On March 4th, SpaceX tried to land a Dragon rocket on a barge 200 miles from land in the Atlantic Ocean. The attempt failed. Just as SpaceX’s head Elon Musk said it would. But, says Musk, the next attempt—the fifth—just may succeed. SpaceX wants to make that next attempt on April 8th with a flight launching at 4:43 EDT from Cape Canaveral “if the barge is ready.” Why is Musk.. Read More

Academy Award®-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE (http://lunar.xprize.org). The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of $30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to.. Read More

A revolution in Capitol Hill space priorities took place at a recent, overlooked House Space Subcommittee hearing. And seemingly only one journalist noticed: Eric Berger of Ars Technica.    The House Space Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Brian Babin of Texas in early February, heard testimony from experts that a new administration would have to rethink space exploration policy. The Congressional members on the committee looked down with disdain on the.. Read More

A decade ago, Col. M. V. “Coyote” Smith, while working for the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office, was given a mission to save the world – without any money and a six-month deadline. He jumped at the challenge. His space-based solar power proposal is in the running to win perhaps as much as $10 billion to develop and deploy such systems. Smith’s DOD proposal, entitled “Carbon-Free Energy for Global Resilience and International Goodwill,” is.. Read More

The Ohio Team managing the 2016 SunSat Competition has decided to extend the deadline for participant registration. The new date for “Intention to Compete” submission is now January 25, 2016. If you are aware of students/faculty/scientists/engineers/professionals who are doing forward-thinking research and development in some area(s) of Wireless Power Transmission, please share with them our International SunSat Design Competition website. As you may know, $10,000 prizes were awarded to finalists announced at the.. Read More

As reported at The Verge and NASA Spaceflight, NASA officials admitted today the Space Launch System is a vehicle without a mission plan. The agency acknowledged what is essentially an empty flight manifest for the SLS at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida during an all-hands meeting on Monday. A test flight of the rocket, which will send people into orbit around the Moon, was originally planned for no later than August.. Read More

Irene Klotz of Reuters reports that NASA has hired Sierra Nevada Corp to its list of companies to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Sierra Nevada will Join SpaceX and Orbital ATK. The Dream Chaser is designed to land horizontally on a runway, similar to the Space Shuttle. Full story here.

An impressive team of government and industry mavericks has responded to the Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s Innovation Challenge for the Defense, Diplomacy, and Development (D3) Innovation Summit in December with a bold idea for “Carbon-Free Energy for Global Resilience and International Goodwill.” The carbon-free energy source the team proposes is solar power harvested in space and transmitted to earth, an energy source that in the long run could replace all fossil fuels and is an energy source.. Read More

There is a new Mars program—the Evolvable Mars Campaign—circulating secretly within NASA and it’s unaffordable, says the Space Development Steering Committee’s Gerald Black, an Apollo program rocket scientist and GE aircraft engine specialist. But Black is not alone. An aerospace specialist from deep within the bowels of NASA agrees. He agrees in his role as a private citizen, not as a spokesman for NASA. Here’s the story. In a press.. Read More

“Space Settlement an Easier Way,” Al Globus, Stephen Covey, and Daniel Faber describe a relatively easy, incremental path to free space settlement by taking advantage of very low radiation levels in Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO) and higher rotation rates. Low levels of radiation in ELEO permit settlements with little or no radiation shielding. Higher rotation rates permit much smaller settlements. Together this reduces settlement design mass by two to three.. Read More