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.
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.
Boeing’s proposal won Phases 2 and 3 of DARPA’s XS-1 program, and I’m pretty bummed about it. And the Air Force announced that SpaceX will launch the fifth X-37B mission in August.
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.
I’m still not quite sure what to make of the random Antares media day that took place Monday at Wallops. They’re three months out from OA-8 and had nothing particularly newsy to announce. Cygnus isn’t integrated and viewable yet, as has been the case for past events like this.
Last week, while I was heading to the keynote at Apple’s WWDC, India successfully launched their new vehicle, the Geostationary Launch Vehicle Mark 3.
Sridhar Narayanan wrote an incredibly-detailed article for The Planetary Society that I highly recommend reading. It’s a great history of India’s program, a great overview of where they are today, and really gives you perspective on what this launch means for them.
Dr. Thomas Lang, Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the UCSF School of Medicine, joins the show to discuss human health and physiology in space.
This info from Koenigsmann means one of two things: they can complete the work while continuing to fly missions from 39A, or they plan to push the work to the end of the year to give themselves some time with two east coast pads operational.
Thanks to my patrons for the month of May. If you’re getting some value out of what I do here and want to send a little value back to help support Main Engine Cut Off, head over to Patreon and donate as little as $1 a month—every little bit helps.
After months of learning and experimenting with circuitry, software, 3D design, and printing, I’ve completed the final layout and design of my Kerbal Space Program controller.
Rand Simberg joins me to talk about his recent trip to the Space Tech Expo, the dawning of the age of in-space manufacturing, the future of SLS and Orion, the National Space Council, and a lot more.