While neither has yet had their manned capsule designs fly, and while both have had their test flight programmes delayed, both Boeing and SpaceX have been awarded contracts by NASA for four more manned commercial flights each to add to the two they each already hold....
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...
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...
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...
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),...
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...
