Recently in COTS Category

NASA commercial crew and cargo manager Alan Lindemoyer wasn't kidding when he said at last week's 3rd space exploration conference that the space operations mission directorate's draft Request For Proposals for International Space Station resupply would be published soon

Bleary eyed and back in the UK yesterday morning after a Friday spent with Alliant Techsystems in Utah and a weekend travelling, I finally had a look today at the DRFP and was interested to spot the following that looked eerily like something that could be called COTS phase three

Click to this post's extended entry for the photograph of Orbital Sciences' Commercial Orbital Transportation Services space act agreement's milestones slide, shown today at the 3rd space exploration conference by NASA commercial crew and cargo programme manager Alan Lindemoyer

Today NASA's International Space Station commercial resupply website went online. We now know what the contract award date is, for what is also known as Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) phase two, and it is 28 November 2008

SpaceX's Falcon 9 launches, its maiden flight and the COTS demo one flight, are both in "Q4", according to its website

On the website you can find the procurement synposis, the schedule, Bill Gerstenmaier's presentation from the 21 September 2007 industry day, and here you can submit anonymous questions

But perhaps the key immediate dates are, the draft RFP's publication on 28 February and a pre-proposal conference and one-on-one meetings scheduled for 17 March and 18 March, respectively

According to Hobbyspace.com Space News has reported that Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) will not sue NASA if the US government's General Accounting Office review of COTS goes against RpK's claims of unfair agreement termination

Meanwhile over at NASA's sole COTS participant, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), the website might need to be updated as SpaceX's launch manifest shows a Q1 launch for the next Falcon rocket (that is using the Merlin 1C engine for its maiden flight) and the Falcon 1 launch for the Malayasian government's Razaksat imaging satellite, while the FAA says Q2 for the first of 2008's Falcon 1 launches and Q3 for the Razaksat

The Russians are part of this COTS proposal from Space Systems Loral and Constellation Services International (CSI). I was told by CSI that it was offering its LEO Express Space Cargo intellectual proprty to others, now we know who

Read MSNBC's take on the situation here

This CSI based proposal would require the US Congress to continue its relief for NASA from the Iran-Syria non-proliferation act, from 2011 when it currently runs out

Here is some non-COTS collaboration for NASA and apparently Wikipedia's COTS page has been updated

Space Exploration Technologies has also updated its website with a lot of information about first-stage hot firing tests of its Falcon 9 rocket and developments for its Dragon capsule. Watch movies of the hot fire test and a simulation of its Dragon capsule docking with ISS, here and here

"New Space" company Xcor has announced successful rocket tests and NASAWatch.com has linked to an Aviation Week article about the most recent Space Investment Summit

"New Space" follower Clark Lindsey has got the investigative bit between his teeth when it comes to the accident at Scaled Composites in July with two postings, here and here

While here Rand Simbrg questions a fellow bloggers ideas about that holy grail, lowering access to space costs

This image shows Spacehab's ARCTUS vehicle, which is the basis for its COTS proposal

Hobbyspace.com has a series of links to NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services programme stuff about PlanetSpace, various reports and links to videos, which you could have seen a long with a bunch of others on Hyperbola months ago

Industrious Clark Lindsey at Hobbyspace.com has also been mining the FAA website for any announcements regarding the secretive Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin project; has found an interview with Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn where he apparently says that commercial flights will now start in 2010 - I'll be seeing Will on Thursday so expect confirmation or not about that from me on Friday - and finally, Clark has some detail about the third space investment summit

And another "New Space" topic is the Google Lunar X-Prize with this spaceref.com link to a press release about an announcement this Thursday

Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) chairman and chief executive George French III has confirmed to Flight NASAWatch.com's report that the company's president Randy Brinkley, a former Boeing Satellite Systems president, has left RpK. French has told Flight that Brinkley has been replaced by a member of the company's board of directors William Byrd.

With one day to go before the 50th anniversary of Sputnik's launch here is my pick of the newsy stuff from around the web...

As usual Hobbyspace.com has a plethora of links to various this, that and bits and bobs

NASASpaceflight.com has interesting details about Rocketplane Kistler and some alleged detail about changes to NASA's Orion crew exploration vehicle

Chair Force Engineer considers this detail and I agree with some of what Chair Force says but take issue with other claims by Nasaspaceflight - more on that in a later post

ATK has put out a press release about a parachute test for Orion

JPL has a feature on Sputnik

Space.com is reporting on MIT developing a tether for astronauts to walk on asteroid

Spacedev has won a DARPA solar thermal propulsion contract

Find a photo report by Energia about preparations for the next manned Soyuz launch here.

Low Earth orbit tourism and NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration programme are not obviously linked but the intentions of one of COTS participants, California based-Space Exploration Technologies, could see commercial human spaceflight actually emerge from a government programme sometime in the next decade.

Meanwhile the privately funded efforts of Virgin Galactic appear to make head way with offers of suborbital flights earlier than anything conceived by SpaceX, yet can it become another route to realising low cost mass access to LEO and beyond? In this marathon race who is the hare and who is the tortoise?