. That study will get underway later this year and will likely be the critical factor in the request by Space Florida, the state space development organization, for a spaceport license for the facility; without the license, or even with a license that contains sharp restrictions on operations based on the outcome of the EIS, the Shiloh facility may not be built at all.

The proposed Shiloh Launch Complex has aroused interest, and concerns, from the local community. Space Florida and space industry backers see the site as critical to attracting commercial launch activity without the restrictions and overhad of operating at KSC or the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station; supporters plan to attend the hearings wearing red. Critics, though, worry about the facility’s potential negative impact on local wildlife, access to public beaches and wildlife preserves, and even the ruins of a 18th century British sugar plantation. Those concerns are described in detail in an article in Sunday’s Daytona Beach News-Journal.

The official documents about the Shiloh launch site don’t mention a specific customer; instead, the launch pads and associated facilities are designed for “liquid fueled, medium- to heavy-lift class orbital and suborbital launch vehicles.” However, it’s widely believed that the anchor customer for this facility—if it’s built—would be SpaceX, given that company’s long-standing desire for a commercial launch facility separate from the pads it leases at Cape Canaveral and California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Florida, though, isn’t the only state pursuing SpaceX, and the Sunshine State’s bid could be clouded out by Texas. SpaceX has been quietly buying land at a site on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville, just a few kilometers north of the Mexican border. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said on a number of occasions, including a talk last March, that Brownsville was the leading candidate for SpaceX’s planned new commercial spaceport.

That decision could be coming soon, which may be bad news for Shiloh’s supporters. The Brownsville Herald reported last month that the EIS for the Texas site should be completed and released to the public by “late winter.” Since the EIS has traditionally been the “long pole” in any spaceport licensing decision, the release may mean a license could soon follow, long before Shiloh’s EIS is complete. If SpaceX wants to make a decision in the near term about a spaceport site, that would favor Brownsville, provided other factors, including economic incentives provided by state and local governments, come together.

The head of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF), former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, told the Houston Chronicle recently that he believes SpaceX will select the Brownsville site. “I think all indications are that he will” select Brownsville, Lopez-Alegria said, referring to Musk. “I know that there’s still some talk about Florida, and Space Florida is a member of CSF so I wish them well as well, but it will be interesting to see.”

When NASA announced plans earlier this year to lease Kennedy Space Center’s [...]]]>

A NASA illustration of a notional commercial rocket on the pad at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA selected SpaceX to begin discussions on a lease to allow the company to launch Falcon rockets from the pad. (credit: NASA/KSC)

When NASA announced plans earlier this year to lease Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), a pad used for Space Shuttle launches but no longer needed by NASA, it probably didn’t anticipate the legal battle that resulted. Only two companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, submitted proposals to lease the pad, but a dispute over whether the pad should be a multi-vehicle facility or exclusively used by one company delayed a decision on who should get access to the pad.

The logjam broke Thursday afternoon when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its decision on a bid protest filed in September by Blue Origin. The company claimed that NASA would not equally treat proposals submitted that would make LC-39A a multi-vehicle facility, versus one exclusively used by one company. (Blue Origin had submitted such a proposal, while SpaceX had originally submitted plans to make exclusive use of the pad.) Included in Blue Origin’s complaint was a comment by NASA administrator Charles Bolden earlier in the year, who said neighboring LC-39B was the preferred site of a multi-user launch pad (including for NASA’s own Space Launch System).

The GAO, in its decision, concluded that it did have jurisdiction to consider the dispute, something NASA had not agreed was the case. However, the GAO found no evidence that NASA favored one type of lease proposal over the other. “In the final analysis, we agree with the agency that the AFP contemplates two possible approaches, but includes no preference for one approach versus another,” the GAO concluded, denying Blue Origin’s protest.

When the GAO released its decision, NASA didn’t indicate when it would make a decision about the lease of LC-39A. It did not, though, end up wasting any time: on Friday afternoon, NASA announced it was entering into negotiations with SpaceX for leasing the pad. “NASA made the selection decision Thursday after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied a protest filed against the Agency by Blue Origin LLC on Sept. 13,” NASA stated in the release. The agency explained that it continued to evaluate the proposals while awaiting the GAO decision, and thus was ready to move as soon as the protest was formally denied.

