SpaceX sues to block ULA’s monopoly on Air Force military launches.
The launches at Kennedy, delayed because of a fire at an Air Force radar facility, have now been rescheduled.
This includes a military launch by an Atlas 5 rocket on April 10 and SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch to supply ISS. The Falcon 9 flight will also include an attempt to bring the first stage back to a soft vertical landing over water.
In hearings today, Pentagon officials said that they are considering building American-built engines to use on our rockets rather than buy Russian-made engines.
They could do this very cheaply if they simply allowed SpaceX to bid on all military launches.
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.
The Air Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle presently in orbit has now set a new record for the spacecraft’s longest flight.
The X-37B space plane currently in orbit in flying the Orbital Test Vehicle 3 (OTV-3) mission, the third long-duration flight of the unmanned Air Force spaceflight program. The miniature space shuttle launched on Dec. 11, 2012 and is surpassed the record for longest X-37B spaceflight on Wednesday (March 26). Until now, the record for the longest X-37B mission is 469 days, set by the program’s OTV-2 mission that was launched in 2011.
The OTV-3 mission in orbit today now uses the first of the Air Force’s two X-37B space plane vehicles. The same spacecraft was used to fly the first-ever X-37B mission (the 225-day OTV-1 flight in 2010), while a second vehicle flew the longer OTV-2 mission a year later.
A fire at a radar site used by the Air Force to track rockets lifting off at the Kennedy Space Center has delayed all launches there, including SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 flight.
Initially the Air Force thought they could make repairs relatively quick, but now think it could take as long as 45 days. No new launch date for the Falcon 9/Dragon flight as yet been set.
The Air Force’s X-37B is approaching one year in orbit.
The ship in space now is on its second flight, and the third total flight of the program.
The first X-37b to fly in space has now completed five months of its second mission.
The next flight of the X-37B has been delayed again, with the new launch date set for no earlier than December 11.
The next launch of the X-37B has been delayed again.
The Air Force has released its investigation into the failure of the August test flight of the X-51a hypersonic scramjet.
As first surmised, the problem was a control fin. Though they haven’t set the date for the next test flight, it appears they do intend to proceed.
A test flight of an Air Force hypersonic aircraft failed yesterday when it went out of control before its experimental scramjet engine could be started.
Though failures during engineering tests are not really failures, as the goal is to find out if the engineering works or doesn’t, this particular failure is a bit more like a real failure. They never got to test the scramjet engine, which was the point of the entire flight. Instead, they had a failure of a control fin on the aircraft, and it appears that this fin was “faulty.” Not a good sign, especially as the previous flight in June 2011 also failed prematurely.
The X-37b that has been in orbit for the past 15 months successfully returned to Earth in a runway landing today.
Video of the landing below the fold.
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The Air Force has announced that the X-37B spacecraft presently in orbit will be returning to Earth in the next few weeks.
It just keeps going and going: Air Force officials declare the on-going X-37B mission, now over 400 days long, “a spectacular success.”
The Air Force moves forward with the plans to develop a reusable first stage rocket.
The X-37B: The Air Force admits it has a fleet of two, does not plan on increasing the size of that fleet, but also plans many more missions for both spacecraft.
The X-37B marks one year in orbit.
More importantly, the Air Force has indicated that a third X-37B mission will launch this fall.
Is the Air Force using the X-37B to spy on China’s first space station?
The Air Forces has awarded contracts to Andrews Space, Boeing and Lockheed Martin to develop a reusable first stage booster.
The landing date of the X-37B has been extended, even as it nears a record mission length.
An update on the ongoing X-37B mission.
I like this quote from the article:
Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station. Speaking this week at the Space 2011 conference —organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and held in Long Beach, Calif. — Arthur Grantz of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems sketched out a host of future uses for the space plane design. For one, the X-37B, as is, can be flown to the space station and dock to the facility’s common berthing mechanism. No new technology is required for X-37B to supply cargo services to the ISS, Grantz said. Also, an X-37C winged vehicle has been scoped out, a craft that would ride atop an Atlas 5 in un-shrouded mode.
The Boeing roadmap, Grantz added, also envisions a larger derivative of the X-37B space plane, one that can carry up to seven astronauts, as well as tote into Earth orbit a mix of pressurized and unpressurized cargo.
An Air Force official suggested this week they would be willing to sacrifice the X-37 in budget negotiations.
SpaceX is about to break ground on launchpad and hanger for Falcon Heavy.
Second X-51 hypersonic flight crashes prematurely.
After what the US Air Force described as a ‘flawless’ flight to the launch point aboard a Boeing B-52 mothership, the X-51 was successfully boosted to Mach 5.0 by a rocket booster. The Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne scramjet engine successfully ignited using its initial fuel, ethylene. During the immediate transition to JP-7, the conventional fuel that makes the X-51 unique, an inlet unstart occurred. A subsequent attempt to restart and reorient to optimal conditions was unsuccessful.
Air Forces is moving to open up its rocket purchases to competition. I especiallly like this quote from a SpaceX official:
“We know what it takes to do this,” says Harris. “We don’t understand why others are making it cost so much.”
Who says there aren’t customers for the new rocket companies? The Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office have inked a deal with SpaceX, preliminary to using the company’s rockets to launch military satellites.
The X-37B space plane has been spotted again by amateurs.
