China’s astronauts successfully undocked, backed away from their space station, and then completed a manual docking early today.
Charting the relative economic strength of the world’s most powerful countries over the past 2000 years.
The article cites 1800 and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as a key moment in this history. I would also note that 1800 is about the time that freedom and Adam Smith’s ideas of economic liberty took hold in both North American and Europe.
NASA has delayed the first test flight of Orion’s launch abort system by two years to 2017.
NASA officials have been warning since last year that work on Orion would be slowed to keep pace with the development of SLS and its launch infrastructure. The agency has proposed trimming Orion’s $1.2 billion budget back to $1 billion for 2013. With the high-altitude abort test facing at least a budget-driven delay, the Langley team has proposed conducting one or more less-expensive tests in its place. Ortiz said conducting a hot-fire test in 2015 or 2016 would “keep the [launch abort system] project moving forward and help alleviate risk.”
I predict that Dragon will not only test its launch abort system first, it will have humans flying on it before Orion. And Dragon will do this for a fraction of the total cost that Orion and SLS spend per year. I also predict that when Dragon does this, Congress will finally begin noticing this disparity, and SLS will die unlaunched.
The competition heats up: Test firing of SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor has begun.
The competition heats up: Excalibur Almaz has signed a deal to use Xcor’s Lynx suborbital craft to train its astronauts.
Since Xcor has not yet flown Lynx, and Excalibur Almaz as a lot of work to do to make its Soviet-era modules flyable, I would bet that this news release is mostly public relations hype, centered as much on raising investment funds for both companies as it is about training astronauts.
The competition heats up: SpaceShipTwo was in the air on Friday, as WhiteKnightTwo did a 1.5 hour test flight with the ship attached to its belly.
This was the second flight of WhiteKnightTwo in three days, and is in line with Virgin Galactic’s test flight schedule announced in May. If the test flights go well, expect that first rocket-powered flight of SpaceShipTwo later this year.
The competition heats up: Excalibur Almaz has announced its plans for a privately funded trip to the Moon.
The first manually flown docking by Chinese astronauts is now scheduled for June 24.
The competition heats up: A new company has announced plans to use the Gemini capsule design from the 1960s to provide crew and cargo capability to orbit.
“Since this is an existing and proven design we could begin construction six to eight weeks after funding and complete a flying prototype ten to thirteen months later,” said WestWind President Bill Jolly.
The FAA and NASA have worked out their differences concerning their regulation of private commercial space.
Essentially, NASA has finally conceded with this agreement that it has no control over a private space launch that is not flying to a NASA facility. That the FAA continues to have as much regulatory control is bad enough, but getting NASA out of the loop will at least ease the bureaucratic burden for private companies.
The competition heats up: China’s Shenzhou-9 capsule successfully docked with Tiengong-1 today and the crew has entered the space module.
