Commerce

SpaceX recently completed its first Dragon high altitude drop test and it was 100% successful!
The purpose of the test was to validate the Dragon's parachute deployment systems and recovery operations prior to the first flight of an operational Dragon later this year. The drop occurred on August 12, 2010 about nine miles off the coast from the scenic town of Morro Bay, CA-- 45 miles north of Vandenberg Air Force Base. An Erickson S-64F Air-Crane helicopter dropped a test article of the Dragon spacecraft from a distance of 14,000 feet, directly above the center of a 6 mile diameter Pacific Ocean test zone.

Photos below

SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Vehicle Plan, Aviation Week

"The U.S. government should lead development of a nuclear thermal propulsion system for a future Mars mission and leave new heavy-lift launchers to commercial entities, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) says. Unveiling conceptual plans for a family of Falcon X and XX future heavy-lift vehicles at last week's AIAA Joint Propulsion conference here, SpaceX McGregor rocket development facility director Tom Markusic said, "Mars is the ultimate goal of SpaceX."

Keith's note: These are two presentations from the meeting by Tom Markusic: "SpaceX Propulsion" and "SpaceX overview" (Broken links fixed)

The ongoing collaboration between entrepreneurial space firm Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation and Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) reached a notable milestone in mid-July with final acceptance of another Ecliptic-produced onboard video system. The space-ruggedized and miniaturized video system will be used to observe post-launch activities on a satellite as it orbits at more than 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface.

As the ISS circles Earth, it has begun tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An experiment hosted by ESA's Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station's orbit hundreds of kilometres up.

The ship-detection system under test is based around the Automatic Identification System (AIS), the marine equivalent of the air traffic control system.

John K. Strickland, Jr: Developing a near-term small space tug for LEO and station use is one option - look where it could get us.

US space workers are currently faced with both the loss of the Shuttle program (correctly set in motion by the Bush administration years ago), and also by the temporary gap in space jobs caused by the probable cancelation of the Ares Program. Understandably they are all very concerned about their personal future, and also the seeming end of the manned space program. There is a way to at least partly alleviate both of these problems: (one financial and the other perceptual).