Category: Commercial
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Weekly Space Blog 6/6
Kepler back online The Kepler spacecraft that was sidelined last year after two of it’s gyroscopes failed has been re-purposed to the K2 mission. The original mission of Kepler was to continuously observe the same patch of the sky looking for slight dips in the brightness of the star. This indicated that a planet or…
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Weekly Space Blog 5/30
Sea Launch successfully launches Eutelsat Satellite Following a 15 month gap between mission’s Sea Launch returned on Monday to successfully launch a 6.6 ton Eutelsat 3B satellite. The Zenit 3SL rocket lifted off successfully and following a nominal flight successfully deployed the satellite to orbit. The communication’s satellite will now use it’s engine’s to transfer…
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SpaceX unveils Dragon v2 – Crew Vehicle
This evening Elon Musk unveiled the next version of the Dragon spacecraft designed to take crews to the International Space Station and beyond. The crewed version of Dragon has undergone quite a transformation from the first version which was hanging above the crowd during the unveiling. The spacecraft is much bigger then before, has SuperDraco…
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Weekly Space Blog 5/23
SpaceX Dragon completes successful mission Last Sunday at 3:05pm the SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully completed it’s CRS-3 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) with a splashdown in the Pacific ocean. Launched on April 18th aboard a Falcon 9 rocket the Dragon spacecraft, carrying nearly 5,000 lbs of supplies and payloads including two in the…
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Successful Liftoff of NROL-33 aboard Atlas 5
This morning a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida carrying the NROL-33 classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. Liftoff occurred at 9:09am EDT and all was progressing well up to payload separation. Due to the nature of the launch there was a news blackout after that so we…
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Weekly Space Blog 5/16
Soyuz TMA-11M crew lands safely The three crew members of TMA-11M landed safely after spending 188 days in space, See full article here Russia fires back over US Sanctions This week Russia fire back against US sanctions in two key areas, the first was to spurn NASA’s proposal to extend the life of the ISS through 2024.…
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Weekly Blog 5/9
This week in Space News SpaceX launch of Orbcomm OG2 satellites delayed The planned launch of six commercial communications satellites for Orbcomm has been delayed. The planned static fire test on Thursday was called off after SpaceX ran into technical trouble during the countdown. The static fire test was rescheduled for Friday but was stopped while the rocket…
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Weekly Space Blog 5/2
We are back with our weekly blog, and what an interesting week it has been. SpaceX announce suit against ULA Block Buy On Friday 4/25, SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had filed a suit protesting the bulk buy of Rocket Core’s from ULA. SpaceX made several arguments against the block buy, including the…
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SpaceX CRS-3 Report
Well after a four month break I am pleased to say the blog is back and will be updated regularly. The reason for the long hiatus was due to a busy Christmas session quickly followed by the birth of my third daughter Annabella in January. Today’s post will focus on last weeks launch, capture and berthing…
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Weekly Space Blog 12/14
A lot has been happening this week in Space ISS Coolant Failure This week one of the two coolant systems on the station shutdown when a component reached a preset temperature limit. While not posing an immediate danger to the crew on-board the shutdown did require that NASA shutdown non-critical systems on the station to…