I’m Anthony Colangelo.

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).

Thanks to my patrons for the month of October. 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.

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.

I know, Schiaparelli wasn’t the primary mission. I know, you have to work hard to inform the public and those who hold the purse strings that ExoMars 2016 as a whole is still a success (so far).

I’m still excited about the Antares return to flight earlier this week, and am looking forward to Cygnus’ arrival this upcoming weekend. I finally finished uploading my photos and videos of the OA-5 launch.

There have been some revelations on the SpaceX front on how they’ll handle the production of Dragons moving forward, and how they’ll introduce propulsive landings.

I’ll be interested in what kinds of missions Antares launches in the future, and how viable a market it could be for Orbital ATK. Antares—due to its launch site and payload capacity—has a somewhat limited mission scope. We don’t yet know what they’d sell launches for, so that’s the big variable here.