The week in review 5

Busy week for me, the school term ended and with and my contract at the school I'd been at for the last 5 weeks. I did work as a different school for 3 days and was hoping to be booked until the school year ends but it was not to be.

Was a busy week in space too, with a number of events, including;

India's suborbital  RLV test,

Orbital ATK's plans,

an update from Blue Origin,

and more info on XS-1 (and additional details here)


An additional positive story was the Expansion of Bigelow' BEAM module at the ISS (on the second attempt),

I also found another new UK Small launcher, Horizon's Black Arrow 2 (Should really be using High Test Peroxide-HTP-  with that name!),

and an interesting article from Space New's magazine on Red Dragon.

Speaking of SpaceX, one he biggest stories this week was of course was latest launch, making a total of 3 barge landings in a row.

In sadder news it appears XCOR's Lynx space plane is dead (for now, but am not optimistic it will every fly at this date. XCOR has been going pretty much since I first started to follow RLV development so it a real shame.

Also this week Planetary Resources cancelled their Kickstarter funded space selfie telescope (which I had donated to. In more positive news they did raise money for a new Earth observation system.

And fnally, a cool poster showing every vehicle in the US military.

Orbital ATK launch plans

A few days late in commenting on these, but Orbital ATK has had 2 stories this week, first on Antares returning to flight in July, second on a future LV based on the shuttle's SRB and Blue Origin upper stage.

Personally I'd have though a liquid upper stage for Antares would be a better bet, the core is comparable in size and thrust to a Atlas V but the overall payload is much lower due to solid upper stages. Of course this would probably be ineligible for USAF launches due to the Russian engines, but it could be cost effective for NASA and commercial launches (maybe could even put CST-100 or Dreamchaser in orbit?)