commercial space

Soon, the Ispace lander will have plenty of company. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic will be sending its Peregrine lander on the debut flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which could launch in June. Houston-based Intuitive Machines plans to send two Nova-C landers to the moon this year, with another slated for 2024. Other companies, like Firefly Aerospace and Draper, have their own landers heading there in the next couple years. SpaceIL will make another attempt, sending Beresheet 2 in 2025. And…

There’s not much going for Roscosmos at this point other than the ISS—or a replacement to be called the Russian Orbital Service Station, which Borosiv claimed could be developed and launched as early as 2028. That’s an overoptimistic timeline, Samson and Dreier argue, considering it took more than 12 years for Russia to develop its Nauka ISS module, which launched to the ISS last year. “I don’t see that, considering their funding issues. And Russia’s civil space program has quality control issues and corruption issues as…

From the start, were you trying to support commercial partnerships with the space industry, or did that develop out of necessity?I would describe the goal as being to increase the efficiency of the tax dollar and to reduce the cost of getting to orbit. Because then at that point NASA can be doing more cutting-edge, unique, interesting, important things in space.Partnering with industry wasn’t a goal. It was an outcome, a path to reach a goal that we all shared in space policy—since the Nixon administration—to reduce the…