BROOMFIELD, Colo. — The battle over what – if any – government safety regulations will be formulated for people flying on Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic suborbital vehicles and the right of those passengers to sue in the event of an accident was on full display at the Next-generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) in Colorado this week.
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Blue Origin is still investigating the in-flight failure of its New Shepard rocket last September that resulted in the abort of a capsule carrying a load of experiments, the system’s chief architect said on Tuesday.
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WhiteKnightTwo took to the air again on Monday morning. Virgin Galactic’s Eve mothership, named after company founder Richard Branson’s mum, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in California. After flying in circles over the Mojave Desert, it headed east to New Mexico where it flew circle over Spaceport America before landing on the facility’s only runway after a flight of 5 hours 33 minutes.
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SpaceX scrubbed the launch of a fresh crew to the International Space Station (ISS) early Monday morning with 2 minutes 30 second left in the countdown. The scrub came 24 hours after an empty Russian Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the station to replace one that suffered damage in December.
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Maxar Technologies will become a private company through a merger with private equity firm Advent International after not receiving any other acquisition proposals during a 60-day “go shop” period.
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Terran Orbital subsidiary Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems has been awarded a $2.4 billion contract to supply 300 communications satellites to Rivada Space Networks. The company will build 288 satellites for deployment in low Earth orbit along with 12 spares.
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Credit: Par SeanMichealClemes — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117737080
United Launch Alliance (ULA) has set May 4 as the date for the maiden launch of its new Vulcan rocket. The flight will launch Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine spacecraft to land on the Moon as well as two other payloads.
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With Virgin Galactic promising that suborbital tourism flights from Spaceport America in New Mexico are right around the corner, the authority that oversees the facility has decided it needs a brand new building there.
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Boeing and NASA say they are on track to launch the first crewed CST-100 Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) in mid to late April.
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Japan’s new rocket fizzled on the pad last week as the United States and Russia prepared for key launches this week to the International Space Station (ISS).
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