Source The Space Review

As originally published by The Space Review on November 23, 2009 (author, Stephen Ashworth)

In 2004, the European Space Agency released a design study called “Human Missions to Mars: Overall Architecture Assessment”. This study was undertaken after a decade of work, notably by David Baker, Jim French, and Robert Zubrin, which established that local propellant production using the Martian atmosphere would be a key technology for practical human access to the Red Planet.

Nevertheless, the ESA study totally ignored this work, and proceeded instead to design in considerable detail a Mars mission on the classical 1950s model. The vehicle would mass 1,357 tonnes on departure from low Earth orbit, and would require about 20 launches of the giant Energia rocket over 4.6 years to assemble—that is, every single mission would require more heavy-lift launches than the entire Apollo and Skylab programs together. The fruits of this titanic effort: just 30 days on the surface of Mars for only half of the crew of six.

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Source Space.com

As originally published by Space.com on November 23, 2009 (author, Leonard David)

In the entrepreneurial space business, there’s nothing like the “cone of silence” surrounding the rocket work of billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame.

In hush-hush surroundings, the Bezos Blue Origin business plan has been resolute in developing its New Shepard, a vertical takeoff and landing rocket. The plan: To develop a craft that can routinely fly multiple astronauts into suborbital space at competitive prices.

Flight tests of an Origin-class suborbital craft have been staged at a Bezos-bankrolled private launch site in Texas. That much is known … and beyond that, little is known in any great detail.

But now there’s news.

Research payloads selected

Today, Blue Origin announced that it has picked three research payloads to fly on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

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Source: BBC

As originally published by BBC on November 10, 2009 (author, Jonathan Amos)


You are going to hear a lot in the next few weeks about Virgin Galactic, not least because on 7 December the company will unveil SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave Desert, California.

This is the rocket plane Sir Richard Branson will use to take fare-paying passengers on sub-orbital flights in the coming years.

In this posting, however, I want to concentrate on another Galactic project which is now gathering pace – the LauncherOne satellite system.

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