While Earthdwellers cast their eyes to Mars this week and waited for news from NASA's Curiosity, lots of action took place closer to home, where the commercial space market has seen progress from every direction. We've rounded up a short summary of what happened back on the home planet.

Chasing dreams

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft team held its Program Implementation Plan Review in Colorado this week, the first milestone in its CCiCap list. CCiCap is phase 3 of NASA's Commercial Crew vehicle development program, intended to foster commercial rides to the International Space Station for NASA astronauts. Passing that first milestone was worth $30M to Sierra Nevada. It advances the company toward the first drop test and free flight of the Dream Chaser Engineering Test Article, a version of the craft specifically built for testing, in November.

According to NASA's Dream Chaser Technical Manager Cheryl McPhillips, Sierra Nevada has two safety review milestones coming as part of its CCiCap program, then an integrated system baseline review, then ultimately a critical design review toward the end of the program. Sierra Nevada also has optional milestones, but they were redacted in the information released thus far.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden has said that the program set out for Sierra Nevada, as a winner of a partial funding allocation in this phase of Commercial Crew, attempts to retire all of Dream Chaser's technical risk. Presumably that strategy will make it much easier later on for the company to quickly complete the vehicle and use it to bid on crew transportation to and from the International Space Station.

Returning to orbit

SpaceX completed its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transport Services) agreement this week with a certification from NASA, clearing the way for SPX-1, its first standard cargo flight to the International Space Station (the earlier flight was a test loaded with non-critical supplies). SpaceX Cargo Resupply Services flights, at $133M, will cost far less than deliveries launched by Russia, Japan, or the European Space Agency.

The next flight has been bumped into early October by another rocket launch, and won't be sent off before October 8 at 8:12pm. Wet dress rehearsals (loading up the rocket with propellants on the stand and staging countdowns) should begin within the next week.

Beyond the mandatory food and clean underwear, SPX-1 will carry 15 experiments for NASA's Student Spaceflights Experiment Program. The SSEP formerly offered students in grades 5-14 an opportunity to fly an experiment aboard the Space Shuttle, but it has since shifted to the International Space Station.

Aiming for Antares

Orbital Sciences was also slated to fly its Antares rocket for the first time in early October, but there's no word yet on whether the traffic jam that's holding up SpaceX will bump them again. Antares is Orbital's COTS vehicle and a competitor of SpaceX's Falcon. It has been delayed several times due to launchpad construction at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia. If all goes well, Antares will carry a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to orbit on its second flight, in a few months, in a test very similar to the one performed by the SpaceX Dragon earlier in the year, when it rendezvoused with the International Space Station.

The Antares rocket has been waiting patiently since last month in its processing facility at MARS. Orbital chose MARS partially to avoid range issues at Kennedy Space Center in Florida—if there are conflicts with the SpaceX flight from Kennedy, it would only be due to a shortage of NASA personnel to help manage both flights. This sort of personnel shortage shouldn't be a major issue for the next few years, but it might be more of a problem in the future. ISS is beginning to look like it will stay in orbit until at least 2028, and more space stations are on the way, so there may be a busy launch schedule at both ranges in the future.

Short of orbit

XCOR Aerospace announced this week that it will build a new spacecraft factory in Brevard County, Florida, to build its Lynx 2-person suborbital spacecraft. Lynx takes off and lands horizontally and requires a runway, which in Florida means the Shuttle's landing strip at Kennedy Space Center.

The factory may soak up some aerospace workers laid off when the Shuttle was retired. XCOR hopes to hire as many as 150 people by 2018, depending on what sort of traffic it gets for its $95,000 suborbital spaceflights. XCOR is also hoping to move into orbital flights in the next several years, and they have several projects in development with other aerospace manufacturers. Testing of those vehicles will be done in a new facility to be constructed in Midland, Texas, while production will be done on the Space Coast.

XCOR's Lynx 2-person suborbital spacecraft is slated to fly from several locations, including Mojave, California, the Caribbean island of Curaçao, and possibly Dubai or Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates has looked at a spaceport that will host flights from both the Lynx and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two, XCOR's prime competitor at $200,000 per flight.

There's already competition in the suborbital space tourism market, and the flights haven't started yet.