Six Senators on Wednesday demanded the Air Force open up competition to more companies for launching its military satellites.
The competition heats up: Six senators on Wednesday demanded the Air Force open up competition to more companies for launching its military satellites.
U.S. senators on Wednesday urged the Air Force to allow more competition in the multibillion-dollar market for launching government satellites, citing rising costs and concerns about Russian-made engines that power some of the U.S. rockets.
Lawmakers said the Air Force’s budget plan for fiscal 2015 reduced opportunities for privately held Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and others to gain a foothold in a program now dominated by the two biggest U.S. weapons makers, Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.
This demand also bodes badly in an indirect way for SLS. It indicates that these senators are beginning to notice the cost benefit of competition and of using the private market. Such a realization is going to eventually leak into their peanut brains about SLS, and that will not do that program any good, especially if the new commercial private companies like SpaceX continue to show success.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The competition heats up: Six senators on Wednesday demanded the Air Force open up competition to more companies for launching its military satellites.
U.S. senators on Wednesday urged the Air Force to allow more competition in the multibillion-dollar market for launching government satellites, citing rising costs and concerns about Russian-made engines that power some of the U.S. rockets.
Lawmakers said the Air Force’s budget plan for fiscal 2015 reduced opportunities for privately held Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and others to gain a foothold in a program now dominated by the two biggest U.S. weapons makers, Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.
This demand also bodes badly in an indirect way for SLS. It indicates that these senators are beginning to notice the cost benefit of competition and of using the private market. Such a realization is going to eventually leak into their peanut brains about SLS, and that will not do that program any good, especially if the new commercial private companies like SpaceX continue to show success.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“Such a realization is going to eventually leak into their peanut brains about SLS”
You may be optimistic on this one. Those peanuts have seemed pretty hermetically sealed, these past few years. But the sooner that they decide to go with a launcher that does not cost an arm, two legs, and three first-born male children (do you have three? I don’t), the better off our space program will be.