Main Engine Cut Off

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.

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.

It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of Virgin Galactic’s architecture, strategy, or technology. Add PR spin to that list.