Main Engine Cut Off

Great rundown of Starliner progress, complete with some talk about RD-180 certification.

Going once for a wonderful set of lawsuit-laden intellectual property! Going twice!

Jake of the WeMartians podcast explores the three remaining candidate landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover. It’s really worth a listen, whether you know about the sites already or not.

NASA announced the selection of 133 proposals for Phase II of the SBIR program. One of the more exciting proposals selected is from Altius Space Machines, titled “Lightweight, High-Flow, Low Connection-Force, In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Coupling”.

It’s a shame that SpaceX is getting so distracted by all their other projects.

An engine on its way to the test stand, 2 customers signed on for 6 launches, a factory well underway in Florida—things are progressing well for New Glenn.

An absolute wealth of information about SpaceX’s 2017 from Chris Bergin of NASASpaceFlight.com.

Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com with an extensive rundown of the upcoming busy week.

These numbers are getting more and more unbelievable by the day. The Intelsat-OneWeb merger is very interesting to follow, too. Hot on the heels of the big investment OneWeb received back in December, the merger gives them more resources, knowledge, experience, and a customer-base. That’s a pretty good mixture.

It’s somewhat of a lackluster response to all the excitement this past week to say “Oh yeah? Well we’re lobbying for the obvious next step of Commercial Cargo!”

To me this reads a lot like Blue Origin isn’t quite ready to talk about any additional plans, but wanted to make their voice heard alongside SpaceX. As I said on this week’s podcast, none of the old insiders (Boeing, Lockheed, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orbital ATK, …) are going to invite SpaceX and Blue Origin into their club. They have to insert themselves into these conversations, and will inevitably ruffle some feathers doing it.