T-minus 1 week: Aiming for NASTAR

I’m coming up on a positively Everest-ian milestone in my ongoing quest to become a commercial astronaut, and it’s been a long time coming: Astronaut training. Supported by my spaceflight consulting firm, Astrowright Spaceflight Consulting LLC, I’m heading out in a week to attend highly specialized training offered by the only FAA-certified civilian spaceflight training […]

Bigelow Aerospace accelerates station plans

Recently, two companies have arisen to challenge Bigelow Aerospace’s domination of the commercial space station market. Now, quietly, Bigelow has fired back where it hurts most: Timeframe. It seems that the first to get a station to orbit will be in a position to pluck the ripest government and corporate space station user contracts. In […]

America’s other other space program

A quick note this morning on one of my personal favorite space ventures, JP Aerospace. As a truly DIY space endeavor, the firm has been making a name for itself for more than a decade with their concentrated, unconventional, volunteer-based business model and regular deployments of high-altitude-balloon-lofted platforms complete with telemetry, imaging equipment, and in […]

Virgin Galactic hints at Orbital Domination

At the recent dedication of the main runway at the world’s first devoted commercial spaceport, Sir Richard Branson (of Virgin Galactic fame) slid in an apparently innocuous but Hiroshima-sized comment. While Virgin Galactic has practically cornered the space tourist market with the successful suborbital space flights of SpaceShipOne and upcoming flight tests of SpaceShipTwo (the […]

NewSpace Station-Race begins

This week has been pretty big for private space, (including astronomy / exoplanetology and development of space-related commercial products – more to come in future posts). In something of a surprise announcement, Russian NewSpace startup Orbital Technologies announced a volley of corporate agreements and a proposed private, commercial space station to launch by the year 2015. With […]

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: […]

Personal orbital spacecraft within reach

Though few may realize it now, the stage is set for the first time in human history to enable someone or a small venture (with considerable financial backing) to assemble his or her own spacecraft using private, commercially-available, “off-the-shelf” spacecraft and equipment. And I want to fly one. The reality is that all of the current […]

Orbital Skydive = Spacecraft Escape

It looks as though something of a duel is afoot between two ventures vying to be the first to break the sky dive altitude record set by military high-altitude-balloon-jumper Colonel Joe Kittinger in 1960. The magic number? -A staggering altitude of 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface. Whoever is the first to do it will […]

Orbital Tugs shove their way into reality

With the imminent retirement of the Space Shuttle and the rise of corporate launch spacecraft, private companies are starting to think seriously about the next logical steps – orbital infrastructure. A few of them have even zeroed in on the next target in the business case by identifying a capability we don’t have: Orbital Tugs. […]

Dawn of the Corporate Scientist-Astronaut

For those of you who have known me a while, who have had to endure my many rants during the last decade-and-a-half about the future and the promise of corporate space exploration, I have four words: I told you so. It’s with an almost electric sense of expectation that I am pleased to report a […]