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Category: space travel – Page 113

Elon Musk said the private space firm has “a real shot at late February” for the orbital launch of Starship.

We might finally see SpaceX’s Starship soar to orbit next month. SpaceX’s orbital launch of its fully reusable Starship rocket is arguably the most exciting upcoming space mission of the year. And we may not have to wait very long to see it take to the skies.

Starship could fly to orbit for the first time as soon as late February, though March is more likely, according to an update from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk via Twitter.

Elon Musk: “We have a real shot at late February”

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The new modification was made following a coolant leak in a Russian Soyuz rocket attached to the International Space Station.

NASA modified the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance capsule, which is currently attached to the International Space Station (ISS).

The crew capsule now features another seat and can carry one more NASA astronaut than was originally intended, a NASA blog post reveals.

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Through a $57 million contract with NASA, ICON, a company out of Austin, is working to do just that. ICON wants to put a broad spectrum of infrastructure on the moon, which isn’t the easiest place to build.

“First of all, you need to be able to protect the astronauts from the lunar environment which is really a nasty place to live and work. Vacuumed environment, extreme temperature swings, radiation environment, micro-meteoroids, dust protection,” Clinton said. “To produce things like landing pads and roads and blast shields and shelters and habitats.”

Clinton says ICON will now work to build a 3D printing robotic arm that will be sent to the moon to do the construction but can be controlled from Earth.

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Will the supersonic Dream Chaser soon be competing with Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the space-tourism race? That’s the plan—eventually.

Sierra Space is developing the Dream Chaser as the world’s “first and only winged commercial spaceplane.” The aircraft is designed to take off atop a rocket, and then return to Earth on its own wings, landing itself much as the original space shuttle designs.

The radical spaceplane will use New Mexico’s Spaceport America as part of a global network for takeoff and landing with “high-value” payloads.

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The first launch of SpaceX’s massive rocket, called Starship, could be coming soon. The company shared a series of photos highlighting the vehicle’s progress ahead of its highly anticipated test flight.

Starship consists of two major components: a massive first-stage booster called the “Super Heavy” and an upper stage known as “Starship.” In typical SpaceX fashion, both aspects of the craft are designed to be fully reusable.

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A SpaceX Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft has safely returned to Earth after delivering several tons of NASA supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).

A little over six weeks after Falcon 9 launched SpaceX’s 26th Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS2) mission for NASA, Dragon departed the ISS on January 9th. Efficiently lowering its orbit with several small Draco thrusters took about 36 hours, and reusable Dragon 2 capsule C211 eventually slowed to the point that it began impacting Earth’s atmosphere. Using its ablative heat shield like a brake pad, Dragon slowed from a velocity of 7.5 kilometers per second (16,800 mph) to about 155 meters per second (~350 mph) before beginning parachute deployment.

At 5:19 am on January 11th, the Dragon capsule gently splashed down off the coast of Tampa, Florida, and was quickly secured by a SpaceX recovery ship. Once onboard, the capsule was opened up, and cargo fresh from orbit was loaded onto a helicopter as quickly as possible. That system – primarily created to rapidly transport astronauts back to NASA medical facilities – also means that scientists can get access to their recovered ISS experiments just a handful of hours after Cargo Dragon splashes down.

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A researcher at Tohoku University has made significant improvements to a high-power electrodeless plasma.

Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. It was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir in the 1920s.

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