Tag: Commercial Spaceflight

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SpaceX’s rocket landing caught on video

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paceX’s Falcon 9 rocket descends to a touchdown at Landing Zone 1. (Credit: SpaceX)

A day after the first-ever fully successful landing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, space fans around the world are geeking out over the pictures. And it’s not just geeks.

Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the U.S. Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, said the Florida landing “clearly placed the exclamation mark on 2015, by closing out another successful year for the Eastern Range in historic fashion.”

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket was launched on Monday night from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, successfully sending 11 communication satellites into orbit for Orbcomm.

That would have been significant enough, coming nearly six months after a Falcon launch failure forced SpaceX to hold up on its space missions. But the first-stage booster’s return to a converted missile range, now dubbed Landing Zone 1, marked the first time that a rocket returned safely to ground after launching an orbital mission.

The Blue Origin space venture demonstrated a similar rocket return during asuborbital test mission last month, but SpaceX’s feat carries even bigger implications for lowering the cost of access to orbit. Bottom line? The pace of the commercial space race is heating up – so enjoy the show on SpaceX’s Flickr site and YouTube channel,

Check out the pictures and video on GeekWire.

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SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket – and lands it!

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The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster sets down at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1. (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time in six months today, and then brought he first-stage booster back down for a first-ever Florida landing.

“The Falcon has landed!” SpaceX’s launch commentator announced.

Hundreds of SpaceX employees cheered the touchdown at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. “USA! USA! USA!” they chanted.

The flight’s main objective was to send 11 satellites into low Earth orbit to boost Orbcom’s OG2 network for machine-to-machine communications. The landing attempt was a bonus, aimed at furthering SpaceX’s goal of bringing down the cost of spaceflight dramatically.

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SpaceX delays launch to lift odds for landing

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands on its Florida launch pad. (Credit: Orbcomm)

SpaceX has delayed the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket with 11 Orbcomm telecommunication satellites for a day, to wait for a better chance to land the rocket’s first-stage booster after liftoff.

The commercial rocket company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said the decision to put off Sunday’s scheduled launch attempt was made after a review of the mission parameters. In a tweet, he said an analysis of probabilistic Monte Carlo simulations showed there was a “10 percent higher chance of a good landing” on Monday night.

As a result, the countdown was delayed 24 hours. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is now scheduled for 8:33 p.m. ET (5:33 p.m. PT) Monday. Forecasters said there was an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions for launch.

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Atlas 5 rocket sends cargo ship to space station

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A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket rises from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday, sending an uncrewed Orbital ATK Cygnus commercial cargo capsule to the International Space Station. Two Microsoft HoloLens headsets were aboard. (Credit: NASA TV)

After waiting out Florida’s weather for three days, United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket lofted supplies to the International Space Station today for the first time ever.

The Atlas rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:44 p.m. ET (1:44 p.m. PT), sending Orbital ATK’s uncrewed Cygnus crew capsule into orbit. The space station’s commander, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, watched the launch from orbit.

Among the record-setting 7,700 pounds’ worth of supplies, experiments and hardware on board are two of Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headsets. Once they arrive, the station’s astronauts will try them out as wearable aids for in-space operations.

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Watch Blue Origin’s rocket scientists get happy

“Touchdown” means something different to rocket scientists and to football fans, but the cheering, hugs and high fives are the same – as revealed today in a Blue Origin video.

The video shows how the Nov. 23 landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft played out, as seen from four perspectives. Two views showed how the autonomous landing went down at the company’s test range in West Texas. The other two views showed the reaction of Blue Origin employees who gathered at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin as well as the better-known Amazon online commerce venture, touted the video in the third tweet he’s ever posted.

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Virgin Galactic will use jet as rocket mothership

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An artist’s conception shows a 747 jet carrying a LauncherOne rocket. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic showed off its latest mothership today: a Boeing 747-400 jet that it acquired from its corporate cousins at Virgin Atlantic to serve as the platform for its LauncherOne rocket.

