Bidding to ride on the first passenger flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft closed at $28 million, with the unnamed winner to join company founder and funder Jeff Bezos, his brother and one other person for a ride slated for July 20.
Hard mate between the 212-ft. tall, 188,000-lb. core stage and the Northrop Grumman five-segment booster rockets occurred at about 7 a.m. EDT on June 13 in High Bay 3 of Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building.
This could be final year of observations with SOFIA as the White House 2022 budget proposal for NASA calls for the cancellation of the airborne observatory.
The OEM is hoping that by proving its ability to produce H175 components normally supplied by Chinese industry within Europe, it could comfortably propose a military version—called H175M—to meet the UK’s upcoming New Medium Helicopter (NMH) need.
The Pentagon is sending a new $150 million package to Ukraine for counter-unmanned aerial systems, secure communications gear, counter artillery radars and medical evacuation equipment to preserve the nation’s territorial integrity.
The former head of the U.S. Defense Department’s research and engineering branch said on June 11 that a sweeping, three-year push to transition decades of experiments with hypersonic vehicles into operational missiles has fallen short of his goal for enabling mass production.
Despite being responsible for two very different areas of the world, U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Northern Command are both seeking additional funding in fiscal 2022 for satellite communications, according to documents obtained by Aerospace DAILY.
U.S. Special Operations Command is seeking $286 million in unfunded priorities in fiscal 2022, with $245 million of that total covering two CV-22 attrition reserve aircraft modifications, while U.S. Southern Command is seeking funds to purchase six Bell helicopters for Guatemala, according to documents obtained by Aerospace DAILY.
U.S. Northern Command and the Missile Defense Agency have included a $27 million addendum to their fiscal 2022 budget requests for a cruise missile defense sensor.
Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Joint Program Office have entered talks on a revised delivery schedule that seeks to set a long-term, stable production rate by stretching out the recovery plan for assembly delays imposed by COVID-19 disruptions, company officials said on June 10.
The European Space Agency has chosen its next medium-class space science mission—a Venus orbiter that will join a pair of NASA probes, selected last week to help resolve questions about why Earth’s sister planet evolved so differently.
NASA’s recently extended Juno mission to Jupiter this week transmitted its first close-up images of the giant planet’s icy moon Ganymede, the Solar System’s largest lunar companion.
