I used to write frequently, but now it’s just occasionally.
Formerly: A List Apart, Cognition, Main Engine Cut Off.
There’s a bit of a logjam out at the Cape: the launch dates of TDRS-M and CRS-12 fell very close to each other, and they’re both high-priority missions for NASA. This situation sheds some light on future SpaceX operations in Florida.
In the wake of the announcement that Dream Chaser will fly to the ISS on an Atlas V 552, I’ve been curious how much performance the dual engine Centaur will add to the Atlas V configurations we know and love.
A launch on an Atlas V 552 probably runs pretty damn close to the $200 million mark. Yikes.
The current pricing SpaceX uses makes no sense in the high-level, long-term view. It’s pretty obvious that the model grew out of an expendable-minded era, and that SpaceX is sticking to it because the market itself has not yet changed its thinking.
It seems that Boeing took Charlie Bolden too literally: his oft-heard refrain was that NASA turned over LEO to commercial companies and wanted beyond LEO to itself. Boeing designed and built a vehicle that literally can not fly beyond LEO without help.
The ISS R&D Conference is kicking off this week in DC with sure-to-be interesting keynotes by Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, and a few members of Congress, among others. But there are also a bunch of technical sessions in the afternoons, so I went digging through the agenda. I found two sessions by Sierra Nevada—one on Dream Chaser at the ISS and one on their NextSTEP-2 Deep Space Gateway concept. Lucky for us, the session PDFs are up already.
I always thought the north side of the UK would be a great spot for a polar launch site. Some will liken this to the spaceport dilemma in the US, but it’s totally different.
This is exactly what NASA was hoping to achieve by putting the plans for the Deep Space Gateway out into the public eye. They need international and commercial partners to latch onto the idea of the Deep Space Gateway, develop plans to use it, and talk about those plans publicly. That’s how they can build support for it within the US political sphere, and that’s how they can get it funded.
This leaves ULA’s Vulcan-ACES in an interesting position. Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne are now in direct competition for engines on both stages of Vulcan-ACES: BE-4 and AR1 for the first stage, BE-3U and RL10 for ACES.