Category: Space
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NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft reaches Mars
Following a ten month, 442 million miles journey NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) successfully entered into orbit of Mars this evening. The orbit insertion maneuver began with six thruster engines firing briefly to damp out deviations in pointing. Then, the six main engines quickly ignite and burn for 33 minutes to slow the craft,…
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SpaceX CRS-4 Mission Launches Successfully
At 1:52:04am EDT today a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for the fourth CRS mission under the NASA’s commercial cargo program. The launch originally scheduled for yesterday had to be scrubbed due to weather constrains. Unlike the recent satellite launches which had long launch…
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Exciting times in Space
A lot has happened in Space or related to Space recently and the future is looking very bright. Below is a summary of some of the recent news and upcoming events. SpaceX and Boeing awarded CCtCap contracts – We now have two companies contracted to build manned spacecraft to deliver crew to the ISS. Currently…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…