Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch provider founded by Sir Richard Branson, has confirmed it is shutting down after selling its facility leases and equipment to three aerospace companies following bankruptcy.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has caved to the demands of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and will grant both men Commercial Space Astronaut Wings despite previously stripping the billionaires of the astronaut title.
The future of space exploration will likely be some sort of public-private partnership. If space-bound billionaires are willing to do their part for the nation and if American political leaders have the vision to see space travel as a 1492-like opportunity, then this could be the beginning of a new epoch of American Greatness.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has become the first space tourism to ride into space aboard a rocket plane that his company has been developing for 17 years. He has beaten billionaire space fans Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who plans to fly to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket later this month.
The FAA has given Virgin Galactic approval to begin transporting commercial passengers to suborbital space aboard its VSS spaceplane. The company promises stunning views of Earth and several minutes of weightlessness during a two-hour trip.
A bill has been introduced in the California legislature to dump the infamous “space tax” that extended the state’s revenue collection frontier to 62 miles above the Earth.
16 of the world’s richest billionaires have investments in space exploration, according to a new report from Bloomberg Technology.
SpaceX completed a successful mission lift-off Thursday of a used Falcon 9 booster rocket, landing it successfully once again on a platform in the ocean.
An explosion Thursday in Cape Canaveral during a routine static test-fire of the nine Merlin 1D engines that power the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is the company’s second catastrophic failure in the last two years, and puts at risk the expected private sector takeover of space flight.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has found that last year’s deadly Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two crash over the Mojave Desert could have been avoided had the craft been equipped with a protective system to overcome the co-pilot’s mistake, according to its newly-released report.
