Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force announced on Wednesday it is awarding three contracts collectively worth about $2 billion to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and United Launch Alliance to develop launch system prototypes.

The funding is for the development of competing launch system prototypes geared toward launching national security payloads. Each company will receive an initial award of $181 million.

The Launch Service Agreements are for the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Northrop Grumman’s Omega and ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rockets. The awards are part of cost-sharing arrangements — known as Other Transaction Agreements — that the Air Force is signing with the three companies to ensure it has multiple competitors. The Air Force has committed through 2024 a total of $500 million in OTA funds for Blue Origin, $792 million for Northrop Grumman and $967 million for ULA. SpaceX previously received an LSA award but did not make the cut this time.

Continue reading “Air Force awards launch vehicle development contracts to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, ULA” »

And America’s next great rocket could come from Blue Origin itself.

‘We will be in space with people not too long after that’

“We should be in space within weeks, not months. And then we will be in space with myself in months and not years,” the Virgin founder and CEO told CNBC on Tuesday.

“We will be in space with people not too long after that so we have got a very, very exciting couple of months ahead.”

Continue reading “Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will be in space ‘within weeks, not months’” »

This evening, SpaceX is set to launch a used Falcon 9 rocket from California, a flight that will be followed by one of the company’s signature rocket landings. But this time around, SpaceX will attempt to land the vehicle on a concrete landing pad near the launch site — not a drone ship in the ocean. If successful, it’ll be the first time that the company does a ground landing on the West Coast.

Up until now, all of SpaceX’s ground landings have occurred out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the company’s busiest launch site. SpaceX has two landing pads there, and has managed to touch down 11 Falcon 9 rockets on them. And each time the company has attempted to land on land, it’s been a success.

Continue reading “Watch SpaceX attempt to land its Falcon 9 rocket on the California coast for the first time” »

Artificial intelligence in space exploration is gathering momentum. Over the coming years, new missions look likely to be turbo-charged by AI as we voyage to comets, moons, and planets and explore the possibilities of mining asteroids.

“AI is already a game-changer that has made scientific research and exploration much more efficient. We are not just talking about a doubling but about a multiple of ten,” Leopold Summerer, Head of the Advanced Concepts and Studies Office at ESA, said in an interview with Singularity Hub.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short engine burn on Oct. 3 to home in on the location and timing of its New Year’s flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule.

Word from the spacecraft that it had successfully performed the 3½-minute maneuver reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at around 10:20 p.m. EDThe maneuver slightly tweaked the spacecraft’s trajectory and bumped its speed by 2.1 meters per second – just about 4.6 miles per hour – keeping it on track to fly past Ultima (officially named 2014 MU69) at 12:33 am EST on Jan. 1, 2019.

“Thanks to this maneuver, we’re right down the middle of the pike and on time for the farthest exploration of worlds in history – more than a billion miles beyond Pluto,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. “It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Go New Horizons!”

As a Master’s student at University of Houston’s Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA), I was exposed to many interesting aspects of space exploration. One that I’m particularly intrigued about is the daily lives of astronauts, and their most mundane activities — how they sleep, eat, shower, exercise, work, etc. When the time came to choose what to focus on for my design thesis, I knew it would have something to do with habitation, community, and daily lives in space.

My undergrad was in architecture and urban studies with an equal emphasis on both. This gave me an understanding of how dwellings changed throughout the centuries in relation to the evolution of cities. I think in most cases, our definition of “home” is very intertwined with our definition of “city”. And I believe as humans set sail for the stars, this intertwining will stay strong. What defines a home and a city varies greatly from culture to culture, and changes with time. However, in a broad sense, a home is for your personal and intimate activities, alone or with close family members, and a city is a collection of private and public areas where the community can interact and coexist.

Does Chinese commercial space rival government? A story has gone viral in China about the departure of a rocket scientist named Zhang Xiaoping from his job as deputy director of rocket design at the state-owned Xi’an Aerospace Propulsion Research Institute. He was rumored to be helping lead the design of China’s heavy Long March 9 rocket. According to the South China Morning Post, a document posted on a Chinese social media site described how Zhang was “most crucial to the development process,” and had “irreplaceable” talents. The document argued that Zhang’s departure could affect China’s race to send people to the Moon.

Gone to LandSpace … Zhang is rumored to have taken a research position at the private aerospace firm LandSpace (cited above), earning 10 times his previous salary of 120,000 yuan (US$17,400) per year. This is an interesting development, although we have few hard facts from our Western vantage point. However, the Zhang kerfuffle does suggest that some of the same tensions we’re seeing between public and private space in the United States also exist in China with its emerging commercial space market.