Historic Dragon Caught: Dawn of Commercial Space

Quite literally, the sun dawned across from the International Space Station minutes ago to reveal history in the making. During a flawless night-time “grab,” Astronaut Don Pettit used the station’s robotic Canada arm to successfully secure SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. This makes SpaceX the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and rendezvous with […]

A shotgun blast of suborbital science

I’m pleased to report that I recently had the fortune to represent my spaceflight consulting firm Astrowright as a sponsor of, as well as present research at, the Next-Generation Suborbital Researcher’s Conference this past February 26-29 in Palo Alto, CA. Specifically, after nearly a year of research and client-training-data-mining together with my friend/ballet-dancer/anthropologist/excercise-scientist/astronaut-trainer/partner-in-crime Ashley Boron, our presentations centered this year on our frontier fitness […]

SpaceX chasing rocketry’s Holy Grail

As many who follow and support spaceflight are well aware, a Holy Grail of modern space transportation is the concept of the fully reusable rocket, or Reusable Launch System/Vehicle (RLV). Now, NewSpace orbital spacecraft provider SpaceX might just have this elusive target squarely in its sights. Many solutions have been suggested to achieve the true […]

Future SwRI astronauts stomp on the accelerator

A quick note today on the further development of the worlds’ first commercial scientist-astronauts! The Southwest Research Institute‘s (SwRI) suborbital research program, after its stunning announcement last spring of the purchase of several research seats on upcoming suborbital spaceflights, is showing no signs of slowing. Recently, after their three commercial scientist-astronauts-in-training, (specifically termed payload specialists,) […]

NASTAR: Day 0 – Part 1

Well, it’s 2:00 p.m. local time in San Francisco International Airport, and reality is starting to set in: After what amounts to 15 years of anticipation, I’m headed out to engage in FAA-certified civilian scientist-astronaut training at the NASTAR Center (reviewed in my previous post here)! After a grueling morning – I was awakened well […]

Paradigm Shift

The Next-generation Suborbital Researcher’s Conference (NSRC) is in full swing, and the momentum here is staggering. We’ve had a very good showing to start and have gained invaluable feedback… and it’s only the first morning. As was mentioned by Dr. Alan Stern earlier this morning, this is Silicon Valley, the year is 1979, and commercial […]

Excalibur back in British Isles!

…commercial spacecraft manufacturer/provider Excalibur Almaz (EA), that is. And they ferried two partially-constructed commercial space stations with them. A primary competitor to Bigelow Aerospace on the commercial space station frontier, EA has leveraged 20th-Century Russian military space technology in a bid to accelerate a fully-functioning private spaceflight program to orbit. Because it is based on […]

Astronaut style, by decade…

With commercial spaceflight around the corner, some may be given to wonder: What will private and research astronauts look like? There are only a couple of examples so far, and people tend to assume that astronauts have always appeared the same – pioneers in blue flightsuits with a determined, gritted jaw. However, such is not the […]

Falcon Dreams

I’m a bit behind the curve here these last couple of weeks, as meetings (plans are afoot,) preparing for and delivering/taking final exams, and reviewing and submitting a couple of nonfiction and technical papers has kept me running on empty and burning the midnight oil. However, I’m emerging from the fog of war and wanted […]

Columbia shuttle disaster board supports commercial spaceflight

A short note today on welcome news. While it isn’t necessarily new news at this point, it’s something that didn’t get a lot of play when it came out, and in my view it really should have. So, what is it? It’s a sigh of relief for everyone rooting for the success of commercial spaceflight: […]