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Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel. Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives...

The U.S. Defense Department has awarded a multimillion-dollar contract for a system that would knock threatening missiles out of the sky. A company called Aerojet Rocketdyne was awarded $19.6 million to develop “enabling technologies” for the system, which will be known as Glide Breaker, it said earlier this month. “Advancing hypersonic technology is a national security imperative,” Eileen Drake, Aerojet Rocketdyne CEO and president, said in a statement. “Our team is proud to apply our decades of experience developing hypersonic and missile propulsion technologies to the Glide Breaker program.” The Glide Breaker program is part of America’s efforts to counteract...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, working alongside Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, has demonstrated that it can successfully fire the AR-22 booster rocket engine 10 times over 240 hours. The test outcome marked a major step in the development of DARPA’s Phantom Express experimental spaceplane, officials said July 10. “We needed to show that main propulsion system, the AR-22, … could in fact support rapid turn operations,” said Scott Wierzbanowski, DARPA’s program manager for the spaceplane. “We were extremely successful. We completely destroyed previously held records of how … you deal with a liquid-hydrogen, liquid-oxygen-type engine.” The agency also proved...

ULA was formed in 2006 as a 50:50 joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that combined their existing expendable rocket fleet families – the Atlas V and Delta IV – under one roof. Who owns ULA is indeed of significance to all Americans – although most have never head of the company – because ULA holds a virtual monopoly on launches of vital US government national security payloads and the nation’s most critical super secret spy satellites that safeguard our national defense 24/7. ULA’s rocket fleet also launched scores of NASA’s most valuable science satellites including the Curiosity Mars...

ULA was formed in 2006 as a 50:50 joint venture between aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing that combined their existing expendable rocket fleet families – the Atlas V and Delta IV – under one roof. According to Reuters, Aerojet Rocketdyne recently proffered a $2 billion cash offer to buy ULA from Lockheed Martin and Boeing. “Aerojet Rocketdyne board member Warren Lichtenstein, the chairman and chief executive of Steel Partners LLC, approached ULA President Tory Bruno and senior Lockheed and Boeing executives about the bid in early August,” sources told Reuters. ULA’s Bruno declined to comment on the story via...

Elon Musk isn’t afraid to shake things up, and he did so again with accusations that US defense contracts awarded to a competitor were the product of corruption. SpaceX, Musk’s orbital transport firm, has been competing for a major contract to put US Air Force satellites in orbit. With a dearth of private investment in space and the end of the US space shuttle program, SpaceX has quickly leapt to the fore of aerospace firms with the help of contracts from NASA to provide re-supply missions to the International Space Station and develop a manned spacecraft to fly astronauts there....