MIDLAND, Texas (MDC PR) – The Midland Development Corporation approved an agreement with Orbital Outfitters for the location of their Space Pressure Suit Manufacturing and Development business at the Midland International Airport (MAF).

The construction of the new building, on approx. 2 acres of land at MAF, will completed by December 2015. The building will include an altitude chamber complex to support the testing and qualification of space and pressure suits, small space systems and components testing and flight crew training operations and will be made available for use by UTPB.

Orbital Outfitters specializes in the design, development, and manufacturing of space and pressure suits, with a secondary line of business focusing on the production of full-scale space vehicle mockups. The company works closely with XCOR Aerospace, whose new R&D Center will be located on the flight line at MAF in a soon-to-be renovated ~60,000 sq. ft. hangar testing and office facility.

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OVIEDO, Fla. (BST PR) — On January 22, 2014, FAA/AST approved 5 courses for Black Sky Training. The addition of these courses to the BST’s first ever FAA approved space flight training course, High Altitude Physiology, given in BST’s Hypobaric Chamber, fulfills BST’s offering for the Space Flight Participant Series.

These revolutionary courses allow BST to offer FAA approved courses to train as commercial astronauts for not only Space Flight Participants, but to those wanting to become pilots of rocket powered RLV spacecraft and to any licensed pilot wanting to hone or advance their skills.

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Resource Prospector Mission field test in Hawaii. (Credit: NASA)

This would be a really cool mission:

Following a series of reconnaissance missions that found hydrogen and then water on the Moon, NASA is laying the groundwork for a lunar rover that would scout for subsurface volatiles and extract them for processing.

The heart of the proposed  (RPM) is the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen & Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) payload, a technology development initiative that predates its official start two years ago in NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division.

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Newton engine (Credi: Virgin Galactic)

The exclusive, multi-platform partnership that Virgin Galactic has forged with NBCUniversal has begun to bear fruit over the past two months. The media giant has signed on to chronicle Sir Richard Branson’s flight aboard SpaceShipTwo and all the events leading up to it.

In November, Sir Richard Branson phoned into CNBC from his Necker Island retreat in the Caribbean to announce that Virgin Galactic would begin accepting the virtual currency Bitcoin for SpaceShipTwo reservations.

A month later, NBC News got into the act, with Science Editor Alan Boyle and a film crew trekking out to Mojave for a powered flight of SpaceShipTwo. They went away disappointed when the test was scrubbed due to a rare patch of bad weather in the High Desert.

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Soyuz TMA-22 crew in space. (Credit: NASA TV)

NASA’s bill for crew transportation services to the International Space Station is expected to rise to more than $2 billion with the space agency’s latest decision to extend an agreement with the Russian space agency Roscosmos through the spring of 2018.

NASA plans to purchase six additional seats aboard Russian Soyuz transports for 2017 plus emergency crew rescue services through the spring of 2018. A similar deal the space agency signed last May for 2016 and 2017 cost $424 million, or roughly $70 million per seat. How much the new agreement will cost is unknown, but costs have risen sharply over the past several years.

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HOUSTON – Jan. 28, 2014 (Waypoint 2 Space PR) – Waypoint 2 Space, a leading provider of spaceflight training for the commercial space industry, today announced it has received FAA safety approval for its highly anticipated training services that will begin late spring of 2014. The FAA safety approval solidifies Waypoint 2 Space’s commitment to establishing the safest and highest training standards for the industry.

Waypoint 2 Space is the only domestic company that will be providing fully comprehensive and immersive spaceflight training programs for both suborbital and orbital space. The company is offering future and prospective crew and spaceflight participants the opportunity to receive innovative training techniques and have access to the most advanced equipment in the world.

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Jean-Yves Le Gall , the president of the French national space agency CNES and former CEO of Arianespace, has written an op-ed in Le Monde in which he identifies what SpaceX has gotten right and calls upon Europe to respond in kind. Below is a rough translation of a key portion via Google Translate: If we compare the launcher SpaceX to its competitors, it differs in three major points. First, its […]

HOUSTON, Jan. 28, 2014 (Conrad Foundation PR) – As part of the Conrad Foundation’s ongoing commitment to developing the conscientious  leaders of tomorrow, the international not-for-profit launched its latest initiative, Brain Trust. The program was established to provide motivated young innovators with the opportunity to further develop products and services created as part of the Foundation’s Spirit of Innovation Challenge.

Services provided to Brain Trust participants include assistance with intellectual property protection, consultations with business and technical experts, and access to grants and other funding opportunities. Teams also are eligible for exclusive speaking and networking opportunities offered by the Conrad Foundation and its partners. Funding for the Brain Trust grants and services was made possible through a 2013 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign which raised more than $40,000 to launch the new program.

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The commercial crew gap: the Obama Administration’s requested funding is in blue, with Congressional amount in red. (Credit: ASAP, FY 2014 budget data)

Sounding much like a broken record (or a buffering webcast, for those not only enough to LPs), NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has once again identified Congressional miserliness as a major threat to the success of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP).

“While the budget request to appropriated funding ratio was slightly improved in 2013, as depicted in the figure below, the shortfall remains a top concern and the 2014 budget remains uncertain,” the panel said in its 2013 annual report. “This shortfall is seriously impacting acquisition strategy, and there is risk that force-fitting the CCP into a fixed-price contract with only the funds available has the potential to adversely impact safety.”

Well, what else is new?

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Spaceflight Now is reporting that the US Air Force has agreed to purchase 36 booster cores as part of a deal with United Launch Alliance: A blockbuster rocket-buying agreement has been signed between the Air Force and United Launch Alliance, the supplier of boosters for national security spaceflight. The deal aims to produce 36 booster cores for the Pentagon’s use over the next few years of Atlas 5 and Delta […]