Orbital Sciences Corp. hopes to launch its first Antares rocket next month, paving the way for a second commercial cargo service to the International Space Station (ISS) by summer. The plan assumes a successful on-pad hot-fire test of the liquid-fueled Ukrainian-built rocket, but it will not be delayed by inconclusive results from a NASA probe into the cause of a fairing-separation problem that destroyed the $388 million Glory atmospheric-research mission in 2011.
President Obama's crusade to increase a small sliver of taxes on the nation's wealthiest has long capitalized on a convenient symbol of privilege: the corporate jet. Those talking points are landing like stray arrows on the makers of business jets, and manufacturers are fuming.
Often faulted for failing to meet science project cost and schedule targets, NASA seems to be following an effective strategy with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Project, or Maven. The $453 million mission, scheduled for launch Nov. 18, will study climate-influencing changes in the Martian upper atmosphere. If the mission is successful, Maven’s development could become a case study for other science mission projects, according to NASA’s inspector general (IG).
NASA’s Space Technology Program, upgraded this week into a full-fledged mission directorate at the agency’s headquarters, is funding development of an electric-thruster technology that holds promise both in propulsion for tiny cubesats and as a lightweight replacement for attitude-control and in-space propulsion systems on larger spacecraft.
MIND THE GAPS: Congressional auditors in Washington who have been keeping a running tally of the government’s highest-risk programs since 1990 have now added the need to mitigate gaps in federal weather satellite data to their list. “We and others ... have raised concerns that problems and delays on environmental satellite acquisition programs will result in gaps in the continuity of critical satellite data used in weather forecasts and warnings,” the Government Accountability Office said Feb. 14.
When we need brake pads or a fuel pump for our automobile, we assume the garage will have one in stock or know where to get it. But at the dawn of the automobile age, when this Daimler car was new, it wasn't that simple. Every automobile was essentially a one-off, custom-built as a worldwide cadre of tinkerers and engineers struggled to invent an industry. A few years later, the same held true as the aviation industry was born.
Rattled by cold California high-desert winds, and little changed since its days as a Second World War motor pool for the U.S. Marine Corps, the old hangar that Masten Space Systems calls home seems an incongruous incubator for low-cost flights to sub-orbit.
French arms exports were down sharply last year, from €6.5 billion ($8.7 billion) in 2011 to an estimated €5 billion in 2012, thanks to stiff competition from increasingly hungry U.S. contractors and technological gains in countries that until now posed little threat to the world's No. 4 defense exporter.
A massive U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan next year will trigger a shift in Pentagon priorities and force structure, but do not expect any major changes for the Air Force's intelligence collection fleet. At least, not for now.
PARIS — Astrium, the space division of EADS, will begin development of Europe’s first digital military ultrafast broadband satellite communications network under a roughly €40 million ($52 million) contract awarded by French defense procurement agency DGA.
Government gridlock and myopic Wall Street horizons are hindering development of a new economic sector in low Earth orbit, because both make private financing for commercial space ventures hard to find, according to a panel of space-finance experts speaking in Washington this week.
HOUSTON — Recent NASA contracts awarded through the agency’s Johnson Space Center worth a potential $2 billion will equip the Orion program with an integration support contractor, while providing wider engineering, scientific and technical support through the Houston field center for the International Space Station (ISS), Orion, commercial crew/cargo initiatives and Mars science projects.
U.S. Air Force officials will have to abandon round-the-clock missile warning and space situational awareness operations if the proposed round of deep sequestration cuts take effect next month, according to Gen. William Shelton, Air Force Space Command chief. Shelton says that he would be forced to “reduce some missile warning and space surveillance 24/7 hour operations to 8/7 hour operations” if the cuts take effect.
There seems to be little hope of better defining U.S. space policy, given the current underfunded NASA vision of human expeditions to Mars and its ambitions to turn responsibility for low-Earth-orbit transportation over to commercial providers, according to members of an expert panel hosted by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
