Briefs: Big flyby list; COMSTAC summary; Blue Origin flight count
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Included in the links is one to this summary of the recent COMSTAC (Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee) meeting held back in October: COMSTAC Meeting Minutes, 10/11/07. Unfortunately, most of the links in my earlier posting about this meeting are now broken.
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In this AST/FAA report - Quarterly Launch Report : 4th Quarter 2007 (pdf) - I see from the table in Figure 23 that Blue Origin had three flights "conducted under FAA experimental permits for the period of October 2006 to September 2007". The Nov. 13, 2006 flight is the one still displayed on their homepage. I thought they had one in December 2006 but according to this table they had additional permit flights only in March and April.
Note, however, that this does not include tethered flights. Armadillo, for example, has only two flights in the table for the period after X PRIZE Cup 2006 but they have said they had about 30 flights total, counting tethered ones, before XPC 2007. Goddard is a whole lot bigger than Pixel or Mod but I assume it is still possible to do hover tests with it under a big crane.
Jeff Bezos mentioned "several" flights during his recent TV interview. So he could be referring to 3 or to more than 3 flights since "several" is flexible that way. (Maybe they had permit flights in October and November but I've not heard of any recent NOTAM announcements.)


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