Country’s first Mars orbiter will launch later this year

MAVEN PREPARED: NASA’s next Mars spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., being prepared for its November launch aboard at Atlas V -401 rocket. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) spacecraft was flown to Kennedy on Aug. 2 from Buckley AFB, Colo., near Lockheed Martin’s facility in Littleton, where it was built.

Boeing’s 702 Small Platform electric satellite series has cleared its critical design review, permitting the first spacecraft to move into the assembly phase and remain on schedule for launch in the first quarter of 2015.

Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver, who has been a policy lightning rod at agency headquarters as the Obama administration worked to shift U.S. human spaceflight from a government-run operation to a commercial venture, has resigned to take a job as general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot, the agency’s No. 3 manager and top-ranking civil servant, is a likely possibility to fill Garver’s post on an acting basis until the White House can nominate another political appointee.

Says can handle high pressure as well as the low temperatures

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) expect to greet the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s HTV-4 early Aug. 9, following the unmanned cargo resupply spacecraft’s successful weekend liftoff from the Tanageshima Launch Center.

WGS WINDOW: The U.S. Air Force is anticipating a launch window for its sixth Boeing Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) spacecraft of 49 min. starting at 8:29 a.m. EDT Aug. 7. The satellite, which will provide high-bandwidth data and voice communications for U.S. and Australian forces, will be lofted by a United Launch Alliance Delta IV with four solid-rocket motors and a 5-meter fairing, from Cape Canaveral.WGS-6 is the final “Block 2” standard satellite, which includes a bypass to allow for quick transfer of video data collected by unmanned aircraft.

FALCON FLIGHT: Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is set to launch three Canadian-built C-band Earth-observation radar satellites for MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates under a “launch reservation contract” awarded to the Hawthorne, Calif.-based launch service provider July 30. Funded by the Canadian Space Agency, the Radarsat Constellation Mission is designed to continue the C-band dataset of earlier Radarsats with as many as four daily passes over Canadian territory and “several” passes a day over the Northwest Passage.