NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

NASA MEDIA ADVISORY : M11-032  NASA Administrator Bolden, Marshall Center Director Lightfoot to Speak at Small Business Alliance Meeting in Huntsville March 24  

What: On March 24, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will host its semi-annual Small Business Alliance meeting at the Davidson Center for Exploration in Huntsville. Speakers will include NASA Administrator Charles Bolden; Marshall Center Director Robert Lightfoot; and Glenn Delgado, associate administrator of NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs in Washington. More than 400 local, regional and national business owners and managers are expected to take part in the meeting.

Members of the news media are invited to attend, and will have an opportunity to ask questions of Administrator Bolden during the event.

Sponsored by the Marshall Center’s Office of Procurement and Small Business Office, the Small Business Alliance was established in 2007 to help small businesses pursue NASA procurement and subcontracting opportunities. With a strong emphasis on technology innovation and partnership, the alliance connects small businesses with government agencies, industry prime contractors and other organizations to share procurement information and new business opportunities.

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Pad OA at Wallops Island. (Credit: Orbital Sciences Corporation)

NASA ushered in a new era of space exploration at its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Tuesday with a ribbon cutting ceremony opening the new Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF).

The HIF will support medium-class mission capabilities. The first customer to use the facility will be Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., with its Taurus II launch vehicle.
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XCOR test fires its Lynx 5K18 engine with lightweight aluminum nozzle; United Launch Alliance (ULA) and XCOR to apply the nozzle and XCOR’s liquid hydrogen (LH2) pump technology to new LH2 engine development. (Photo Credit: Mike Massee / XCOR)

What do you get when Big Rocket teams up with America’s most innovative rocket startup? Some pretty amazing new technology.

ULA/XCOR PR — March 22, 2011, Centennial, CO, and Mojave, CA, USA: United Launch Alliance (ULA) and XCOR Aerospace announced today their successful hot-fire demonstrations of a lighter-weight, lower-cost approach to liquid-fueled rocket-engine vacuum nozzles. The new nozzle technology, which uses aluminum alloys and innovative manufacturing techniques, is projected to be less costly and save hundreds of pounds of mass compared to nozzles in use today in typical large upper-stage rocket engine systems.

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LM PR — DENVER, March 21, 2011  — Forging a new path forward to ensure safe, affordable and sustainable human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) today unveiled the first Orion spacecraft and a spacious state-of-the-art Space Operations Simulation Center (SOSC). These two major projects, located at Lockheed Martin’s Waterton Facility near Denver, Colo., showcase the NASA-industry teams’ progress for human space flight, the Orion Project and NASA’s Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.

The spacecraft will undergo rigorous testing in Denver to validate Orion’s ability to endure the harsh environments of deep space. The Orion crew exploration vehicle is on schedule to conduct its first orbital flight test as early as 2013 and provide initial operational flights by 2016 as required by the NASA Authorization Act of 2010.

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Aerojet's AJ26 engine successfully tested for Taurus II space launch vehicle. (PRNewsFoto/Aerojet)

The FAA’s 2011 U.S. Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts: Vehicles, Technologies, and Spaceports report highlights what a busy year it was for Aerojet in 2010. The company’s work included propulsion development for the DOD, NASA’s Orion program, Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Taurus II rocket, and a pair of innovative technology programs. The company also tested an advanced solid fuel for ramjets with potential commercial applications.

The relevant section from the report is after the break.

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Two recent launch failures and sharp public criticism from leading government officials is putting the Russian space agency Roscosmos under a harsh spotlight. It’s also raising questions about whether the launch campaign the country is pursuing this year is too aggressive.

After having led the world with 31 launches last year, the Russians will increase that pace to 48 this year. That is a launch every 7.6 days. No other country in the world comes close to that figure; in 2010, the United States and China had 15 launches apiece. There were only 74 launches worldwide last year.

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The FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation: 2010 Year In Review report has some interesting charts and tables that show the state of the global launch market. Russia leads the world in all categories, with the United States a distance third in commercial launches and not too far behind in non-commercial ones. China tied the U.S. for the first time with 15 launches, none of them commercial. Europe launched six Ariane V commercial missions. As for the rest of the world, there were all of seven launches, three of which sent their payloads to swim with the fishes. (Sorry South Korea and India. May 2011 be a much better year.)

But, that’s just the top level analysis. There’s much, much more. Follow me down below as we go Behind the Numbers…

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This week on The Space Show… 1. Monday, March 21, 2011 , 2-3:30 PM PDT. We welcome back Bob Werb, co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, to discuss the “Keep The Promise Program”. 2. Tuesday, March 22, 2011, 7-8:30 PM PDT: We turn our attention to the upcoming ISDC Conference with Cliff McMurray and Bart Leahy. 3. Friday, March 25, 2011 , 9:30-11 AM PDT: We welcome back Dr. Clay […]

The San Francisco Mission District burning in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

I’ve found a bit more information about Russia’s IGMASS system, which is an international network designed to help with disaster predicting, monitoring and response.The first bit of news is the eye-popping $22 billion cost of building the full global network. That’s expensive, but relatively cheap compared to the cost of disaster relief and recovery.

The Voice of Russia describes the plan:

The project suggests that satellites, special airplanes, ground sensors and navigators will be transmitting all data concerning ongoing or expected natural disasters such as earthquakes, forest fires, tsunami, or even asteroid fall to regional and international crisis centers. The proposed global aerospace monitoring system suggests the use of Russian GLONASS and American GPS navigation, as well as ground quake and tsunami alarm systems that include more than 20,000 devices.

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The FAA’s 2011 U.S. Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts: Vehicles, Technologies, and Spaceports report highlights a pair of significant advancements by XCOR Aerospace in 2010. They involve significant progress on a new type of piston pump engine that could make turbopumps obsolete. XCOR also completed a series of crucial wind tunnel tests on its Lynx suborbital vehicle.

Both achievements are worth a closer look. Excerpts from the report follow with my notes in italics.

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The FAA’s 2011 U.S. Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts: Vehicles, Technologies, and Spaceports report has a section that looks at commercial spacesuits being developed by American companies.

One of these companies, ILC Dover, has been building spacesuits for NASA for decades, producing the suits worn on the moon by Apollo astronauts and space shuttle astronauts. The David Clark Company has been around since 1941, producing pressure suits for Chuck Yeager, Gemini astronauts, and the space shuttle program. The third company, Orbital Outfitters, is a newcomer that is designing pressure suits for XCOR’s Lynx suborbital vehicle.

The relevant section from the report is reproduced after the break.

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The mysterious Blue Origin has plans for an orbital capsule to be launched aboard an Atlas V rocket, according to the FAA’s 2011 U.S. Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts: Vehicles, Technologies, and Spaceports report: In 2010, NASA signed a Space Act Agreement with Blue Origin for $3.7 million as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. Under the agreement, Blue Origin continued development of a “pusher” crew […]