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.
China’s first mission to Mars is on hold for 26 months following a last-minute decision by the Russian space agency Roscosmos to postpone launch of its Phobos-Grunt probe. Originally set for launch on a Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in a planetary window opening Oct. 6, the mission was delayed until the 2011 Mars launch window, apparently because of problems with the return vehicle that was to bring back samples from the Martian moon Phobos, according to Ma Yongping, deputy director of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.
A seasoned crew of spaceflight veterans will take the space shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station (ISS) on the final scheduled shuttle mission on the NASA flight manifest. Steve Lindsay, the head of the astronaut office at Johnson Space Center, will command Discovery on the STS-133 mission, an eight-day logistics and resupply flight now scheduled to lift off on Sept. 16, 2010. Joining him will be pilot Eric Boe and mission specialists Alvin Drew, Michael Barratt, Tim Kopra and Nicole Stott.
Launch of the U.S. Air Force’s secretive Orbital Test Vehicle Flight 1 (OTV-1) spaceplane has been rescheduled for Apr. 10, 2010, on an Atlas V 501 rocket following several shifts in the busy Cape Canaveral launch manifest. The OTV is the Air Force-led X-37B, a Boeing Phantom Works-built derivative of the X-37 technology demonstrator originally developed for NASA’s “Future X” project of the late 1990s, which the agency hoped to fly as early as 2006 as a precursor to a spaceplane for ferrying space station crews (see image).
