Irene Klotz is Senior Space Editor for Aviation Week, based in Cape Canaveral. Before joining Aviation Week in 2017, Irene spent 25 years as a wire service reporter covering human and robotic spaceflight, commercial space, astronomy, science and technology for Reuters and United Press International. She also worked with Discovery Communications, Discovery News and was a founding member of Space.com.
Irene cut her teeth on the space beat at Florida Today newspaper, a business writer enchanted by the colorful entrepreneurs who wanted access to Air Force launch facilities and assets after commercial payloads were taken off the space shuttles following the 1986 Challenger accident. Commercial space remains the focus of her work, along with a keen interest in the search for life beyond Earth.
A graduate of Northwestern University, Irene is the 2014 recipient of the Harry Kolcum Memorial News and Communications Award, named in honor of the late Aviation Week managing editor and Cape Canaveral senior editor who was among Irene’s earliest mentors.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The U.S. Air Force has given Space Florida its first task under a $48 million Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract: develop a logistics strategy plan for solid-fuel rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 46. The work, which is valued at $30,000, will pave the way for launches of Minotaur and other solid-fuel rockets from pad 46, which is managed by Space Florida, a state-backed space development and operations agency.
CAPE CANAVERAL — Scientists and engineers working on payloads slated to ride on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket are preparing to ship hardware, although they have not been told a launch date. “I don’t know when the flight will be. I only know that the flight hardware has to be ready in a few months,” says Rainer Kuhl, physical sciences program manager for German space agency DLR, a partner in a New Shepard project called Microgravity Experiment on Dust Environments in Astrophysics (Medea).
Space Adventures has secured three seats for sale on upcoming Soyuz missions to the International Space Station, the company announced Jan. 12. The flights, which are expected to cost upward of $35 million apiece, will be available beginning in 2013, company spokeswoman Stacy Tearne says.
