Five groups making private space flight a reality

From space tourism to cargo trips to human trips to Mars, these are five key players with the capital, determination, and vision to shape the new path to the final frontier. 

2. Orbital Sciences Corp.

Steve Helber/AP
Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket sits on the launch pad along the beach at the NASA facility on Wallops Island Va.

Less grandiose than its competitor, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences specializes in designing and manufacturing small to mid-size spacecraft for commercial clients and the US  government. Founded in 1982, this publicly-traded company based in Dulles, Va., launched the Pegasus rocket in 1990, the first space-launch vehicle to be funded entirely by private money. To date, Orbital has built “more than 560 launch vehicles and more than 170 satellites,” according to Space.com

In 2008, the company was awarded a $1.9 billion contract from NASA to take eight unmanned cargo missions to and from the International Space Station through 2016, making it the only other private company, aside from SpaceX, to receive such a contract. Its first cargo flight to the ISS was launched Jan. 9, 2014 using the Cygnus spacecraft and transporting 2,780 pounds.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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