I’m Anthony Colangelo.

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.

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Fantastic update from Chris Bergin over at NASASpaceFlight.com on SpaceX’s incredible week. Two launches, one reused stage, two successful landings and recoveries, the first appearance of their new robot on the droneship, the best attempt yet at recovering fairings. All while preparing for another launch Sunday.

Ashlee Vance, with a poorly-titled-yet-interesting piece on Peter Beck and Rocket Lab in Bloomberg. Great photos within, as well as a little nugget on their schedule.

Things are still looking up for BE-4.

The EELV section of the House Armed Services Committee markup is quite interesting. The full committee will be marking up the bill today, so things may change quite a bit. But until then, there are a few interesting bits within.

The entire hour-long show is absolutely worth a listen—she gives a good update on where SpaceX is at, currently—but one particular moment stood out.

Andy Pasztor hasn’t been very fond of SpaceX over the years, but his recent article on SpaceX’s double-launch weekend is something else.

Back in April, ULA announced layoffs at Vandenberg, which seemed to indicate that they dropped their launch team on the west coast. Two months later, it looks like SpaceX has two independent launch teams up and running.

It’s been hard to get a sense of what ARCA has been up to lately, and how seriously we should take this project. But this week, they released the first episode of a new series of videos leading up to their launch of a subscale vehicle powered by a linear aerospike engine.

Scaled hardware to validate the architecture, big enough for initial Mars missions with a few crew members, and small enough to be used commercially for other tasks.

For the mere price of thirteen and a half years’ worth of Blue Origin operations.

I’m very curious to see how the second life of Sea Launch will play out. Relatedly, I haven’t been too kind to Antares lately, but this is actually good news for Orbital ATK.