Forever intrigued by attempting the impossible, we’ve made traveling faster than the speed of light a staple of our works of science fiction. Most science fiction stories feature some way of getting from point A to point B faster than light, whether it’s via activating the warp drive or jumping into hyperspace.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) is gearing up for a critical test firing of its next-generation rocket after a recent fueling check, and it could happen as soon as this week.
On Monday morning (May 22), Bruno stated on Twitter that the company’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket was returning to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Now that the rocket is back at the pad, Vulcan’s static fire test (in which the rocket’s engines are ignited while it remains on the ground) could happen any day. “We are targeting as soon as tomorrow for the Flight Readiness Firing,” a representative from ULA told Space.com on Tuesday (May 23), “but it will depend on range availability.” On Wednesday (March 24), ULA CEO Tory Bruno intimated on Twitter that the test could happen as soon as Thursday (March 25).
Virgin Galactic has released a video introducing the public to the pilots who fly the company’s VSS Unity space plane, which is gearing up for its final test flight.
The suborbital flight, known as Unity 25, is set to take off on Thursday (May 25) and will be the final step on Virgin Galactic’s long journey to realizing commercial space flight.
Elon Musk is bucking a billionaire trend. He says he doesn’t plan to hand over his companies, which include Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, to his kids.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying four private astronauts arrived at the International Space Station early Monday (May 22) after a record-setting trip to the orbiting laboratory.
The Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday (May 21), kicking off the private Ax-2 mission to the orbiting lab for Axiom Space. It linked up with the station a day later at 9:12 a.m. EDT (1312 GMT) as both spacecraft sailed 262 miles above the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Japan.
On Friday, May 19, SpaceX released a 20-second video demonstrating that it is already conducting tests on technology aimed at fortifying the ground beneath its enormous Starship rocket’s orbital launch pad. The launch pad, situated at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, endured significant damage during the inaugural test flight of a fully-integrated Starship vehicle on April 20. During the test flight, the sheer power of the Super Heavy rocket’s 33 Raptor engines created a substantial crater beneath the pad. As a result, chunks of shattered concrete were sent soaring through the air.
SpaceX founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk shared that SpaceX is actively developing a solution to mitigate such damage. He said that they plan to build “a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.” The footage of the test shows a methane-fueled Raptor engine ignited with its beam hitting a steel-plate and a massive stream of water. “One hell of a plasma beam!” said Musk when he shared the video via Twitter, shown below. A single Raptor V2 engine is capable of generating around 230 tons of thrust. Engineers must build a strong structure that could support such intense power, collectively, all 33 Raptor engines generate over 17 million pounds of thrust!
Regarding launch pad modifications –“We’re going to put down a lot of steel” under the launch tower before the next Starship flight with a water flame diverter system, Musk said during a Subscriber-only Twitter Spaces discussion on April 29. “We certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the concrete under the launch pad during the flight test, he said (pictured below). He speculates that the crater was caused due to “compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked.”
It’s the second mission chartered by the Houston company Axiom Space. Aboard will be a veteran NASA astronaut, two Saudis and an American entrepreneur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR5TiVn5PYk
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SpaceX is already testing tech that could strengthen the ground beneath its giant Starship rocket’s orbital launch pad, a new video shows.
That pad, at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, took a beating during the first-ever test flight of a fully stacked Starship vehicle — the most powerful rocket ever built — on April 20.
