credit: NASA
The AIAA SPACE 2008 conference saw an update yesterday on the progress with NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services demonstration programme. I was a bit bemused with this slide above as it seems to me to be rather hard to undertake COTS crew capability D activities when the NASA FY2009 budget published in February had nothing in it for this option; admittedly unfunded in the funded space act agreements but some NASA cash is going to be expected
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credit: NASA
Orbital has certainly got a long way to go but they have made headway and I will have more details to publish about that soon as I have spoken to the company's COTS manager Antonio Elias
credit: NASA
Like Orbital I have more detail about SpaceX and its latest progress and that should also be reaching flightglobal.com shortly. The CUC flight unit you see referred too in the above slide is a UHF radio that will be taken to the station on the Space Shuttle mission STS-130 and could be used by Orbital and other non-COTS resupply providers
on September 12, 2008 9:16 PM | Reply
Looks like the commercial space transportation timelines 15 years ago, with the times moved 15 years into the future.