I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Great rundown over on reddit of what Shotwell talked about during her keynote at SmallSat today. Most exciting part: the first Raptor engine shipped to McGregor for testing.

The crew access arm at SLC-41 is due to be installed sometime this week, Pad 39A work is continuing, and Falcon Heavy is delayed until “early 2017.”

The mere existence of ARM on NASA’s #JourneyToMars roadmap is an admission of just how flawed that roadmap is in its current state.

There are a few obvious reasons the Air Force would go with a sole-source contract. This isn’t a big deal or a surprise, at all.

The changes associated with artificial gravity are not as much about the changes to the still-on-paper (at best) spacecraft, and more about the changes to the NASA roadmap.

China has recently been opening up to more collaboration with Russia, ESA, and others. I really want to see the United States open up to China before it’s too late and everyone moves on together, without us.

Here’s hoping they don’t “bend over backwards” on this one.

While this is posed as an option to help get Inmarsat’s payload off the ground sooner, this is an interesting decision for SpaceX to make in the future, as Falcon Heavy is flying regularly and they are reusing cores.

They also seem to be on the brink of solving the aerodynamic loading issues they’ve talked about in the past. The one issue they haven’t yet solved is how damn expensive these launches are going to be, riding on an Atlas V.

This would be an absolutely fantastic system on small sats.

Doug Messier has some questions regarding the handling of Virgin Galactic’s licensing by the FAA. It’s a very interesting case that could set a lot of precedent in this realm.

The more hardware heading towards Mars, the better.

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I’ll probably stop posting about each test this core goes through at this point, because it looks like they’re going to be doing a lot of them. Firing it once a day until something goes wrong?

Reports out of McGregor—posted over on the SpaceX Facebook group—that SpaceX has fired the JCSAT-14 core again, for over two minutes. It’ll be very interesting to watch how many times they run this core through tests. That was an extremely quick turn around between full-duration tests, so things must be going well.

Yesterday, SpaceX completed a full-duration static fire of the JCSAT-14 core.

The Dream Chaser flight test vehicle is on its way to NASA Armstrong for a second flight test out at Edwards Air Force Base.

After a few months of work on SLC-4E at Vandenberg, SpaceX looks ready to pick up flights from there this fall. I haven’t heard too much lately about their work on the landing pads out west, but we should be seeing some of that soon, too.

It’s absolutely true that Orion’s timeline is ridiculous, but I can’t stand comparing post-Shuttle projects with those that came before it.