Main Engine Cut OffIt seems that Boeing took Charlie Bolden too literally: his oft-heard refrain was that NASA turned over LEO to commercial companies and wanted beyond LEO to itself. Boeing designed and built a vehicle that literally can not fly beyond LEO without help.
The ISS R&D Conference is kicking off this week in DC with sure-to-be interesting keynotes by Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, and a few members of Congress, among others. But there are also a bunch of technical sessions in the afternoons, so I went digging through the agenda. I found two sessions by Sierra Nevada—one on Dream Chaser at the ISS and one on their NextSTEP-2 Deep Space Gateway concept. Lucky for us, the session PDFs are up already.
XCOR laid off the rest of its staff and is closing up shop after losing a contract with ULA, which leaves ULA in an interesting spot for Vulcan-ACES. On the ULA side, they won their first Phase 1A contract from the Air Force, and the contract price sheds some light on just how much they’re cutting their costs.
This is exactly what NASA was hoping to achieve by putting the plans for the Deep Space Gateway out into the public eye. They need international and commercial partners to latch onto the idea of the Deep Space Gateway, develop plans to use it, and talk about those plans publicly. That’s how they can build support for it within the US political sphere, and that’s how they can get it funded.
Fantastic update from Chris Bergin over at NASASpaceFlight.com on SpaceX’s incredible week. Two launches, one reused stage, two successful landings and recoveries, the first appearance of their new robot on the droneship, the best attempt yet at recovering fairings. All while preparing for another launch Sunday.
SpaceX launched two missions last weekend, flew new titanium grid fins on Falcon 9, and are really picking up the pace. And Blue Origin got cozy with the Alabama Launch Alliance by announcing that they’ll build the BE-4 production facility in Huntsville—if the engine is chosen for Vulcan.
Things are still looking up for BE-4.
Boeing’s proposal won Phases 2 and 3 of DARPA’s XS-1 program, and I’m pretty bummed about it. And the Air Force announced that SpaceX will launch the fifth X-37B mission in August.
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.
Dr. Thomas Lang, Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the UCSF School of Medicine, joins the show to discuss human health and physiology in space.