With the successful debut of its Epsilon rocket last week, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is advancing incremental improvements to the new solid-fueled launcher with commercial customers in mind. “We are taking a two-step development plan to launch a low-cost, high-performance Epsilon,” says Yasuhiro Morita, Epsilon program manager at JAXA. “We are aiming at the commercial market after the establishment of the next-generation Epsilon, and I hope to be very competitive.”

China is eager to collaborate with Russia or Europe to use its Shenzhou human spacecraft and perhaps a planned cargo carrier to support the International Space Station, even as it works toward starting a Mir-class station of its own by 2020.

Orbital Science Corp.’s Cygnus resupply capsule will loiter in orbit until at least Sept. 28, permitting Russia to proceed with an upcoming three-man Soyuz crew transport mission to the International Space Station, before making a second attempt at a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program rendezvous and grapple demonstration, NASA and the Dulles, Va., based company announced Sept. 23.

An Australian research team hoping to conduct a free flight Mach 8 test of a novel inlet-fueled scramjet is investigating what prevented the hypersonic flight experiment from reaching the correct test conditions.

While NASA’s engineers plot the next steps in human spaceflight and Congress struggles with the cost, the 100 Year Starship nonprofit is focused on an aggressive interstellar journey with the best humanity has to offer. Launched with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency in early 2012, the group, led by former NASA astronaut and physician Mae Jemison, is now reaching out on its own with a cultural and socially inclusive vision of human daring that echoes the themes that Star Trek and Star Wars sounded generations ago.

Measurements of methane in the Martian atmosphere made by the Tunable Laser Spectrometer aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover since the August 2012 landing in Gale Crater find surface concentrations of the gaseous hydrocarbon much too low to support subsurface biological activity as a source.

When the nearest hardware store is 350 mi. straight down, tool control takes on a whole new dimension. Take away gravity, and air, and it gets even harder. Just ask Jill McGuire, a private pilot who was also the engineer in charge of crew aids and tools for the last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009. “You have to take everything with you,” she says. “You don't get a chance to run to Home Depot.”

WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY, Va. – Orbital Sciences Corp. has enough hardware on hand for the 10 commercial cargo missions it has contracted with NASA, and is already looking ahead to the day when it runs out of the surplus Soviet-era Russian engines it uses to power its new Antares launch vehicle.