SPACE 51

SP51/13/CO-01 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-01ACTIVE Virgin Galactic The flagship subject of this beat - one full year of test flights, hires and hype, tracked document by document. SP51/13/CO-02ACTIVE SpaceX Filed in 2013 as one promising contractor among several. The assessment has not aged equally. SP51/13/CO-03 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-03ACTIVE Blue Origin 342 words. In 2013, that was the entire public file on Jeff Bezos' rocket company. SP51/13/CO-04 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-04DEFUNCT XCOR Aerospace The Lynx was going to fly four times a day. It never flew once. SP51/13/CO-05 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-05ACQUIRED Orbital Sciences The other cargo contractor - the one that did everything right and disappeared anyway. SP51/13/CO-06 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-06REPURPOSED Stratolaunch Paul Allen's giant: built to launch rockets, outlived its founder, found a different job. SP51/13/CO-07 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-07DEFUNCT Reaction Engines Thirty-five years chasing the SABRE engine. The physics worked. The funding didn't. SP51/13/CO-08 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/CO-08ACTIVE Spaceport America A $200 million spaceport in the New Mexico desert, still waiting for its industry to show up. SP51/13/OR-01ACTIVE NASA Origins, the Shuttle programme entire, and the 1962 speech that started everything. SP51/13/OR-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/OR-02ACTIVE JAXA Japan's space agency - plus the small talking robot it sent to orbit. SP51/13/TE-01 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/TE-01CANCELLED VentureStar / X-33 The Shuttle's replacement that never was. Cancelled 2001; instructive forever. SP51/13/TE-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/TE-02CLASSIFIED US Air Force X-37B The one subject in this cabinet that was classified before we got the idea. SP51/13/TE-03 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/TE-03SUPERSEDED The Cost of Space Travel What a seat to space cost in 2013, and who was selling. Most of the sellers are gone. SP51/13/TE-04 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/TE-04TIME CAPSULE How to Get Hired by a Spaceline Career advice for an industry that was hiring like the future had already arrived. SP51/13/EV-01EVIDENCE Cosmonautics Museum, Moscow Thirty frames from the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. Shot on site, 2013. SP51/13/EV-02EVIDENCE Intrepid Museum, New York Thirty frames around Enterprise - the Shuttle that never flew to space.

SP51/26/NF-01 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-01ACTIVE Rocket Lab The company that actually became what the 2013 cohort promised to be. SP51/26/NF-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-02ACTIVE Firefly Aerospace First fully successful commercial Moon landing. No 2013 file ever earned that stamp. SP51/26/NF-03 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-03PRE-FLIGHT Relativity Space They bet a rocket factory on 3D printing - a bet this archive saw coming in 2013. SP51/26/NF-04 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-04PRE-FLIGHT Sierra Space Dream Chaser appears in this archive in 2013. It still hasn't flown. The file stays open. SP51/26/NF-05 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-05ACTIVE Axiom Space Building the ISS's replacement one module and one private crew at a time. SP51/26/NF-06 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-06WITHDRAWN Astra Proof that the boom-bust cycle survived into the new era intact. SP51/26/NF-07 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-07PRE-FLIGHT Stoke Space Trying to land the entire rocket - both stages, nothing thrown away. SP51/26/NF-08 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-08PRE-FLIGHT Vast The newest station builder, moving faster than anyone expected. SP51/26/NF-09 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/NF-09ACTIVE Impulse Space SpaceX's first hire left to build the part that comes after launch: the last-mile delivery van for orbit.

SP51/26/SA-01 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-01ACTIVE NASA The 2013 file asked who would succeed the Shuttle. The answer was a way of doing business, not a vehicle. SP51/13/OR-01ACTIVE NASA Origins, the Shuttle programme entire, and the 1962 speech that started everything. SP51/26/SA-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-02ACTIVE Roscosmos Every first in spaceflight has a Soviet name on it, which is exactly the problem. SP51/26/SA-03 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-03ACTIVE ESA It can land a probe on a comet half a billion kilometres away, and still cannot launch its own astronauts. SP51/26/SA-04 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-04ACTIVE CNSA The newcomer everyone underestimated, now the only nation with a new space station and racing for the next boots on the Moon. SP51/26/SA-05 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-05ACTIVE JAXA Small budgets, genuinely hard science, and a habit of getting the broken spacecraft home anyway. SP51/13/OR-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/13/OR-02ACTIVE JAXA Japan's space agency - plus the small talking robot it sent to orbit. SP51/26/SA-06 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/26/SA-06ACTIVE ISRO First try to Mars, first to the lunar south pole, cheaper than the movies - and the crew comes next. SP51/26/SA-07ACTIVE CSA It never built a rocket. It built the world's best robot arms instead, and traded them for a seat to the Moon.

SP51/OC-01 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/OC-01OPEN Mars Three ventures, one radiation problem, zero humans. The case stays open. SP51/OC-02 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/OC-02OPEN The Station Question The ISS retires around 2030. The succession is not settled. SP51/OC-03 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/OC-03OPEN The China File No archival documents exist. That is the finding. SP51/OC-04 NO VISUAL RECORD ON FILE SP51/OC-04OPEN Data Centres in Orbit A million-satellite plan, a trillion-dollar merger, one chip actually in orbit - and a physics problem nobody has solved yet.