J-2X engine will go on the shelf as tight funds slow exploration

Russia's Proton M launch vehicle returned to flight Sept. 30, nearly two months after a July 2 mishap sent the heavy-lift rocket and three Russian Glonass M satellites crashing to the ground at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Early peer-reviewed results of soil-sample analysis by an instrument on the Curiosity Mars rover hold potentially good news for future human explorers who will need to live off the land as much as possible, and bad news for scientists looking for evidence of past life on the planet.

I began my career in the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry as an export sales manager for a European missile manufacturer (now MBDA). It was a somewhat unusual career move for a business school graduate with no engineering background. Today, even fewer graduates have A&D high on their lists when they look for jobs as sales or marketing managers. This is, after all, an industry built by engineers, and its reputation is based primarily on products and the technological innovations that underpin them.

New Russian launch site aimed at curbing reliance on Baikonur

Now that Orbital Sciences Corp. has launched its Antares/Cygnus combo off to the International Space Station, NASA soon will have two routes to the orbiting laboratory. That will come in handy as the U.S. agency works to use the $100 billion engineering marvel as much as possible. Building the ISS was an accomplishment without precedent, but keeping it supplied with experiments and food is not that easy either.