Tranquility is officially attached to the International space station! I stayed up last night watching Canada Arm2 slowly arc from the Endeavor's payload bay to the common berthing mechanism on Node 1. Beautiful stuff.
In other wondrous news. SpaceX has now moved all the necessary pieces of the Falcon 9 puzzle to the cape launch complex 40. Let the assembly begin. The inaugural launch should be showing up on a monitor near you (and hopefully me) sometime in the next 1 to 4 months. I wish they could be a little more specific. Actually they are. They report launch 1 - 3 months after hardware integration is complete, but they completely neglect to project how long that integration might take.
In the mean time head over to Russel Blink's Photo stream on flickr an see if you can figure out just what Armadillo Aerospace is up to with it's trusty pixel craft. From the looks of it, they have modified the craft from an alcohol / lox rocket to a methane / lox configuration. The give-away is the new application of insulation on all four propellant tanks. Methane is cryogenic. Alcohol is not. They also added more robust landing gear. My assumption is that Armadillo is under contract with NASA to demonstrate a methane powered lander and is looking to pixel to fulfill that requirement while they use their modular vehicles for in-house differential throttling and multi-engine work.
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