by David Todd | Jul 28, 2015 | Commercial human spaceflight, Personal spaceflight, Space tourism, Suborbital, Technology, Virgin Galactic
The premature in-flight deployment of the feathered tail plane speed braking system was the primary cause of the destruction of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo (VSS Enterprise) on 31 October 2015, the formal investigation into the accident has concluded. The US...
by David Todd | Jul 17, 2015 | ESA, Launches, SpaceX, Technology
While the rhetoric at the third UK Space Conference held in Liverpool in July emphasised downstream space applications as the way to continued growth, there was an acceptance that there was also gap in Britain’s resurgent space portfolio: it does not have a...
by David Todd | Jul 17, 2015 | ESA, International Space Station, Science, Technology
It is a sign that the UK space industry remains in very good health that the third UK Space Conference had attendance up for the third time, this time to 1,100 delegates. As a further indication of the UK’s growing importance in space, the enlarged Conference...
by David Todd | Jul 9, 2015 | ESA, Satellites, Technology
In a public private partnership (PPP) contract, Airbus Defence and Space has received an initial €180 million (US$198 million) contract to develop the first flexible Quantum satellite with Eutelsat and ESA. The spacecraft will have the first reconfigurable...
by David Todd | Jun 15, 2015 | NASA, Satellites, Technology
The launch of InSight Mars, a NASA mission to land on the planetary surface to study the interior of the planet Mars (InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will now have some co-payloads with it as it is...
by David Todd | Jun 14, 2015 | ESA, exploration, Technology
As he awaited the start of his tenure as Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) on 1 July 2015, replacing the admired Jean-Jacques Dordain in the role, Dr Jan (Johann Dietrich) Woerner noted his enthusiasm for a planned lunar base and village on the Moon...
