Tag: Commercial Spaceflight

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceX president sees satellites as next frontier

Gwynne Shotwell
SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, talks about the company’s future financial frontier. (CNBC via YouTube)

SpaceX is taking a commanding role in the rocket business — but Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, expects the satellite business to be more lucrative.

Shotwell sized up SpaceX’s road ahead in a CNBC interview that aired today in connection with the cable network’s latest Disruptor 50 list. For the second year in a row, the space venture founded by billionaire Elon Musk leads the list.

The 18 launches by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets accounted for 20 percent of the world’s orbital liftoffs last year, and Shotwell said she expects the launch tally to rise to between 24 and 28 for this year.

Next year, however, could bring a “slight slowdown” to a level that’s more in line with 2017’s pace, Shotwell said. That’s due to a projected decline in demand for satellite launches.

The satellite launch service market has grown to an estimated $5.5 billion in 2016, according to the latest State of the Satellite Industry Report. But that pales in comparison with the $127.7 billion market for satellite services and the $113.4 billion market for satellite ground services.

That’s why SpaceX is putting its chips down on a plan to provide global broadband access through its own satellite constellation, known as Starlink.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Cygnus cargo ship launched to space station

Antares launch
Orbital ATK’s Antares rocked rises from its Virginia launch pad, sending a robotic Cygnus cargo ship into space. (NASA Photo / Audrey Gemignani)

Orbital ATK sent its robotic Cygnus cargo spaceship on its way to the International Space Station today, loaded up with more than 7,200 pounds of supplies, equipment and science experiments.

The two-stage Antares rocket rose from its launch pad from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 4:44 a.m. ET (1:44 a.m. PT), lighting up the predawn sky for observers across a wide swath of the mid-Atlantic coast.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Computer aborts milestone SpaceX rocket launch

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket sits on its Florida launch pad. (SpaceX via YouTube)

The anxiously awaited launch of the first of SpaceX’s “last” Falcon 9 rockets will have to wait at least one more day. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the company’s upgraded Block 5 model “will be the last major version of the Falcon 9” before it’s retired in favor of the super-duper-sized BFR. This first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket was due to launch the Bangabandhu Satellite-1 for Bangladesh from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center today, but SpaceX’s flight control computer automatically called a halt to the countdown at T-minus-58 seconds.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Boeing CEO is bullish on business in Earth orbit

Dennis Muilenburg
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg speaks at Northwestern University, with a model of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket standing in front of him. (Boeing via Facebook)

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg predicts that the number of space destinations will grow from one — the International Space Station — to 10 or 12 over the next couple of decades, creating an “economically viable marketplace” in Earth orbit.

And he sees Boeing being in the thick of it.

Tonight Muilenburg sketched out a vision of space commerce and exploration that extended from low Earth orbit to Mars and beyond. The occasion was the 34th Annual Patterson Transportation Lecture, delivered at the Northwestern University Transportation Center near Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago.

Muilenburg repeated his controversial pledge that NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System, which has Boeing as one of its lead contractors, will be the first rocket to send humans to Mars. (SpaceX and its fans might beg to differ on that point.)

But it was his vision for a commercial transportation system in low Earth orbit that showed how many of Boeing’s interests — ranging from airplane and satellite manufacturing to its work on the Phantom Express space plane and CST-100 Starliner space taxi — come together on the final frontier.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Jeff Bezos strikes a fashion pose for Blue Origin

Bezos with boots
Jeff Bezos shows off his “Gradatim Ferociter” boots. (Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

If being Amazon’s CEO ever gets tiresome for Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest human, he could always turn to a career modeling Western wear.

Bezos demonstrated that today after the successful test flight of his Blue Origin venture’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. In his apres-landing photo shoot, shared via Twitter, Bezos wears a cowboy hat, Blue Origin shirt, jeans, sunglasses and cowboy boots as he leans against the New Shepard crew capsule.

The boots are the piece de resistance.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin sends suborbital rocket to new heights

New Shepard launch
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, dubbed RSS H.G. Wells, blasts off from its West Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture notched another record today when it sent its New Shepard suborbital spaceship on its highest-ever round trip to space.

It was the eighth uncrewed test flight for the New Shepard program, and the second go-around for this particular spaceship, which is dubbed RSS H.G. Wells in honor of the English science-fiction writer and futurist.

RSS H.G. Wells flew for first time last December, and was refurbished in line with Blue Origin’s strategy for rocket reusability. On that flight, the craft rose to a height of 99.39 kilometers, just shy of the 100-kilometer Karman Line that defines the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

The target altitude for this flight was a record-setting 106.7 kilometers, or 350,000 feet. After today’s picture-perfect launch and landing, Bezos reported in a tweet that the craft reached 351,000 feet (107 kilometers).

“That’s the altitude we’ve been targeting for operations,” he said. “One step closer.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

NASA reworks moon rover mission amid outcry

Resource Prospector prototype
A prototype for the Resource Prospector rover undergoes field testing. (NASA via YouTube)

An influential group of advisers on lunar exploration says NASA is canceling its Resource Prospector mission to explore the moon’s surface in the 2020s — and urged the agency’s newly sworn-in administrator, Jim Bridenstine, to reverse the decision.

In response, NASA pledged today that “selected instruments from Resource Prospector will be landed and flown on the moon” as part of an expanded robotic campaign that will make use of commercial landers and rovers.

The tumult over the $250 million mission comes as Bridenstine and the White House’s National Space Council are ramping up their back-to-the-moon campaign. Resource Prospector appears to have been caught up in that campaign’s fast-moving paradigm shifts.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

SNC gears up to build spaceship (and space station)

Dream Chaser
Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser atmospheric test vehicle is on display at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Sierra Nevada Corp. is showing off a prototype of its Dream Chaser space plane, but its focus is quickly shifting to building the real thing to send to orbit.

And as if that’s not enough, there’s an orbital power plant and space habitat to work on as well.

SNC executives provided what they promised would be a series of status reports today here at the 34th Space Symposium, in front of the engineering test vehicle for the Dream Chaser program.

The 30-foot-long, stubby-winged plane was built for atmospheric tests, to check the aerodynamics and flight control systems for an autonomous mini-space shuttle that will be capable of ferrying cargo to and from the International Space Station starting in 2020.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Stratolaunch aims to fly mega-plane this summer

Stratolaunch plane
Stratolaunch’s twin-fuselage plane catches the sun’s rays during a test outing. (Stratolaunch Photo)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch space company says it’s on track to conduct the first test flight of its mammoth airplane this summer, and use it to send rockets into orbit as early as 2020.

The status check came today during a background briefing here at the 34th Space Symposium, conducted under background-only conditions that precluded quoting sources by name.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceShipTwo goes supersonic in milestone flight

SpaceShipTwo flight
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, christened VSS Unity, fires up its hybrid rocket motor for the first time. (Mars Scientific / Trumbull Studios Photo)

Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane flew a smooth, supersonic test flight today during its first rocket-powered outing since the first SpaceShipTwo broke up three and a half years ago.

The craft christened VSS Unity has taken flight a dozen times since its debut in February 2016, but the previous 11 tests didn’t involve lighting up the plane’s hybrid rocket motor.

That’s what made today’s flight test at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port special: After carrying the plane and its two pilots to an altitude of about 46,500 feet, Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two mothership, known as VMS Eve, released Unity from its underbelly.

Seconds later, the pilots turned on Unity’s engine for the first time.

Get the full story on GeekWire.