SpaceX has purchased more land near it’s likely spaceport site in Texas, Waco residents have been told to prepare for a louder-than-usual engine test over the weekend, and NASA has slips the next Dragon flight to January. The space exploration firm based in California that is considering development of a rocket launch facility near Boca Chica Beach purchased four more lots. The purchase follows a commitment of $15 million and […]
AUTHOR
Doug Messier
Via Orbital Sciences Corporation Orbital Sciences Corporation is targeting September 15 as the first opportunity to conduct the Antares launch of our Cygnus spacecraft for the COTS Demonstration Mission to the International Space Station (ISS) originating from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility Wallops. In the event that weather or other operational factors require the date to shift, the company will seek to carry out the launch no later than September 19. […]
Video Caption: Mining asteroids isn’t easy and now with some new scientific data it may actually be even harder than we originally thought! What are the risks and how do we overcome them? Check out this SpacePod for your answers!
This is an artist’s concept of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft preparing to take a sample from asteroid Bennu. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/Chris Meaney)
By William Steigerwald
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization’s appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Aug. 13, 2013 (UMD PR) — New electromagnetic propulsion technology being tested by the University of Maryland’s Space Power and Propulsion Laboratory (SPPL) on the International Space Station could revolutionize the capabilities of satellites and future spacecraft by reducing reliance on propellants and extending the life cycle of satellites through the use of a renewable power source.
A crane lifts SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft on to a barge after the vehicle twice orbited the Earth in December of 2010. (Credit: SpaceX)
WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) partner Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) recently reviewed the systems critical to sustaining crews in orbit and returning them safely to Earth aboard the company’s Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX is one of three commercial space companies working under NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative to develop spaceflight capabilities that eventually could provide launch services to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil.
The authors of a newly published scientific paper have identified a dozen asteroids that can be easily moved to stable locations near Earth for scientific investigation and mining using current technologies.
“This paper has shown that the retrieval of a full asteroid is well within today’s technological capabilities, and that there exists a series of objects with potential to be temporarily captured into libration point orbits,” the three authors write. “We define these objects as Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs)….Indeed, the paper presents a list of 12 EROs, with a total of 25 trajectories to periodic orbits near L2 and 6 near L1 below a cost of 500 m/s, and the number of these objects is expected to grow considerably in the coming years.”
WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — NASA announced Thursday it is adding some additional milestones to agreements with three U.S. commercial companies that are developing spaceflight capabilities that could eventually provide launch services to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil.
Athena rocket
DENVER, Aug. 14, 2013 (Lockheed Martin PR) – Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] has chosen three world-class companies to provide CubeSat integration for Athena launch services. Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems LLC of Irvine, Calif., TriSept Corporation of Chantilly, Va., and Spaceflight, Inc. of Tukwila, Wash. will provide turnkey CubeSat integration services for multi-payload and RideShare missions using Athena launch services beginning in 2015.
“We are very pleased to offer this significant enhancement for CubeSat customers using Athena launch services that leverage the proven expertise of these three companies to provide comprehensive, affordable, one-stop integration and launch services to customers worldwide,” said Robert R. Cleave, president of Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services. “Working together, we are providing customers with efficient and affordable payload integration bundled with the launch service for the expanding range of CubeSat missions.”
NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program has issued a new call for proposals for payloads maturing crosscutting technologies. The solicitation covers a single, unique orbital flight that is scheduled for launch in late FY 2015. STMD Technology Demonstration Mission Program’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) currently has excess payload capacity. The Flight Opportunities Program has been offered part of this excess capacity for non-deployable, ready-to-demonstrate payloads that could be accommodated on the […]