LauncherOne is designed to be launched from a high-flying carrier airplane and send small-scale satellites into orbit. It will use a liquid-fueled engine called Newton, which is still under development. The launch system is expected to be in operation by 2018, and it’s already been tapped by OneWeb to help put a global Internet constellation into orbit.

It was previously thought that LauncherOne would use Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane. That’s the mothership being used for SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered passenger space plane. But Virgin Galactic said the 747 was more suited for LauncherOne’s upgraded payload capacity and flight rate.

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XCOR co-founders launch Agile Aero startup

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In a 2013 photo, Jeff Greason inspects XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx rocket engine while Doug Jones looks on. Greason is creating a new venture called Agile Aero, while Jones is staying on with XCOR. (Credit: XCOR Aerospace)

XCOR Aerospace pioneered the rapid development of rocket propulsion systems, and now three of XCOR’s founders are starting up a new venture called Agile Aero to do something similar for advanced aerospace vehicles.

Agile Aero has surfaced just a week after XCOR announced the departure of chief technologist Jeff Greason and chief engineer Dan DeLong. Greason and DeLong are teaming up with Aleta Jackson, another co-founder and aerospace veteran who left XCOR this month.

“It’s the Three Musketeers again,” Greason told GeekWire. XCOR’s fourth co-founder, Doug Jones, is staying on as the company’s chief test engineer.

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An out-of-this-world deal for Cyber Monday

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Spaceflight’s Cyber Monday deal will deliver satellites to orbit in 2018. (Credit: Spaceflight)

Here’s a Cyber Monday deal from Seattle-based Spaceflight for the space geek on your list: Purchase a satellite launch for one-third off, at the low, low price of $200,000.

The only catch is that you’ll have to wait until 2018 for the satellite to be delivered. But that’s the way it is with travel plans, whether you’re heading to a vacation resort or putting a 3U CubeSat in a sun-synchronous orbit 310 miles (500 kilometers) above the planet. “Booking early is the best for both parties,” said Phil Brzytwa, Spaceflight’s business development manager.

Through the end of the year, Spaceflight is offering up to 36 CubeSat spots on the company’s SHERPA satellite port at $200,000 (marked down from the list price of $295,000), and it’s not clear how long they’ll last.

“Already this morning we’ve had seven inquiries from all around the planet, and my inbox is filling up,” Brzytwa told GeekWire. There’s a limit of four CubeSats per customer.

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Newly signed law lays out space resource rights

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Artwork shows a spacecraft mining an asteroid. (Credit: Bryan Versteeg / Deep Space Industries)

President Barack Obama today put his signature on a law supporting the rights of space miners to extract, use and sell resources from asteroids, the moon, Mars and other celestial bodies – giving space-minded entrepreneurs something extra to be thankful for.

“This is the single greatest recognition of property rights in history,” Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman of Redmond-based Planetary Resources, said in a news release. “This legislation establishes the same supportive framework that created the great economies of history, and will encourage the sustained development of space.”

Anderson’s company has said the asteroid mining industry could eventually grow to trillions of dollars a year – but that’s dependent on the establishment of a spacefaring infrastructure that can use the off-earth water and other raw materials from near-Earth asteroids.

It’s also dependent on the establishment a legal infrastructure that lets miners keep what they get. That’s what the newly signed law, known as the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R.2262), is expected to start doing.

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Jeff Bezos spaces out: ‘I can’t wait to go!’

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Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, sprays champagne from a bottle after the successful landing of the New Shepard rocket booster on Monday. (Credit: Blue Origin via YouTube)

Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, says watching his Blue Origin rocket make a safe landing after flying into space rates as one of the greatest moments of his life, and he can’t wait to take a ride himself.

In an exclusive GeekWire interview, conducted on the morning after the New Shepard test mission, Bezos answered questions about what the flight means for Blue Origin, the space venture he founded … why he waited so long to start tweeting … and when the rest of us will get a suborbital space ride. He also stirred the pot in his rivalry with that other billionaire space geek, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Get the full Q&A on GeekWire.