And, as it turns out, the debate over whether LC-39A should be an exclusive-use or multi-use pad turns out to be a moot one. When the controversy over the pad erupted in September, with dueling letters from members of Congress supporting both Blue Origin’s and SpaceX’s bids, SpaceX announced it was open to allowing other companies to use the pad if they wanted. “At the time we submitted the bid, SpaceX was unaware any other parties had interest in using the pad,” the company said then. “However, if awarded this limited duration lease on 39A, SpaceX would be more than happy to support other commercial space pioneers at the pad, and allow NASA to make use of the pad if need be.” Blue Origin has indicated recently they would not be ready to begin test flights of their orbital vehicle until 2018, so SpaceX might not have much company at LC-39A for a while.

When New Mexico officials announced almost six years ago that what had previously been known as the Southwest Regional Spaceport would henceforth be called Spaceport America, the decision raised a few eyebrows. After all, it [...]]]>

The previous design (left) of the Spaceport America website, as it appeared Tuesday morning, and the new design (right).

When New Mexico officials announced almost six years ago that what had previously been known as the Southwest Regional Spaceport would henceforth be called Spaceport America, the decision raised a few eyebrows. After all, it wasn’t the only spaceport in the United States of America, and, in fact, at the time of the renaming the facility still existed only on paper. However, they didn’t play up the “America” (as in USA) angle that much in the branding of the site: the logo was done in a mix of black, red, and white, in a sci-fi-eqsue font somewhat similar to the one used by its anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic. In other words, more “spaceport” than “America”.

Today, though, in a redesign timed to the Independence Day holiday in the US, Spaceport America unveiled a new look that shifts that emphasis more to the “America” part of the name. The sci-fi font has been replaced with a more generic one, and the color scheme is now a very patriotic red, white, and blue. The spaceport’s logo features what the spaceport authority, in a press release about the design, calls “two stars coming together” in red and blue.

“The Spaceport America identity is created from the colors of our nation with red symbolizing energy, strength, and power and blue symbolizing trust, loyalty and wisdom,” the spaceport explained. “It reflects Spaceport America’s core commitment to the spirit of exploration, the promise of human potential, and the powerful combination of vision and courage as it launches the next generation of space.”

The spaceport authority also released one bit of non-redesign news about the spaceport itself: it has obtained a temporary “Certificate of Occupancy” from the state for the Spaceport Operations Center (SOC) building at the spaceport, a smaller dome-shaped building just north of the massive hangar that will be used by Virgin Galactic. The interior of the building it not yet complete, but the release stated that they expect final build-out to be done by the end of the year.

For the first time since late September, SpaceShipTwo performed a glide flight on Tuesday. Parabolic Arc, citing a report in the Antelope Valley Press (hidden behind a paywall), reported that SpaceShipTwo made a glide flight Tuesday above Mojave Air and [...]]]>

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

For the first time since late September, SpaceShipTwo performed a glide flight on Tuesday. Parabolic Arc, citing a report in the Antelope Valley Press (hidden behind a paywall), reported that SpaceShipTwo made a glide flight Tuesday above Mojave Air and Space Port. (The test flight has not, as of early Thursday morning, appeared on Scaled Composites’s flight logs for the vehicle.) The last glide flight for SpaceShipTwo was in late September, when it went into a stall shortly after release from WhiteKnightTwo. The resumption of glide flights was expected after a series of WK2 flights and a captive carry flight with SpaceShipTwo earlier this month.

This new series of flight tests comes as Virgin Galactic is preparing for a major announcement next month at the Farnborough International Airshow outside London. “Virgin Galactic will announce an expansion to the company’s current business plans of space tourism and research, which will support government agencies, defense and commercial customers,” the media advisory reads. That, SPACE.com reported this week, is likely to be a resumption of its smallsat launch efforts, which the company first said in 2009 it was pursuing but, more recently, appeared to be on the back burner. A full-scale replica of SpaceShipTwo will also be on display at Farnborough, which may also incorporate some minor design changes to address that stall incident last September.