Mark Sirangelo has resigned from Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) for what CEO Fatih Ozmen, owner says are personal reasons, Space News reports. He had run SNC’s Space Systems Division for nearly a decade after his former company, SpaceDev, was acquired. “We are proud and grateful for all we have achieved in partnership with Mark over the last ten years,” Ozmen said. “Mark has an inspiring enthusiasm for space and a […]
Cygnus approaches ISS (Credit: NASA)
WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — Ten years ago, on August 18, 2006, NASA announced agreements with two private companies that dramatically changed the way NASA does business and the landscape for the commercial space industry.
The announcement was rooted in long term trends dating back to the 1980s, but the immediate cause of this change can be traced to the report of the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. In the wake of the Columbia accident in 2003, and the announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration by President Bush in early 2004, the Commission was tasked with coming up with recommendations about future space policy.
SpaceShipOne on the floor beside the Spirit of St. Louis of the National Air & Space Museum. (Credit: National Air & Space Museum)
Two major flight-related anniversaries are being celebrated this week. Today marks the 89th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic aboard the Spirit of St. Louis. Lucky Lindy took off from New York on this date and arrived in Paris some 33.5 hours later, claiming the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
Wednesday was the 20th anniversary of the launch of X Prize (later Ansari X Prize). Inspired by the Orteig Prize, it offered $10 million for the first privately build vehicle to fly to suborbital space twice within two weeks. The Ansari X Prize was won in October 2004 by a team led by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen with SpaceShipOne.
After Lindbergh’s flight, a public that had previously shunned commercial aviation embraced it with a passion. Following the Ansari X Prize, Richard Branson vowed to begin flying tourists to space aboard a successor vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, within three years. Nearly a dozen years and four deaths later, Branson has yet to fulfill this promise.
The SpaceShipTwo program has now taken longer than it took for NASA to go from President John F. Kennedy proposal to land a man on the moon to the completion of the program with the splashdown of Apollo 17. NASA launched the space shuttle Columbia exactly 20 years after the first spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin.
So, why have things taken so long? And why did one prize succeed beyond the dreams of its sponsor, while the space prize it inspired has promised so few practical results? The answer is a complex one that I addressed back in March in a story titled, “Prizes, Technology and Safety.” I’ve republished the story below with links to other posts in a series about flight safety.
Richard Branson speaks to the press at the Mojave Air and Space Port about the crash off SpaceShipTwo. (Credit: Douglas Messier)
The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on all the problems Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic have had with SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo over the years. It pretty confirms everything I’ve been writing for the last few years, adding some interesting details but getting a few of them wrong.
There were a number of interesting elements here:
The article claims that Sierra Nevada Corporation was brought in by Scaled Composites to develop SpaceShipTwo’s engine in 2009. That’s not accurate.
This week on The Space Show with David Livingston…. Monday, January 2, 2012: 2-3:30 PM PST: We welcome Michael Listner, attorney, to the program to discuss national and international space law. Michael is a contributor to several online publications, including Space Safety Magazine He is also a Senior Contributor to Defense Policy.Org, Thus our discussion will cover several very interesting areas of space law. SPECIAL DAY: Wednesday, January 4, 2012, […]
Sierra Nevada Building On NASA Design
Aviation Week
The Colorado-based company is modeling Dream Chaser on the HL-20 lifting-body vehicle that NASA started as a potential International Space Station (ISS) crew rescue vehicle, which would have been able to transport a full station crew fleeing an emergency to a horizontal landing on runways anywhere in the world.
Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser - a space shuttle designed for orbital flight and ISS servicing.
The $50 million in contract awards that NASA announced earlier this month will fund a number of approaches to commercial human spaceflight, including a new capsule and a small space shuttle. The space agency also spread out awards between newer, entrepreneurial companies and established aerospace giants.
SIERRA NEVADA PRESS RELEASE
Small, low cost, satellites that can be rapidly fielded to augment traditional large national security satellites continue to gain attention in a time of constrained military budgets.
I’ve been reading Dan Linehan’s book, “SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History.” It has some interesting history about the development of SpaceShipOne’s engine that seems to shed some light on the delays that Scaled Composites is having in developing the follow-on SpaceShipTwo vehicle.
PRESS RELEASE
The newly formed Space Systems business area of Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) will debut at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs March 30th. The Space Systems business area was established in 2009 through the merger of SNC subsidiary, MicroSat Systems, and SpaceDev, which was acquired by SNC in late 2008.
