| | | | |  Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON —The chief executive of United Launch Alliance said Nov. 9 that he doesn't feel any urgency to select a main engine for his company's next-generation Vulcan rocket, despite an impending deadline for an Air Force launch competition.
During a question-and-answer session after his speech at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon, Bruno declined to give an update on the competition between the BE-4 engine from Blue Origin and the AR1 from Aerojet Rocketdyne to power the first stage of the Vulcan. ULA has long indicted its preferred choice is the BE-4, but wanted to wait until the engine completed a series of test firings to confirm it would be suitable. Blue Origin announced Oct. 19 it had carried out the first hotfire test of the engine, but has not disclosed if it has carried out any additional tests to date. Bruno didn't comment on that test beyond the statement ULA issued at the time congratulating Blue Origin for the achievement. | | |  Sandra Erwin, LONDON— For the military space world, the big headline from Capitol Hill Wednesday was that the final version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act does not, at least for now, require the Pentagon to create a new "space corps."
This might seem like a victory for the Air Force. Senior leaders had fought back the House space corps provision that would have effectively taken away from the Air Force its ownership of military space. It's a hollow victory, however. The 2018 NDAA is big on Pentagon reforms, across the board, but it hammered the Air Force especially hard. The NDAA conference report blasts the Air Force for a "broken national security space enterprise," strips key authorities from the service and shifts much of the management of military space to the deputy secretary of defense. | | |  Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — Sierra Nevada Corporation is expected to perform a second glide test of its Dream Chaser vehicle as soon as next week, according to comments from a NASA official.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said at a House Science Committee hearing Nov. 9 that the glide flight of the uncrewed vehicle, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, was planned for Nov. 14. "They have a drop test on the 14th of this month to look at their vehicle coming back," he said when asked about the company's work by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) at the hearing. | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — As the deadline nears for an Air Force competition to fund development of new launch vehicles, Orbital ATK announced Nov. 7 what it called an "important milestone" for its proposed launcher. In a statement, the company said it successfully tested a new composite case for the solid rocket motors that it plans to use in its proposed Next Generation Launch (NGL) rocket, stressing the case to 110 percent of loads and pressures it would experience in flight. | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — XCOR Aerospace, a company that for nearly 20 years had been working on rocket engines and a suborbital spaceplane, filed for bankruptcy Nov. 8 after it was unable to line up new investors. The company filed paperwork with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of California, seeking bankruptcy under Chapter 7, which calls for liquidation of the company's assets. XCOR is headquartered in Midland, Texas, with facilities in Mojave, California. The filing was first reported by Parabolic Arc. | | | Jeff Foust, WASHINGTON — SpaceX said Nov. 8 that it suffered a failure of a Merlin engine during a recent test at its Texas facility, but that the incident would not delay any upcoming launches. The incident, which took place Nov. 4 and was first reported by the Washington Post, may have involved a new version of the Merlin engine being developed by SpaceX for the next upgrade of the company's Falcon 9 launch vehicle. | | | Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — Arianespace completed the company's tenth launch this year Nov. 7, delivering a Moroccan Earth observation satellite to low-Earth orbit on a Vega rocket. The mission, Arianespace's penultimate for the year, marks the 11th consecutive success for the Avio-supplied Vega, a light-lift rocket that has picked up a regular cadence now within the Arianespace family of rockets. | | | Sandra Erwin, LONDON — There was a time when the U.S. military had to scramble to book commercial satellite capacity. With forces deployed around the world, it seemed there was never enough bandwidth to stream live video and fly surveillance drones over war zones. Circumstances have changed. The satellite communications industry has dramatically scaled up capacity and has no plans to stop, to the point that supply is now outstripping demand. | | | Caleb Henry, WASHINGTON — Tekever, a Portugal-based company with business interests ranging from clean energy to defense and logistics, is pulling together a team of domestic companies and organizations to build the first made-in-Portugal satellite. That small satellite, called Infante, is a precursor to a constellation of 12 spacecraft in low-Earth orbit for remote sensing and telecommunications services. The team's current plan is for Infante to be a 16U cubesat with a mass of 25 kilograms. | | | | | | |
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