Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
AsiaSat 5 has begun commercial service operations at 100.5 deg. E. Long. following its in-orbit checkout after an Aug. 12 flight on an International Launch Services Proton from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Space Systems/Loral 1300 satellite, with 26 C-band and 14 Ku-band transponders, is taking over pan-Asian services currently provided by the 13-year-old AsiaSat 2 from the same location. The traffic transfer is to be completed in a few weeks, says Hong Kong-based Asia Satellite Telecommunications.
A seasoned crew of spaceflight veterans will take the space shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station (ISS) on the final scheduled shuttle mission on the NASA flight manifest. Steve Lindsay, the head of the astronaut office at Johnson Space Center, will command Discovery on the STS-133 mission, an eight-day logistics and resupply flight now scheduled to lift off on Sept. 16, 2010. Joining him will be pilot Eric Boe and mission specialists Alvin Drew, Michael Barratt, Tim Kopra and Nicole Stott.
Launch of the U.S. Air Force’s secretive Orbital Test Vehicle Flight 1 (OTV-1) spaceplane has been rescheduled for Apr. 10, 2010, on an Atlas V 501 rocket following several shifts in the busy Cape Canaveral launch manifest. The OTV is the Air Force-led X-37B, a Boeing Phantom Works-built derivative of the X-37 technology demonstrator originally developed for NASA’s “Future X” project of the late 1990s, which the agency hoped to fly as early as 2006 as a precursor to a spaceplane for ferrying space station crews (see image).
