X-51A achieves breakthrough in hypersonic flight
The fourth time’s a charm in this case. I’ve just received word that on Wednesday the fourth and final flight in the X-51A program achieved its objective of running a scramjet engine in flight for more five minutes. This is the first time in history that any group, in this case the Air Force in a project with DARPA with Pratt & Whitney and Boeing as contractors, has managed to...
Read MoreSpaceShipTwo goes supersonic
Yesterday in Mojave, the Scaled Composites-built suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipTwo lit its rocket engine for the first time and cracked the sound barrier. Pilot Mark Stucky and copilot Mike Alsbury were at the controls of the spaceship, and pilot Dave Mackay and copilot Clint Nichols flew the White Knight Two carrier jet that took the spaceship up to launch altitude. It was the first time in...
Read MoreBooming along with XCOR Aerospace
I’m in transit back from a day with XCOR Aerospace in Mojave yesterday. To my mind, XCOR is the great underreported commercial spaceflight story of the decade. While companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic get the majority of the press attention, XCOR has been quietly building, piece by piece, a spaceship of its own. I think the company will have to start fielding a lot more media...
Read MoreFirst flight of Antares rocket by Orbital Sciences a success
Now, for the first time, America has two, not just one, launch vehicles in operation for reaching the International Space Station. The Antares rocket, built and operated by Orbital Science Corporation, lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia on a test flight to orbit today. It carried a mass simulator to stand for the Cygnus spacecraft that will be added to a flight later this year. Everything...
Read MoreGeoMetWatch: new eyes in the sky
It was my mother who first alerted me to the impending crisis in weather forecasting. Because funding has declined, America’s current 90-satellite fleet of Earth-observing satellites will drop to just 20 by 2020. My mother has been an avid weather watcher since the ’80s, when my family moved from Southern California to Minneapolis, where tornadoes and thunderstorms and snowstorms made...
Read MoreAsteroids: the next frontier
NASA has included an item for capturing an asteroid in this financial year’s budget request. Two companies have launched in the last year dedicated to mining asteroids. There’s no doubt in my mind that asteroids represent the next frontier for both human and robotic spaceflight. Near Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are easier to reach than the moon. Depending on the size and where the are,...
Read MoreMasten space flying higher
There’s a quiet revolution taking place in the commercial space flight industry: vertical takeoff/vertical landing rockets. You know the ones. You’ve seen them in 1950s science fiction movies. Big smoking rocket rises on a pillar of flame. Comes back down the same way. Sure, the Shuttle took off that way, but it didn’t have quiet the same poetry in motion because those 1950s...
Read MoreUrtheCast to stream live video of Earth from space
One of the promises of the commercial space flight revolution now underway is affordable access to space by ordinary people. That’s coming a whole lot sooner than you might think, and it’s going to me more than just affordable. It’s going to be free. UrtheCast, a startup based in Vancouver, has cut a deal with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to install a pair of high...
Read MoreXCOR advances rockets with automotive engine reliability…again
XCOR Aerospace has announced the culimination of a 12-year project to develop piston-driven pumps for delivering fuel and oxidizer to rocket engines. A recent test firing successfully demonstrated the delivelry of both kerosene and liquid oxygine to one of their engines for the first time. The small, Mojave, California-based company made its mark with its piston-driven rocket engine fuel pump in...
Read MoreRevolutionizing Prosthetics: Out of the lab and into the real world
I gave a talk this morning at the San Antonio Military Medical Center (SAMMC) about how innovative organizations, including DARPA, tick. The DARPA-funded DEKA arm is the most advanced upper limb prosthetic in the world. I was so inspired by this project that I put it on the cover of my book about DARPA, The Department of Mad Scientists, and also opened the book with it. The arm is undergoing...
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