Keith’s note: as first reported the other day the commercial space station competition is now tightening. Blue Origin seems to be losing interest and focusing their big rocket, Sierra Space seems to wants to chart its own path, and Voyager/Northrop Grumman are merging their efforts (the only effort with flight-proven and operation hardware already doing the whole space station thing). According to NASA: “As part of NASA’s efforts to foster commercially owned and operated low Earth orbit destinations, Nanoracks, part of Voyager Space’s Exploration Segment, and Northrop Grumman are teaming up to support Nanoracks’ development of the Starlab commercial space station. Rather than developing its own destination as planned under a separate Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA, the agency and Northrop Grumman agreed to withdraw from its agreement so the company can join Voyager Space and Nanoracks in providing cargo logistics services and engineering services to support the Starlab station.” According to Voyager Space Holdings: “Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft will be utilized to deliver pressurized cargo to Starlab over an initial five-year period to support future human spaceflight missions. The Cygnus spacecraft has completed 19 missions, delivering over 138,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). Cygnus has already demonstrated several advanced capabilities, including the ability to function as a laboratory while docked to ISS, deploy satellites, and reboost the station’s orbit.”
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