Tag: commercial-space
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Blue Origin and SpaceX revisit their latest rocket landings in must-see videos
A view from the “vent cam” on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital booster shows a West Texas landscape during an April 2 flight, plus a “toasty brown” ring fin at the top of the frame. (Credit: Blue Origin) Will seeing a spaceship land on its feet ever get old? The novelty is still there in…
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Key return to flight milestone looms for Antares rocket
Orbital ATK technicians install two RD-181 engines to the base of an Antares rocket’s first stage booster last year at Wallops Island, Virginia. Credit: NASA Targeting a resumption of Antares cargo launches to the International Space Station as soon as July, Orbital ATK plans to roll out an upgraded Antares rocket to a launch pad…
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Woohoo! SpaceX Falcon 9 booster makes nighttime landing at sea after launching JCSAT-14 satellite
Hours after its nighttime landing, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage stands tall on an autonomous spaceport drone ship nicknamed “Of Course I Still Love You.” (Credit: SpaceX) SpaceX increased the degree of difficulty for tonight’s Falcon 9 rocket landing attempt at sea after launching a Japanese satellite into a super-high orbit – but the feat…
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SpaceX announces plan to send mission to Mars in 2018
Artist’s concept of SpaceX’s Red Dragon spacecraft landing on Mars. Credit: SpaceX Elon Musk’s space transport company — chartered with a long-term goal of colonizing Mars — plans to send the first commercial mission to the red planet as soon as 2018 with assistance from NASA, SpaceX announced Wednesday. Measuring about 20 feet tall and…
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Orbital ATK eyes Kennedy Space Center as home of potential new launcher
File photo of the Vehicle Assembly Building with a crawler-transporter in the foreground. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett NASA announced Thursday that Orbital ATK has begun negotiations to lease a disused section of Kennedy Space Center’s iconic Vehicle Assembly Building and an Apollo-era launch platform for the company’s proposed next-generation rocket. The space agency said it selected…
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Florida factory to mass-produce satellites at record pace
Artist’s concept of the OneWeb factory at Exploration Park, Florida. Credit: OneWeb OneWeb officials Tuesday unveiled plans for a factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will churn out up to 15 satellites per week to populate low Earth orbit and beam broadband Internet signals worldwide. Repurposing aircraft assembly…
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SpaceX Falcon booster comes full circle to Cape Canaveral after landing at sea
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first-stage booster makes its way back to the company’s processing facility in Florida after its recovery at sea. (Credit: USLaunchReport.com via YouTube) Eleven days after a thrilling landing at sea, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket booster is coming back to the company’s space-age garage in Florida, in preparation for engine tests and potentially the first-ever…
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Expandable room installed on space station
Updated after BEAM installation. Credit: NASA/Tim Kopra The International Space Station’s robotic arm, under the control of engineers on Earth, extracted an experimental inflatable habitat from the trunk of SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship Saturday and attached it to the orbiting complex. Made by Bigelow Aerospace, the new module will spend two years on the space station…
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Interview: Jeff Bezos lays out Blue Origin’s space vision, from tourism to off-planet heavy industry
Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with GeekWire aerospace and science editor Alan Boyle at the 32nd Space Symposium. (Tom Kimmell Photography, Courtesy of the Space Foundation.) COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn’t focused on creating America’s biggest online retailer when he was a boy. But he often says that…
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Jeff Bezos describes future space tours – and explains why he passed up a moon trip
Billionaire Jeff Bezos watches a replay of a New Shepard suborbital test flight with GeekWire’s Alan Boyle at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. (Credit: Tom Kimmell Photography, Courtesy of the Space Foundation) COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his chance to go into space in a Russian Soyuz capsule – and not just…