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.

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.

Marco Langbroek, SatTrackCam Leiden, on the curious proximity of USA 276 to ISS on the days surrounding the berthing of SpaceX CRS-11.

This info from Koenigsmann means one of two things: they can complete the work while continuing to fly missions from 39A, or they plan to push the work to the end of the year to give themselves some time with two east coast pads operational.

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.

Yesterday was a great day for SpaceX, with the beautiful and seemingly-flawless launch of Inmarsat–5 Flight 4.

Interesting to think that if SpaceX’s constellation ambitions even approach their projections, they’d be exempt from this regulation within a decade.

After SES-10, there was a chorus of doubters saying, “Yeah, but it took a year to refurbish!” This flight should put that to bed, but then again, they’ll probably say, “Yeah, but 6 months is nowhere close to 24 hours!”

This is encouraging to hear. Long coast periods are key to some more complex flight profiles—specifically direct injection into geostationary orbit—and SpaceX has yet to show that ability. It’s one area that ULA still owns with Centaur and the Delta Cryogenic Second Stage.