Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. today announced that Hamilton Sundstrand and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Inc., will be the primary suppliers to Team Ball in its pursuit of a contract for the Avionics Instrument Unit for the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV). Ares I will launch the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the vehicle [...]
NASA has signed a $1.2 billion contract with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne to develop the J-2X engine the U.S. space agency needs to power the upper stages of its Ares I crew launch vehicle and Ares V heavy-lift rocket. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of Canoga Park, Calif. has been working on the engine, an updated [...]
NASA has stopped developing the 274,000lb-thrust (1,220kN) J-2XD engine version for its Ares I crew launch vehicle (CLV) and will use its 294,000lb-thrust J-2X powerplant for the CLV and the Ares V cargo launch vehicle upper stages. The liquid-oxygen, liquid-hydrogen-fuelled J-2X, named after the Apollo programme upper-stage J-2 engine, will start 133s into the flight [...]
The cost of flying to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship is up from about $25 million earlier this year to about $30 million (€22 million) to $40 million (€29 million) for trips planned in 2008 and 2009. “It’s mostly because of the fallen dollar,” Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space [...]
NASA welcomes a vote of support for its future space exploration plans from the nation’s largest organization of doctors. The American Medical Association recently passed a resolution in support of human space travel, citing “potential future benefits to medicine and advances in patient care.” The resolution passed in a unanimous vote at the AMA’s annual [...]
Flight can reveal NASA’s draft plans for its Constellation programme’s Lunar Lander team, as the US space agency prepares for a lessons-learned meeting with a dozen retired Apollo Lunar Module engineers on 20 July.The engineers worked on the Apollo Lunar Module reliability and maintainability team for its prime contractor Grumman, now known as Northrop Grumman, [...]
NASA selected California-based Pratt&Whitney Rocketdyne Inc., Monday to develop the upper-stage engine for the rockets intended to succeed the space shuttle and carry American explorers back to the moon. The $1.2 billion contract covers design, development and testing of the J-2X engine intended to furnish propulsion for the second stage of NASA’s Ares I crew [...]
The U.S. space program is veering toward an ominous black hole with the shuttle era set to end in 2010 and a replacement system still about seven years from being ready for launch. The gap will make NASA more vulnerable to funding cuts as federal budget woes mount in the years after the shuttles’ exit. [...]
There’s good news in the congressional warfare over NASA’s budget: Thanks to hard pushing by U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, the House Appropriations Committee has restored $1.3 billion that had been cut from NASA’s fiscal year 2008 budget. The money, which would boost NASA funding to $17.6 billion, still has to pass the full House and [...]
The Lockheed Martin Orion spacecraft has received a new set of refined baseline targets from NASA, concentrating on ensuring Orion can achieve ISS mission roles, as the vehicle edges closer to using up all of its reserve and weight growth allowances. Orion itself is being refined, in order to ease some of the pressure on [...]