In a press release issued today, a spokeswoman for ISA (International Space Agency) confirmed that ISA will be taking on the challenge of Mars in the coming months.
She had this to say: "It's obvious to ISA that there is a lot of competition in the commercial space exploration environment and with at least two other companies in the running to land on Mars we feel that ISA needs to be there at the forefront of exploration of this new frontier. Therefore, ISA is committed to landing a...

Overview:
The XR2-02 mission will see the XR-2 "Raven" launch from Ascension island, dock with the Arrow and travel to the moon where the XR-2 will land followed by the arrow.
This mission will test out basic arrow systems and handling as well as deploy a new lunar expedition crew and deploy the azure rover which will allow longer tranverses than previous expeditions have seen.
The arrow will...

(Note: Events in my Orbiter worldline are about a year behind the current date)

Yesterday the ISA (International Space Agency) completed the first commerical ISS visit and crew rotation using a wholly commerical built vessel for the trip.

Departing Ascension (wideawake) on July 1st, the day the contract for the ISA to provide NASA with some crew transport capabilites, an XR-2 class vessel named "Raven" launched to the ISS. Docking occured on flight day 3 after...

I've been running my own space programme within Orbiter for sometime now and I've been sticking to largely realistic vessels with the odd foray into the DG-IV for moon missions but I hit something of a snag as no vessels is powerful enough to loft the Cosmos addon.

So.. having a think about the best way to approach this I realised that by sticking to current hardware it really was an impossible task, modern day hardware just doesn't have the up mass, even using something like the Jupiter-IIIX...