Orion Medical Blog

SpaceX has been approved for a five-year contract  to launch its rockets from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) is located on Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was previously used by the U.S. Air Force for Titan III and Titan IV launches and to send off the Mars Observer spacecraft and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

On April 26, 2007, private space transportation company SpaceX (formally called Space Exploration Technologies) was granted the use of LC-40 for the next five years by the 45th Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force Space Command.   Read more

The people closest to David Beverly, the NASA engineer shot to death in his space-center office last week, asked his friends and colleagues at a memorial service Wednesday to share in his passions for work, play and family.

Beverly, 62, was as much at home straddling a motorcycle on a cross-country trip or skippering his 41-foot sailboat through Galveston Bay as he was troubleshooting electronics gear for the space shuttle, the international space station or NASA’s new moon ship.

“David had such a great passion for his work for NASA and being a part of a great program,” his widow, Linda Beverly, told an audience of several hundred people who filled a space center auditorium.  Read more

Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh will visit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on Tuesday, May 8. The tour of Goddard is occurring near the end of the queen’s visit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia.

Goddard is home to the largest organization of scientists and engineers in the United States dedicated to learning and sharing knowledge of the Earth, sun, solar system and universe. The visit gives the royal couple the opportunity to meet 21st century explorers of new worlds. The visit is indicative of the long history of collaboration with the United Kingdom, including the Hubble Space Telescope and Solar Dynamics Observatory.  Read more

Workers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, were back on the job Monday after a disgruntled contractor shot himself and one bystander.

William Arthur Phillips, aged 60, entered Building 44 on the center’s sprawling campus on 20 April with a .38-calibre revolver and shot 62-year-old engineer David Beverly in the chest. Phillips was a long-time contractor at Jacobs Engineering who had recently received a poor job review from Beverly. Phillips also detained a second NASA employee, Francelia Crenshaw, but did not harm her. After a three-hour standoff, Phillips took his own life.  Read more

In January, the new Congress finally passed the budget for FY2007. The budget was based on the Continuing Resolution that had been in effect since last October, and so NASA was denied the increase over FY2006 that it had expected. In early February, the President proposed his budget for FY2008, and the screws on NASA tightened yet again.

The requested FY2008 budget for NASA is essentially what was promised to the agency in FY2007. In that sense the Administration is consistent. However, essentially none of the problems were solved that were identified in the FY2007 requested budget, and are now exacerbated with an enacted budget for FY2007 equal to the FY2006 budget. (In the newsletter articles that follow, the Chairs of several of the standing committees of the Space Studies Board and other Board members express their personal opinions on the impact of the FY2008 budget request on their disciplines.)  Read more

Late this afternoon NASA announced that it was making a significant modification to the Orion development contract with Lockheed Martin. The announcement of the modification, at a total cost of $385 million, was formally released at 4:00 pm, after Wall Street had shut down for the day.

The change in the contract will add two test flights of Orion’s launch abort system, halt production of a pressurized cargo version of Orion, and most significantly, add two years to the design phase of Orion development – thus slipping the initial delivery of flight hardware.   Read more

With only three years remaining before the space-shuttle fleet’s planned retirement, NASA managers have begun tackling the thorny issues that will dictate the program’s end.

Critical facilities must be overhauled to support planned human missions to the moon. Billions of dollars’ worth of obsolete shuttle hardware must be disposed of. And, most difficult of all, thousands of jobs must be shifted or eliminated as the shuttle era ends and the new Constellation project takes off.  Read more

Orbital Sciences Corp., which makes small rockets and space systems, reported a higher quarterly profit helped by a ramp-up of contract activity on NASA’s Orion human spacecraft program and expansion of commercial satellite manufacturing.  Read more

House and Senate appropriators have pushed back against NASA’s proposed termination of a planned 2011 robotic lunar lander mission, directing the agency to spend $20 million this year to continue work on a follow-on to the 2008 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The directive, in the form of a letter from Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), who respectively chair the Senate and House appropriations panels with NASA oversight, responds to a 2007 operating plan the space agency submitted to Capitol Hill in mid March. Besides formalizing NASA’s previously disclosed intentions to cancel the robotic lander, the operating plan details the latest cost estimates for a slew of other missions.  Read more

NASA has entered into an agreement with the U.S. Air Force to support abort flight test requirements for the Orion Project. The Air Force has contracted with Orbital Sciences Corp. of Chandler, Ariz., to provide launch services for the flight tests.

The agreement with the Air Force’s Space Development and Test Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., provides for abort test boosters that will serve as launch vehicles for Orion ascent abort flight tests that are set to occur from 2009 through 2011 at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The first abort test is scheduled for 2008, but will not require a functional booster.

The tests will support certification of the Orion crew exploration vehicle’s launch abort system. The system includes a small escape rocket designed to ensure the safety of the crew in the event of a launch vehicle malfunction while on the launch pad or during ascent to orbit. A total of six tests are planned, pending environmental assessments. Two will simulate an abort from the launch pad and will not require a booster. The rest will use abort test boosters and simulate aborts at three stressing conditions along the Ares launch vehicle trajectory.  Read more