by David Todd | Dec 13, 2016 | Commercial human spaceflight, commercial launch services, NASA, Personal spaceflight, Soyuz, SpaceX
In what is rapidly becoming a farcical situation within the NASA commercial crew programme, SpaceX has now admitted that its commercial crew capsule, “Crew Dragon” (aka Dragon V2), will have its first flight delayed from May 2017 until November. This flight will be...
by David Todd | Oct 19, 2016 | Commercial human spaceflight, NASA
Boeing has now admitted that its Boeing CST-100 Starliner commercial crew capsule is late and will not make a crewed flight until August 2018 (delayed from February 2018). The first fully operational crewed flight to the International Space Station (ISS) will take...
by Matt Wilson | Oct 6, 2016 | Blue Origin, Commercial human spaceflight, Launches, Seradata News, Suborbital, test
At 1536 GMT, on 5 October 2016, the start-up space company Blue Origin completed the fifth consecutive launch of their New Shepard booster, alongside the first successful in-flight test of their crew abort mechanism. The primary aim of this mission was the testing of...
by Matt Wilson | Sep 28, 2016 | Commercial human spaceflight, exploration, Personal spaceflight, SpaceX, Technology, test
On 23 September, SpaceX released a statement explaining the progress they had made in the investigation into the cause of the Falcon 9 “anomaly” in the run-up to the AMOS-6 mission. It stated that “…the Accident Investigation Team (AIT),...
by David Todd | Aug 3, 2016 | Commercial human spaceflight, Personal spaceflight, Virgin Galactic
After a full safety analysis of the vehicle, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA-AST) has awarded Virgin Galactic an operator license for its suborbital SpaceShipTwo rocketplane. The award will eventually...
by David Todd | Aug 1, 2016 | Commercial human spaceflight, commercial launch services, International Space Station, Launches, NASA, Seradata News, SpaceX
NASA has ordered a second post-certification mission from commercial provider SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. The order represents the second manned, fully commercial NASA flight to the International Space Station (ISS) for SpaceX and its Dragon V2 capsule. Unmanned...
