The companies building manned spacecraft for the United States all appear to be on track.
The report gives a nice overview of the recent achievements of all three companies, and suggests that the U.S. will once again have a manned spacecraft capability before the decade has ended coming from more than one design.
The top ten states for job growth.
There isn’t a clear common political thread here, but it is worth noting that all of the top five and seven of the ten have all-Republican governments.
It isn’t the party that matters, it is the philosophy of the members of that party that matters. And you are more likely to find politicians who support freedom, competition, and capitalism in the Republican Party.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have set January 7 as the launch date for the Cygnus cargo mission to ISS.
They did some rescheduling at Wallops Island to allow the Cygnus launch to happen earlier.
India has set January 5 as the launch date for its next attempt to launch is home-built GSLV rocket.
An update on the Google Lunar X-Prize competition.
A number of teams have dropped out, narrowing the competition to eighteen teams.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has set December 31 as the launch date for its next Falcon 9 commercial launch.
They are picking up the pace. This will be SpaceX’s second commercial launch in December and its second geosynchronous launch. If they prove they can keep this pace through 2014 they will not only clear away a large amount of the launch backlog, they will establish themselves as a solid player in the launch market, a company that the competition must fear due to its low prices.
Bad weather scrubbed a SpaceShipTwo test flight yesterday.
It was unclear whether this would have been a powered flight. The scrub also ends any chance of another test flight before the end of the year.
Madness: A company fires an employee because he put out a fire.
Bowers knew that his actions were going against company policy, but he believed that in this instance the customers urgent need came first. “When the guy came in and said his dashboard was on fire I grabbed the fire extinguisher and I followed him outside and sure enough his dashboard was on fire,” Bowers said. They quickly put out the fire and Bowers returned to his post.
He was later called into the store director’s office where he was suspended for his actions. “The one supervisor told me that my heart was in the right place, but my brain wasn’t,” Bowers said. Later that week, he was fired from his job for not following company policy.
The company is Meijer’s, which is going to discover this is a major public relations disaster. Just read the comments at the link.
NASA engineers have decided to go ahead with a series of spacewalks to repair the ISS cooling system, thereby delaying the Cygnus cargo mission until January.
The EVAs will take place on December 21, 23 and 25 followed by a Russian Spacewalk on the 27th and a Beta-Angle Cut-out beginning on December 29. That means that the earliest launch opportunity for Cygnus is January 9, 2014 (local time) – pending the successful execution of the contingency EVAs.
Update: The Orbital Sciences press announcement says their launch can happen no earlier than January 13.
Arianespace has ordered the construction of an additional 18 Ariane 5 rockets.
This construction order, if it reflects actual launch contracts, gives Arianespace some margin while it works to find ways to compete in the launch business, as expressed by the last sentence of the above article: “Astrium managers recently called for a thorough overhaul of the Ariane contractor mix with a view to reducing prices to stay viable in the competitive world commercial launch market.”
Aerojet has successfully completed engine tests for the launch abort system on Boeing’s CST-100 manned capsule.
“In the past several weeks, the Aerojet Rocketdyne team conducted a series of eight tests on two Launch Abort Engines meeting or exceeding all test parameters,” said Aerojet Rocketdyne Program Manager, Terry Lorier. “The tests demonstrated engine performance for multiple mission duty cycles and proved operation and durability under extreme operating conditions. The success of this most recent test series clears the way for our team to proceed into qualification and production of the engine in the next phase of the program.”
