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.
Preparations continued without a hitch over the weekend at Kennedy Space Center in Florida as NASA counted down to its second attempt to launch Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-114, currently scheduled for 10:39 a.m. EDT July 26.
While still trying to sort out precisely what happened to its Cosmos-1 solar sail spacecraft, the Planetary Society hopes to be able to build and launch another solar sail by the end of next year, according to Director Louis Friedman. "We're going to make plans to try and do Cosmos-1 again and to have another attempt at flying the first solar sail mission," Friedman told The DAILY. "We have a lot of ground spares and we could probably build a spacecraft fairly quickly ... maybe in a year."
Following the recent cancellation of NASA's Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, the upcoming Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is poised to play a larger role in relaying science data from future Mars missions back to Earth, according to program officials. Originally scheduled for launch in 2009, MTO was to have been the first spacecraft sent to another planet for the express purpose of relaying communications, marking the beginning of what NASA calls an "interplanetary Internet." The mission was canceled to free money for other priorities.
