SpaceFlightNow, one of the top space news sites, has a special edition of “This Week In Space” with Miles O’Brien with a detailed look at President Obama’s sweeping changes for the U.S. human spaceflight program.
The Constellation program had already run through about $9 billion to develop a new crew capsule, Orion, and a new rocket, the Ares 1. Both are vaporized by Obama’s new NASA strategy.
Under the COTS test program, the SpaceX (Dragon) and Orbital (Cygnus) robotic spacecraft will demonstrate their ability to supply the International Space Station in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
Those companies’ human-rated proposals are based on variants of the unmanned versions of those craft.
The Augustine Commission submitted options to the Obama administration in October for the future of the human space program. The Augustine Commission saw no chance that Constellation could succeed in its goal of a 2020 landing on the moon.
Sierra Nevada Corp. was the big winner in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) competition, receiving $20 million of the $50 million in economic stimulus money meant to seed development of commercial crew transportation services.
NASA also announced that Chicago-based Boeing will receive $18 million; Denver-based United Launch Alliance will receive $6.7 million; Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin will get $3.7 million; and Tucson, Ariz.-based Paragon Space Development Corp. will get $1.4 million.
People in the eastern United States will have an opportunity to see the space shuttle Endeavour launched on Sunday morning, Feb. 7. It will also likely be the very last opportunity ever to see a space shuttle blast off at night. STS-130 will be the 32nd to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station. It is the first of NASA’s five final shuttle missions this year before the fleet is retired in the fall.
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