Category: Commercial
-
ULA and Blue Origin unveil BE-4 rocket engine
Today United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Blue Origin announced a new liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine that delivers 550,000-lbf of thrust at sea level. The engine has been in development at Blue Origin for three years and a pair of them will be integrated into the Atlas rocket in appropriately three/four years. The…
-
Atlas V launches with CLIO payload
This evening a United Launch Alliance Atlas V lifted off with a secret payload called CLIO for the Department of Defense. Details of the orbit or what the payload is for has not been made available. The launch was delayed several times due to weather constrains but those cleared allowing a liftoff to occur at 8:10pm…
-
CCtCap awards announced
Today at 4pm EDT from Kennedy Space Center NASA announced the winners of the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts. And the winners are: Boeing – The CST-100 capsule seen to the right has been awarded $4.2 billion of the money. Over the next three years Boeing will have to complete a number of milestones below to…
-
AsiaSat-6 launched successfully
Following an 12 day delay for SpaceX to triple-check that the Falcon 9 was okay after the Falcon 9 Reusable explosion the rocket and payload successfully lifted off this morning to complete another mission for SpaceX and AsiaSat, during the countdown this evening the weather conditions were not ideal including a lightning strike on the…
-
Asteroid Mining the big question
We have seen a lot of news recently regarding mining asteroids to provide resources which could open up a trillion dollar industry in the future. However during all this talk the one question that doesn’t seem to have been answered is how do we get the resources back to Earth to use. During a conversation…
-
My Views on Commercial Space
Today during a twitter conversation about the new SpaceX Texas Spaceport one of the people in the discussion send the following tweet. @ChrisDMarshall you seem to be determined to downplay commercial space potential and options. — NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 30, 2014 This got me thinking as personally I fully believe in Commercial Space as…
-
Will SLS ever fly
Following on from my previous article I wanted to explore the possibility that the Space Launch System (SLS) may never actually fly. While progress has been made on the SLS it will not be ready to fly when President Barack Obama leaves office and given that he cancelled the Constellation Program (CxP) when he came…
-
The true cost of getting the US back to manned flight
To date we have seen a lot of talk about the cost of the SLS program, however that isn’t the only cost that has been incurred by the US tax payer since the announcement that the Space Shuttle was to be retired. This article will look at everything that has happened since then and how…
-
SpaceX talk to NASA FISO
This afternoon SpaceX’s Garrett Reisman gave a talk to NASA’s Future In-Space Operations Group regarding SpaceX. During the talk he mentioned the up coming milestones for CCiCap. The Dragon Pad Abort test will be performed from the top of a test structure from SLC-40 as SLC-39 will not be ready in time. The vehicle will…
-
AsiaSat-6 launch scrubbed
SpaceX announced this afternoon that this evening’s AsiaSat-6 launch has been scrubbed. This follows last Friday’s F9R test failure and almost certainly is to allow the team more time to review the data from that test and ensure that the problem won’t happen to the F9 launcher. While this is yet another delay for SpaceX…