by Michael Belfiore | Apr 23, 2013 | Blog
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...
by Michael Belfiore | Apr 21, 2013 | Blog
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...
by Michael Belfiore | Apr 18, 2013 | Blog
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...
by Michael Belfiore | Apr 9, 2013 | Blog
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...
by Michael Belfiore | Apr 8, 2013 | Blog
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...
by Michael Belfiore | Apr 5, 2013 | Blog
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....
