Main Engine Cut Off

Good rundown of SpaceX’s remaining 2016 manifest by Peter B. de Selding of SpaceNews. After a great launch and landing last night, SpaceX is planning for 9 more launches this year.

Great rundown over on reddit of what Shotwell talked about during her keynote at SmallSat today. Most exciting part: the first Raptor engine shipped to McGregor for testing.

The crew access arm at SLC-41 is due to be installed sometime this week, Pad 39A work is continuing, and Falcon Heavy is delayed until “early 2017.”

There are a few obvious reasons the Air Force would go with a sole-source contract. This isn’t a big deal or a surprise, at all.

Here’s hoping they don’t “bend over backwards” on this one.

While this is posed as an option to help get Inmarsat’s payload off the ground sooner, this is an interesting decision for SpaceX to make in the future, as Falcon Heavy is flying regularly and they are reusing cores.

Reports out of McGregor—posted over on the SpaceX Facebook group—that SpaceX has fired the JCSAT-14 core again, for over two minutes. It’ll be very interesting to watch how many times they run this core through tests. That was an extremely quick turn around between full-duration tests, so things must be going well.

Yesterday, SpaceX completed a full-duration static fire of the JCSAT-14 core.

After a few months of work on SLC-4E at Vandenberg, SpaceX looks ready to pick up flights from there this fall. I haven’t heard too much lately about their work on the landing pads out west, but we should be seeing some of that soon, too.