Los Angeles, May 8, 2012 (ATK PR) – ATK will be making a major announcement and providing updates on its Liberty System, which provides the safest, most reliable capability to launch crews to low earth orbit for commercial space. The announcement will be made at the SpaceCraft Technology Expo in Los Angeles, California during the Liberty session. What: Liberty Transportation System Session Date: Wednesday, May 9, 2012 Time: 4:30 – […]
AUTHOR
Doug Messier
Eugene Cernan
Apollo commanders Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and James Lovell have sent a letter of support to Rep. Frank Wolf supporting the House’s demand that NASA immediately down select to one commercial crew provider and transition to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) based contracting.
“Our recollection is that FARs exist to protect taxpayer investments and the best interests of the government by reducing risk in procurement,.” the retired astronauts wrote. “They were developed over years of experience and represent lessons learned and best practices in contracting. We are generally unfamiliar with Space Act Agreements but understand that they include little in the area of requirements and would be unlikely to provide the documentation that we normally depend upon to provide high confidence in reaching our technical goals.”
Read the full letter after the break.
Brazilian Space Agency President José Raimundo Braga Coelho. (Credit: AEB)
AEB PR — The mathematician José Raimundo Braga Coelho was named president of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB). The decree of appointment, signed by President Roussef, was published in today’s Official Gazette (DOU).
Following is the first declaration of the new president:
“My first words are addressed to the President Rousseff. I am grateful to His Excellency for the confidence placed in me, as I offer the unique opportunity of presiding over the Brazilian Space Agency, the main executing agency of our space policy, an indispensable part of the historic national effort to sustainable development with a strong and unprecedented social inclusion that Brazil is – fortunately – engaged for several years.
San Mateo, CA (Citizens in Space PR) — Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, will announce a space prize challenge for citizen scientists at Maker Faire, the nation’s largest festival of do-it-yourself science and engineering, on May 19. The announcement takes place on the Education Stage at the San Mateo Event Center at 1:00 pm.
Citizens in Space plans to fly citizen-science experiments on fully reusable suborbital spacecraft that are now being developed by US companies.
The Houston Chronicle has taken a look at the Texas’ efforts to promote commercial space development within the state and found them to be wanting. The newspaper quotes Elon Musk as saying state officials have made little effort to get behind SpaceX’s proposed Gulf Coast spaceport near Brownsville. It also got a curt no comment from a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry. Meanwhile, the Texas Space Alliance says it is […]
Union workers at United Launch Alliance facilities in Alabama, California and Florida rejected the company’s new three-year contract on Sunday only to have it take affect anyway when a vote to strike fell short, according to published reports.
The vote involved approximately 860 workers ULA’s production facility in Decatur, Ala., and its launch sites at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The workers are represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) .
SHERPA space tug. (Credit: Spaceflight, Inc.)
Seattle, WA – May 7, 2012 (Spaceflight Inc. PR) — Spaceflight Inc. (Spaceflight) unveiled today its SHERPA in-space tug, which is dedicated to hosting and deploying small and secondary payloads.
“SHERPA is the next step in providing space access for small and secondary payloads,” said Jason Andrews, President and CEO of Spaceflight Inc. “SHERPA builds on our Spaceflight Secondary Payload System (SSPS) by incorporating a propulsion and power generation system to allow us to host payloads, as well as place them in an orbit other than the primary payload’s orbit.”
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This week on The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston… 1. Monday, May 7, 2012 2-3:30 PM PDT (5-6:30 PM EDT, 4-5:30 PM CDT): No show today as I am attending the Reinventing Space Conference (Responsive Space). 2. Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 7-8:30 PM PDT (10-11:30 PM EDT, 9-10:30 PM CDT): There will be a live Space Show at the Reinventing Space Conference. It will be archived for Space Show […]
NASA plans to award Boeing a contract to modify its Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS) to serve as interim cryogenic propulsion stages on the first two flights of the new Space Launch System in 2017 and 2021.
“As a result of internal market research that looked at available in-space propulsion capabilities in the United States, Europe, and Japan, NASA determined that the DCSS, with minor modifications, was capable of fulfilling the SLS needs,” the space agency announced on its procurement web site.
Gear down. (Photo: Mark Greenberg)
PRESS RELEASE — Space Travel is a reality and speaks to the minds of many. Already over 500 people purchased a $200,000 ticket to go space with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the worlds first commercial space liner. With celebrities like Aston Kutcher, Stephen Hawking, Michael Schumacher and Victoria Principal already signing up it’s time to connect the International Film Industry to Space and vice versa during an exciting, most “Out-of-the-box” Astronaut Party.
Time and place will be the luscious villa Oxygen on the Riviera’s hotspot Cannes on Saturday May 19, 2012.