Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
NASA has awarded a contract to build a testbed for optically guided rendezvous and docking in Mars orbit—a key technique that will be required for a Mars sample return. Such a mission will have to gather a sample from the Martian surface, then launch it into Mars orbit, where it will dock autonomously with the spacecraft that will bring it back to Earth. The Mars Orbiting Sample Retrieval Rendezvous and Docking Testbed will be developed by Aurora Flight Sciences and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory.
Some Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee are questioning whether NASA has violated stipulations of its Fiscal 2010 appropriation language by moving to terminate elements of the Constellation program early. Their questions echo concerns raised in March by a group of House lawmakers who sent a letter to the U.S. Government Accountability Office asking for an investigation of NASA’s actions.
NASA’s abandonment of the Constellation program represents a “change in approach and philosophy,” but not a change to the ultimate goal of sending human explorers into the Solar System, according to the agency’s number two exploration official. The Obama administration plans to terminate the Constellation program, including the Ares launch vehicles and Orion spacecraft being developed for a lunar return, in favor of a multipronged effort aimed at enabling technologies for future deep-space exploration.
