A Russian paid 1.2 million euros to fly on SpaceShipTwo with actor Leonardo DiCaprio at a charity auction at the Cannes film festival on Thursday.
The competition heats up: Japan has announced an August 22 launch date for its new Epsilon rocket.
Key quote: “Epsilon replaces the M-V, a larger solid-fuel rocket that failed to attract sufficient customers to remain in production. M-V’s last launch was in 2002.” Competition rules!
The competition heats up: The Russians announced today that they plan nine more Proton rocket launches in 2013, for a total of twelve.
I note this to give some context to what SpaceX will do with Falcon 9 this year. SpaceX has just updated its launch manifest schedule, and if the American company does what it says, it should have at least six more Falcon 9 flights this year, for a total of seven.
Should these predicted launches all take place, it will clearly demonstrate that SpaceX has grabbed a significant share of the launch market, but that the Russians are also holding their own.
Note also that the updated launch manifest still includes the first test flight of Falcon Heavy in 2013. Very interesting.
Update: The Russians are also preparing to launch their new Angara rocket family, which will replace their older rockets and allow them to launch from their new spaceport.
The competiton heats up: In a speech in Dubai last week Richard Branson revealed that his company is aiming for a 2013 Christmas day inaugural space tourism flight of SpaceShipTwo.
The competition heats up: A new Defense Department report says that China is aggressively ramping up its space program.
China will continue to augment its orbiting assets, with the planned launch of 100 more satellites through 2015. These launches include imaging, remote sensing, navigation, communication and scientific satellites, as well as manned spacecraft.
China is pursuing a variety of air, sea, undersea, space, counterspace and information warfare systems, as well as operational concepts, moving toward an array of overlapping, multilayered offensive capabilities extending from China’s coast into the western Pacific. China’s 2008 Defense White Paper asserts that one of the priorities for the development of China’s armed forces is to “increase the country’s capabilities to maintain maritime, space and electromagnetic space security.”
Further, China continues to develop the Long March 5 rocket, which is intended to lift heavy payloads into space. LM-5 will more than double the size of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) payloads China is capable of placing into orbit. To support these rockets, China began constructing the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in 2008. Located on Hainan Island, this launch facility is expected to be complete sometime this year 2013, with the initial LM-5 launch scheduled for 2014.
The Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle has been unwrapped at Dryden.
This is not the actual flight vehicle, but a prototype built to do drop tests with. They will build the spacecraft based on the data obtained in these tests.
A first look at the Saturn 5’s F1 engines that were recovered from the ocean floor and are being restored for museum display.
The competition heats up: In new and apparently successfully ground tests of the SpaceShipTwo engine, Scaled Composites even destroyed one this week to test the operation of different components.
Great Britain’s first official astronaut has been picked for a five month mission on ISS in 2015.
Astronaut Michael Foale was born in Britain, but he flew on Mir as an American. Britain meanwhile had banned spending any government money on space exploration in the 1960s, and hadn’t changed that policy until about two years ago. If the reaction to Canadian Chris Hatfield’s ISS mission is any guide, this mission will liven things up a bit for space exploration in the old country.
The competition heats up: Richard Branson recently told an audience in Dubai that the first commercial flight of SpaceShipTwo will occur before the end of 2013, and that commercial flights from Dubai will occur two years later.
The competition heats up: Russia’s Proton rocket successfully put a commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit on Wednesday.
This is the third successful Proton launch this year and the third since a December launch failure. It appears the Russians have ironed out the kinks in the Briz-M upper stage, and are ready to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In fact, at the moment they are the only ones who can compete with the Falcon 9, at least when it comes to price.
SpaceX is about to finalize a deal with the Air Force to launch satellites on both its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
For the Dscovr mission, scheduled for late 2014, a Falcon 9 will be used to launch an Earth and space weather satellite to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1, a location approximately 930,000 mi. from Earth. The Dscovr program, which will provide warning of space weather events, is a joint effort between the Air Force, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The STP-2 mission, which is targeted for launch on a Falcon Heavy in mid-2015, includes two space vehicles: the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate-2 (Cosmic-2), designed to monitor climate behaviors; and the Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX), which will conduct radiation research. [emphasis mine]
The big story here is that even before it has flown the Falcon Heavy once SpaceX already has a customer for it.
