Main Engine Cut Off

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.

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.

There’s quite a bit of shuffling going on in Russia.

Some comments from Maj. Gen. Roger Teague on Air Force funding as it pertains to the Vulcan engine downselect.

Overall, I’m quite disappointed at the missed opportunity XS-1 presented to widen the industry. It’ll take a lot to convince me that a Boeing project of this sort will ever be affordable. Boeing doesn’t have the best reputation for cost-efficiency when it comes to launch vehicles—Delta IV and SLS being the two most recent examples—and their last small launch DARPA project didn’t end well.

Curious that the ultra-secretive Blue Origin said anything about this at all. Getting out in front of it is better than letting news of a test stand failure leak out. I doubt we’ll get any other details on it, but there are a lot of questions here.