Tag Archives: Spacecraft

The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded the Cold Stowage II contract from NASA. Under the potential $48.3 million, single award, cost-no-fee contract, the university will deliver a suite of freezers that will maintain a controlled temperature environment for science samples aboard the International Space Station (ISS), as well as to and from low-Earth orbit.

NASA has released a sources sought notice calling on launch providers that can send a cube satellite to highly elliptical orbit as part of a demonstration mission on phenomena occurring in the Earth’s outer radiation belt.

Maxar Technologies has completed installing the fuel tank into the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing-1 spacecraft. The company is developing for NASA the OSAM-1 spacecraft, which is based on the 1300-class spacecraft platform and designed to refuel satellites in low-Earth orbit, Maxar said Thursday.

Jim Bridenstine, NASA Administrator and a 2019 Wash100 winner, said he thinks spacecraft from Boeing and SpaceX could be ready to fly astronauts as soon as the first quarter of 2020, CNBC reported Sunday.

Maxar Technologies has completed a preliminary design review of spacecraft being developed to help NASA explore the metallic 16 Psyche asteroid for the first time and gain insight into how planet Earth formed.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has deployed two CubeSats from the International Space Station under a flight demonstration and test initiative. The CubeSats were launched from the orbital laboratory via a NanoRacks CubeSat platform as part of the CubeSat Assessment and Test mission, APL said Wednesday.

Northrop Grumman has announced that its automated cargo spacecraft slated to be deployed to the International Space Station will be named after former U.S. Navy officer and NASA astronaut John Young. The Cygnus spacecraft will be launched aboard Northrop’s Antares rocket on Nov. 15 from Pad-0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport …

Lockheed Martin has teamed up with NanoRacks to seek concepts of commercial payloads that could fly on upcoming missions of NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Lockheed said Friday the market assessment marks the initial step toward its vision to deliver commercial opportunities to deep space. Mike Hawes, Orion program manager and vice …

Lockheed Martin’s space business has begun to consider the possibility of providing companies and researchers a chance to fly experiments aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the Denver Business Journal reported Thursday. Orion is scheduled to launch in 2020 atop the Space Launch System for an unmanned flight test as part of …

NASA has worked with Northrop Grumman and Ball Aerospace to assess the capability of the James Webb Space Telescope’s two main components to communicate with each other. Engineers and technicians used ground wires to temporarily connect the spacecraft to the telescope as part of the optional “risk reduction” test, NASA …

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft docked at the International Space Station tested on Tuesday its reboost capability through a 50-second engine firing activity, Spaceflight Now reported Wednesday. Ground controllers at Northrop’s Dulles, Va.-based mission operations facility transmitted commands to the spacecraft to fire its IHI Aerospace-supplied BT-4 main engine, which generated …

Janet Kavandi, director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, has said a SpaceX-built spacecraft has left the agency’s Ohio-based Plum Brook Station for Florida following the completion of a series of acoustics and thermal vacuum tests, SpaceNews reported Monday. Kavandi issued the statement Monday at the American Institute of Aeronautics and …

Lockheed Martin plans to reduce the production cost of the Orion crew capsule for future missions through reuse of the vehicle structure and other components of the spacecraft, SpaceNews reported Friday. “We have the internal component reuse that will start even between [Exploration Mission] 1 and 2, but then when …

NASA has pushed back from 2019 to May 2020 the launch of its James Webb Space Telescope to give the program’s engineers more time to test and integrate the telescope and spacecraft components. “All the observatory’s flight hardware is now complete, however, the issues brought to light with the spacecraft element …

Blue Origin has conducted the first flight test of a new spacecraft that took off aboard the New Shepard reusable suborbital vehicle at its launch site in west Texas, Digital Journal reported Wednesday. The unmanned Crew Capsule 2.0 lifted off Tuesday aboard the New Shepard booster and flew for at least 10 …