John Carmack’s brilliant little company Armadillo Aerospace has now won both level 1 and level 2 of the “Lunar Lander Challenge” a contest by the X Prize Foundation to encourage companies to develop new technology for moon landings. Carmack, who originally made his fortune developing the computer game Doom, and continues to spend most of [...]

SpaceX‘s press releases have a very interesting sentence in the “About SpaceX” section: “SpaceX is the only COTS contender with the capability to return cargo and crew to Earth. “ “And CREW?!” COTS stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation Services; SpaceX won a competition to provide commercial services for NASA. Three Missions Scheduled So far, SpaceX [...]

With the retirement of the space shuttle scheduled for next year, this group of astronauts will probably be going into space on a Russian Soyuz…at least for the next five years or so. The American replacement for the shuttle, Constellation, is still under development and will be for some time. Astronaut candidates still plentiful Even [...]