I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceFlight talked with Orbital ATK’s Frank DeMauro about the switch from Antares to Atlas V for OA-7.

Photos and videos were posted on the SpaceX subreddit of the ITS composite tank as it headed out to the destructive sea testing that we heard about from Elon Musk himself.

Signed about a month ago, this report from the FAA states that they’ve cleared the environmental concerns surrounding Falcon 9 landings at Vandenberg. Great timing, as SpaceX should be back up and flying soon.

This is going to be an extremely interesting transition period. More of a “Let’s modernize this roadmap,” instead of a “Tear it all up!”

Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceFlight wrote up a rundown of external cargo for SpaceX CRS flights 10 through 20. The NanoRacks airlock isn’t mentioned anywhere, which is counter to what Mike Johnson talked about in my interview with him.

How Orbital ATK got to where they are today, what makes their next rocket so appealing, and how things might play out in the future.

This is an interesting development that could point a few directions.

This is an interesting development that could point a few directions.

This is very relevant to this week’s episode. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Moon has much more political capital than Mars, and I would not at all be surprised to see a focus on the Moon over the course of the next administration.

We should get some closure in the next few weeks on the AMOS-6 front. They’re getting started with static fires and testing in McGregor again, which means the investigation is entering the wrap-up and sign-off phases. The return-to-flight mission seems to be Iridium NEXT out of Vandenberg, with a flight out of 39A in mid-December.

A commercial cargo-style program for getting payloads to the Moon would be wonderfully interesting. It would be well-timed to be used as NASA participation in the Moon Village idea that is talked about within ESA (and pretty much everywhere but the US).

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Friday afternoon before a holiday: the time to bury press releases. I’m not sure why SpaceX buried this particular update since the news is encouraging.

Chris Bergin of NASASpaceFlight, with an encyclopedic post about the work that will need to take place—between EM-1 and 2—to revamp the Mobile Launcher to support the Exploration Upper Stage.

It’s important to keep the budgets of NASA and other governmental agencies in context: NASA is spending billions per year on Orion’s development. Roscosmos is spending an average of $122 million per year on Federation.

After putting together a component test unit, I hooked it up to a Teensy++ 2.0—the brains of the controller—and took it for a spin in X-Plane.

The mission status report says, “The team is still investigating the cause of the reboot and assessing two main engine check valves.” and gives no other update on the delayed orbit-lowering maneuver. The lack of information on that front is a little worrying, to say the least.

Let’s hope that the Rocket Lab test launch isn’t the new Falcon Heavy—always two months away.