Former Orbital Sciences Corporation lobbyist Mark Bitterman has resigned from his job at SpaceX after less than three months on the job, Space News reports.
And he quit because of….wait for it…“personal reasons — family obligations that require more time and attention than the demands of this job would allow,” SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham told the publication.
The competition’s Tokyo-based team shows off its lunar rover.
Roscosmos has cleared the Proton-M rocket and the Breeze-M upper stage for flight after an inquiry found that the recent loss of a communications satellite was caused by a programming error in the third stage’s guidance system. “Following analysis of information, the commission has concluded that over formation of the mission profile for the Briz-M upper stage, the time interval of sub turning of the gyro-stabilised platform was cut unreasonably. […]
Boulder, Colo. — SwRI PR — Aug. 30, 2011 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been selected to provide payload flight integration services as part of three suborbital flight provider contracts recently announced by NASA to Virgin Galactic, XCOR and Masten Space Systems. These contracts are an important step forward for the NASA Flight Opportunities Program, funded by NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist and managed by NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., and affirm the need for commercial space access for a range of research and educational applications.
“We’re excited for ourselves, for our flight provider partners and for NASA. These wins add to SwRI’s growing base of payload and payload specialist work and experience in the next generation of suborbital research being undertaken with reusable vehicles such as XCOR’s Lynx I, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip 2 and the bevy of vehicles Masten will be flying,” says Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division, and the architect of SwRI’s next-generation suborbital programs using these and similar vehicles.
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Our brave marsonauts may face the most monotonous phase of their mission, but they’re not bored because they are not boring! Have a look at their inventive cookery to celebrate their one full year in the isolation! In early June the Mars500 crew celebrated their one full year inside the modules simulating an interplanetary spaceship. They are now flying virtually back to Earth and due to a delay in communications, […]
Long simmering controversies concerning the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) heated up today as one of the 28 teams competing for $30 million branded the competition’s rules as “oppressive” and “unconscionable” and accused the X Prize Foundation of tolerating a serious conflict of interest involving prominent trustee Naveen Jain, who leads one of the competitors.
“The facts of the matter are that the MTA [Master Team Agreement] is nothing more than a one-sided ‘legal framework’ to benefit the X PRIZE Foundation and Google while placing an unreasonable burden on the teams. The agreement is egregiously one-sided, overly burdensome, oppressive and unconscionable,” Team Mystical Moon wrote in a blog post.
This week on The Space Show With David Livingston…. SPECIAL TIME WEBINAR 7-9 PM PDT: 1. Monday, August 29, 2011, 7-9 PM PDT: This is a Space Show webinar panel continuing our human factors theme. We will be looking at what it takes for life support for a deep space/Mars Mission. Our panel consists of Dr. Vadim Rygalov of Space Studies at the University of North Dakota, Brian Enke of […]
While many of the competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize are building rather small vehicles to keep costs down, Astrobotic Technology has gone in the other direction in order to maximize revenues.
In addition to delivering a rover, Astrobotic’s lander can carry up to 110 kg of third-party payload to the lunar surface. At a cost of between $1.8 million to $2 million per kilogram, a fully sold out mission would earn Astrobotic around $200 million in revenues – more than enough to pay for the mission.
The People’s Daily reports: According to an unnamed source in a position of authority in Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the remarkable Chinese unmanned space module Tiangong 1 will be launched soon. However, because the experimental orbiter SJ-11-04, which was launched last week, failed to enter Earth’s orbit, the launch of Tiangong 1 has been postponed until early September.
