Canadian aerospace set to boldly grow in privatized space travel
The Montreal Gazette
But Canada ultimately stands to profit, Delaney says, pointing to our track record in robotics and space technology, which will be needed as the groundwork is laid for future travel.
NMPolitics.net has asked New Mexico’s gubernatorial candidates about continued support for Spaceport America. The state-funded facility, now under construction in the desert near Las Cruces, was championed by outgoing Gov. Bill Richardson and will be a main launch site for suborbital space tourism flights for Virgin Galactic.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Susana Martinez says the state has already spent lots of money on Spaceport America and can no longer be its “major financer,†while Democratic opponent Diane Denish says she is a supporter of the spaceport but didn’t directly answer a question about the project’s funding.
ASTROBOTIC PRESS RELEASE
Astrobotic Technology, a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off company devoted to robotic exploration of the Moon, announced that it will pursue NASA’s offer to buy up to $10 million in data from a commercial lunar lander mission. The space agency announced its Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program today with a total budget of $30 million.
NASA has announced that it will buy data from lunar landers, an effort that seems tailor made for competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize.
NASA ANNOUNCEMENT
NASA has issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to purchase specific data resulting from industry efforts to test and verify vehicle capabilities through demonstrations of small robotic landers. The purpose is to inform the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles.
International Space Station
ISS Program Reaches Out
Aviation Week
Nearly 300 participants gathered Aug. 3 for the first NASA International Space Station Research Academy, a three-day offering designed to familiarize researchers and payload developers with the orbiting outpost’s designation as a National Laboratory and its capabilities to support experiments in fields ranging from fundamental biology and physics to biotechnology and Earth observations.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson
Senators Jay Rockefeller IV, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Bill Nelson, put out press releases this week praising themselves and the NASA funding bill that passed the Senate this week. All three of them had key roles in crafting the legislation.
“This bill offers a blueprint to move America’s civilian space program forward in a smart, fiscally responsible way,†Rockefeller said. “We’ve had to take a clear, hard look at what we want from NASA in the years and decades to come. We’ve asked the tough questions. The result is a truly bipartisan bill that will help refocus and reinvigorate the agency, while making key investments in aeronautics, science, and education. I’m proud the Senate has moved it one step closer to becoming law.â€
Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Vehicle Plan
Aviation Week
The U.S. government should lead development of a nuclear thermal propulsion system for a future Mars mission and leave new heavy-lift launchers to commercial entities, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says.
Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center
Senate passes NASA “compromise†bill to build new rocketship
Orlando Sentinel
The Senate Thursday night passed a compromise NASA authorization bill that would see the agency get back on track developing a new heavy lift rocket while providing some funding for commercial rocket companies to fly humans to space.
Boeing's CST-100 crew transport. (Credit: Boeing)
A couple of reports out today about Boeing’s plan to build and launch its CST-100 commercial crew capsule into orbit, with initial test launches set to begin in only 3 years. Florida Today reports:
The Boeing Co. plans to be ready to fly commercial space taxis from Cape Canaveral to the International Space Station by 2015 and soon will decide where the spacecraft will be manufactured and assembled, officials said Thursday.
AIAA PRESS RELEASE
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) will honor the winners of AIAA technical and literary achievement awards on September 1 at a noon luncheon in conjunction with the AIAA SPACE 2010 Conference & Exhibition and the 28th AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (ICSSC), being held August 29–September 2, 2010 at the Anaheim Convention Center and Hilton Anaheim Hotel in Anaheim, Calif.
Sir Richard Branson greets Virgin Galactic ticket holders last year at Oshkosh. Financier Per Wimmer is at left; behind Branson is Virgin Galactic's Will Whitehorn.
In an “as told to the editor” story in Forbes, Richard Branson identifies what he believes will be his ultimate legacy:
At Virgin we’d like to think we transformed the airline business and the trade business. But I think the thing that most likely, in a business sense, we will be remembered for is introducing commercial spaceship travel.
Indeed. That would be a great legacy. But will it be?
The Lynx wind tunnel model is tested with red dye earlier this year at the Air Force Research Laboratory, located on Wright-Patterson AFB.
It seems that the folks at XCOR have been busy firming up the design for the Lynx suborbital vehicle. Aviation Week reports the company was down at NASA Marshall recently:
Jeff Greason, who argued strongly against the Constellation program as a member of the outside review panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, used the 55-year-old 14-in. transonic wind tunnel here last month to help develop his XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx suborbital spaceplane. The private vehicle, and his entrepreneurial-outsider approach to creating it, epitomizes the commercial “new space†approach to human spaceflight that lies at the core of the Obama space policy.
