In this photo from the rollout, the VSS Unity rocket plane is on the left, the VMS Eve mothership is on the right, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson is on the dais. (Virgin Galactic photo)
MOJAVE, Calif. – This time around, Virgin Galactic took no chances with the weather.
When the first SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was rolled out and christened Virgin Spaceship Enterprise in 2009, the craft sat out in Mojave’s December chill. A windstorm ended up spoiling the party and blowing away the tents that Virgin Galactic set up for the celebration.
Not that the weather was anything to worry about: The show wrapped up in the middle of the afternoon, well before the temperatures dropped and the winds picked up. VSS Unity was even taken outside into the sunshine after the ceremonies wrapped up.
Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, dubbed the VSS Unity, rolls out under the spotlights at the company’s hangar in Mojave, Calif. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
MOJAVE, Calif.– Sixteen months after Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was lost amid tragedy, the second SpaceShipTwo was christened Virgin Spaceship Unity with a smashed bottle of milk and a big gulp of celebrity glitz.
Hundreds of employees, VIPs and would-be spacefliers gathered on Feb. 19 for the craft’s official rollout at the Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar, or FAITH, here at the Mojave Air and Space Port. And although British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking couldn’t attend the ceremony in person, he read out the rocket plane’s new name in an audio clip.
“We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity,” said Hawking, who has been guaranteed a free spaceflight if he’s up to it when VSS Unity enters service. “Space exploration has already been a great unifier. We seem able to cooperate between nations in space, in a way we can only envy on Earth.”
Then Virgin Galactic’s founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, arranged for the official christening to be done by his granddaughter, Eva Deia, who was born exactly one year ago today.
“I’m pretty sure a 1-year-old has never christened a spaceship before, so we really are in virgin territory,” Branson quipped. “Today seems to the right time to change that, as we after all are celebrating the birth of two gorgeous ladies.”
Spaceflight’s SHERPA carrier is set to deploy 87 satellites. (Credit: Spaceflight)
Federal agencies can now buy a satellite launch as easily as they buy pencils, thanks to a new arrangement with Seattle-based Spaceflight.
OK, maybe it’s not quite that easy. You still have to get the go-ahead to put something into orbit, whether you’re a climate scientist at NASA or Agent Fox Mulder at the FBI. But once that go-ahead is given, the launch can be ordered from a standardized menu instead of going through a months-long contracting process.
“What this does is make it a more expeditious process,” Spaceflight’s president, Curt Blake, told GeekWire.
Spaceflight is the first launch service provider to be awarded what’s known as a General Services Administration Professional Services Schedule. That means any federal official who’s authorized to spend the money can order a CubeSat or a MicroSat launch online, via the GSA Advantage’s eBuy site.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard prototype spaceship blasts off in January. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is lifting the curtain just a bit on its future plans for rocket engines and spaceflights.
One of the revelations relates to progress on its methane-fueled BE-4 rocket engine, which is on track to provide propulsion for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin tweeted out a picture of the engine’s bell, most likely taken at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash.:
Technicians at an SNC facility in Colorado inspect the Dream Chaser engineering test article, or ETA, which is being put through flight tests. (Credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation)
NASA’s decision to use Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser mini-shuttle to carry cargo to and from the International Space Station marks the most positive development to date for a space program that’s been a decade in the making. But the head of that program says it’s only the beginning.
“We’re getting more interest in the last couple of weeks than we’ve had before,” Mark Sirangelo, SNC’s corporate vice president of space systems, told GeekWire on Monday.
The privately held Nevada-based company mostly flies under the radar, even though it’s a significant military contractor. But thanks to the cargo contract announced this month, SNC’s Colorado-based space systems operation is likely to get a brighter spotlight – as well as additional work for the Dream Chaser.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard propulsion module fires its rocket engines for a soft landing. It marked the second trip to space and touchdown for the same prototype vehicle. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent up its New Shepard suborbital spaceship on another flight test to outer-space altitudes today, and brought it back to a safe landing.
The uncrewed flight at Bezos’ West Texas test facility arguably marks the first time that a reusable rocket designed for a vertical landing proved to be actually reusable for space missions.
There are caveats to that claim, to be sure: The SpaceShipOne rocket plane, the X-15 and NASA’s space shuttles have all demonstrated reusability after going into space. Those craft landed horizontally, like an airplane, rather than vertically. In addition, test rockets flown by the DC-X program as well as Masten Space Systems, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX have been reused after taking vertical hops. However, those rockets stuck to altltudes below 100 kilometers (62 miles), the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.
Despite all the caveats, Blue Origin’s feat marks a significant step toward flying reusable rocket ships on suborbital space trips on a commercial basis, for tourism as well as for research.
Richard Branson is in a friendly rivalry with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture may have done another flight test, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is making waves with its rocket progress – but don’t forget about Richard Branson.
“Our spaceship comes back and lands on wheels. Theirs don’t,” the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic said during a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There’ll be banter like this which will take place, and that’s good. People will have a choice of which spaceships they want to use to go to space.”
Today there was a torrent of tweets about a possible Blue Origin flight test. First, the Federal Aviation Administration alerted aviators to stay away from the airspace over the company’s test range in West Texas. Then, around midday today, the restrictions were lifted. One Twitter user, Patrick Brown, went so far as to post a picture of what appears to be a rocket trail leading up from the company’s test range in West Texas.
Blue Origin kept mum. “Unfortunately, Blue Origin doesn’t have anything to contribute at this time,” the company said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.
A newly released video shows SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsule pulling off a valuable trick: firing its thrusters to hover above a landing pad.
The Nov. 24 test was part of Project DragonFly, the California-based company’s effort to develop a Dragon that can touch down on land rather than splashing down in the ocean. The trick is likely to come into play when future Dragons come back from the International Space Station — or land on Mars.
This test was conducted at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in Texas. The Dragon was suspended from a tether, and then engineers fired up its eight SuperDraco thrusters for five seconds. SpaceX said the firing generated about 33,000 pounds of thrust before the craft was returned to its resting position.
World View’s Voyager capsule would rise into the stratosphere at the end of a high-altitude balloon, with a parafoil used to aid in its descent. (World View Enterprises illustration)
World View Enterprises’ plan to send tourists from Spaceport Tucson into the stratosphere in a balloon-borne capsule won a $15 million vote of support today from Arizona’s Pima County.
In a 4-1 vote, the county Board of Supervisors approved a plan to build the spaceport for World View’s use by the end of the year. World View is working on a pressurized Voyager capsule that would rise to 100,000 feet beneath a high-altitude balloon and give passengers a leisurely space-like view – all for the price of $75,000 a person.
World View CEO Jane Poynter told GeekWire that today’s vote of support signals that Arizona has joined the likes of Florida, California, New Mexico and Texas on the commercial space frontier. “We’re really seeing an inflection point in this whole space tech area,” she said.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rises into the fog from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, sending the Jason 3 sea-watching satellite into space. (Credit: NASA)
Less than a month after SpaceX’s first successful rocket landing, billionaire Elon Musk’s company tried to do it again today – but this time, one of the rocket’s landing legs failed, resulting in a tumble onto its oceangoing landing platform.
Oh, and the Falcon 9 rocket launched a satellite, too.
The primary objective of today’s launch was to put the Jason 3 ocean-mapping satellite into orbit for NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Eumetsat and the French space agency CNES. Jason 3 is designed to monitor changes in sea level from orbit, continuing a decades-long campaign of measurements.
The rocket rose into the fog from its launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, right on time at 10:42 a.m. PT. The launch was judged as a success, but SpaceX had been hoping for a successful landing, too.
