Recently in commercial launch services Category

credit: Virgin Galactic / caption: why the straigth wing and v-tail?

This design for Virgin Galactic's mini satellite launching rocket LauncherOne was shown by the company's small satellite launch general manager Adam Baker at the 60th International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, Korea in October. For a more colourful LauncherOne design click through to the extended portion of this blog post

This video shows Norman Augustine's remarks at the 22 October 2009  US human spaceflight review final report publication press conference

These few weeks since the US review of human space flight report (overseen by Norman Augustine above) was published have seen commercial's future at NASA just get brighter and brighter, what with a new advisory committee and some shiny comments made by the agency's administrator Charles Bolden - backed up by remarks from his officials on deep background apparently

One wonders how these advisory committees could inform the process for developing the new spaceflight vision that Bolden is charged with giving Obama, at a meeting before year's end or by February 2010 according to this report and this report?

Will these committees engage with the flexible path option that has been getting some good press of late? And what can really be done along that path? To date there has been near Earth objects and Lagrange orbit talk and then Moon and Mars gets a mention - but where is the money coming from for any of these destinations?

Its something to consider if flexible path really is the new way forward because its appearences in the media are not from off the cuff remarks. This report shows that internally NASA has been thinking a lot about what it wants to do, and it started long before it got the final Augustine report

Hyperbola Hyperbola and Flightglobal will report further on this Emdrive propulsion system and its applications later this week but for now here is a picture of the spaceplane proposed by Emdrive's UK inventor

credit Reaction Engines / caption: Skylon rendezvous with ISS

Reaction Engines' Skylon single stage to orbit vehicle is shown here in close proximity to the International Space Station. The UK SSTO is undergoing changes with greater payload bay detail, Hyperbola will make public more info soon

click on all the images in this blog post to see larger versions in the same browser window

Hyperbola is launching to the Oort cloud for a week's R&R from today and will be returning via Daejeon, Korea from the 12 October. In Daejeon Hyperbola will be blogging from the International Astronautical Congress, where the world's space community meets. And yes there may even be Virgin Galactic news there...

Khrunichev Space Center has successfully fired its Angara family Universal Rocket Module-1 again. Go here for more information and pictures

If starting and then stopping, within a week, a procurement process for human rating commercial crew transport vehicles  seems strange then the sum of money that came attached might seem even stranger

NASA has told Hyperbola: "We received a total of $1 million in recovery act funds for human rating commercial crew vehicles."

And "Yes, that is just one million."

According to the space agency "In spite of that statement in the [human rating study procurement synopsis saying only Orbital and SpaceX could apply] there was so much interest from other companies that NASA decided it needed to move to a position where those other companies could comment, thus an [Request For Information]."

But why only $1 million in the first place? Hyperbola will answer that question and more tomorrow

Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) has told Hyperbola that its Prisma formation flying satellite(s) that might have flown on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon is now to fly on a Dnepr rocket in February 2010. SSC senior vice president for global sales Svante Stenbom told Hyperbola that the presence of SSC on the SpaceX manifest had more to do with an agreement to express an interest than any actual concrete contract - while SpaceX's loss of the UK telecoms sat Hylas to Arianespace seems to have been more significant. Stenbom said SSC had not made any milestone payments to SpaceX. While SpaceX has announced its Orbcomm and Astrium launch deals Hyperbola wonders how many other items on SpaceX's manifest have been just expressions of interest. Stenbom denied that the Orbcomm launch schedule had made the delayed February 2010 Prisma launch impossible and that the Dnepr had always been an option for the company

Hyperbola also spoke to Surrey Satellite Technology's public relations people about the slightly strange Space X, EADS Astrium, SSTL announcement for an unnamed Earth observation spacecraft launch at an uncertain date in the future but no further details are forthcoming

SSC's press office just emailed Hyperbola this: "We intentended to use Falcon for the launch of the Prisma satellites, however, we were not able to wait so we had to choose another launcher this time." The comment does add weight to the conspiracy theory that Prisma was squeezed out by SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Orbcomm commitments in 2010. Prisma was supposed to launch this year and was delayed to February 2010 so how long was this unacceptable wait? 

A concern expressed by this blog was that the Norman Augustine led review, all 90-odd days of it, would simply be too short to achieve anything and that the options this US Review of human spaceflight plans committee would come up with would just lead to another study 

Fortunately it would seem, according to sources brave enough to talk to Hyperbola, that Bolden will have a "forward plan" very soon after Augustine has briefed the US Senate and House of Representatives, dates for which are being organised now

This will follow the committee chairman's 14 August debrief to NASA administrator Charles Bolden and John Holdren, Office of Science and Technology Policy director - whose office kicked off the review on behalf of president Barack Obama's administration

The rapid timing for all this is apparently because political wheels are to be set in motion as regards the Congressional budgetary process. So it is nice to know everything but the engineering is driving the schedule

But fear not Hyperbola readers because this NASA announcement yesterday indicated that all would be revealed sooner than you think

The Aug. 12 meeting will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. EDT at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Amphitheater, located at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW in Washington. The agenda is:

1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Committee public deliberations:

Discussion of final options

Discussion of final report

Discussion of close-out activities

Hyperbola understands that all the Augustine materials will be made public on 12 August, and perhaps there won't even be set of secret appendices...

Coming back to this forward plan of Bolden's, some people have been getting quite excited about what Xcor founder and chief executive Jeff Greason's (pronounced Grey-son) propellant depot presentation means for the options that Augustine's committee could choose

UPDATE: Florida Today's The Flame Trench blog has a transcript of its live blogging output from today's Norman Augustine's "Review of US human spaceflight plans" panel's visit to Cocoa Beach, Florida