by Edward Wright NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Development (CCDev) program keeps getting smaller all the time. Last June, Congress forced a “compromise” on NASA, which was more like a surrender. Under this “compromise,” NASA was forced to reduce the number of companies in the CCDev competition from five to three. The third company (Sierra Nevada) received a much smaller [...]
Post Tagged with: “commercial”
NASA’s New Budget
At NASA these days, money is the talk of the town. On April 10, Us President Obama released his budget request for fiscal year 2014, including the NASA budget. This is just the start of the process: the budget doesn’t reflect the actual funds that will be allocated to NASA, this is just the official ask. Here is NASA’s official [...]
Boeing Completes Launch Vehicle Adapter Review
Source: NASA The Boeing Company of Houston, a NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) partner, has successfully completed a preliminary design review (PDR) of the component that would connect the company’s new crew capsule to its rocket. The review is one of six performance milestones Boeing has completed for NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, which is intended to make [...]
Flying to Mars on a Fusion Rocket
One of the most challenging aspects of sending humans to Mars is the duration of the flight that takes them there: over 500 days of putting up with the same crewmates while being barraged by cosmic radiation. It’s enough to make anyone stay in Earth orbit. But a group of researchers at the University of Washington is determined to go [...]
Black Sky Training Obtains FAA Approval
Commercial spaceflight took another step forward on March 28 when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) awarded commercial suborbital flight training company Black Sky Training the first ever safety approval for space training. “By establishing a standard protocol for training of the flying public and flight crews, they [the FAA/AST] have signaled the burgeoning space flight industry that nothing but the highest safety [...]
Antares Rolled Out for April 17 Flight Test
Orbital Sciences Corporation has confirmed that the Antares rocket test flight will commence on April 17. In the meantime, the first fully-integrated Antares was rolled out from its assembly at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), on April 6. “With the completion of the Antares roll out today,” said Mr. Michael Pinkston, Orbital’s Antares Program Manager, “we are on a clear [...]
New Mexico’s Legislation Expands Liability Protection for Spaceflight Companies
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez has signed legislation expanding existing liability protections for spaceflight companies in the state, on April 2. “We are not only reaffirming the major commitment New Mexicans have made to Spaceport America but we now have an even stronger opportunity to grow the number of commercial space jobs at the spaceport and across our state,” said [...]
Swiss Space System May Build Rocket Plane, Spaceport in Europe
Swiss Space System (S3) has announced a plan to build an unmanned rocket plane by 2017 to launch satellites into orbit. “S3 aims to develop, build, certify and operate suborbital space shuttles dedicated to launching small satellites, enabling space access to be made more democratic thanks to an original system with launching costs up to four times less than at present,” [...]
Kazakhstan, Russia Compromise on Baikonour Launches
On April 1, Russian and Kazakh officials announced that they had reached a compromise. On March 27, the two nations agreed that Russia would launch at least 14 commercial spaceflights from Baikonour Cosmodrome in 2013. The agreement followed months of wrangling between the two nations over the status of Baikonour. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has paid [...]
Training for Fear: the Creation of Inner Space Training
Everyone is familiar with astronaut training procedures from practicing EVAs under water to studying diagrams of the spacecraft they will fly and spinning around in centrifuges to experience the rigors of g-forces. But all this physical, physiological, and intellectual preparation doesn’t address the psychological and emotional responses of future spacefarers. What of an astronaut’s fear, for instance, when faced with an [...]
