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Category: space travel – Page 179

But the catch function still needs some work.

Elon Musk has posted the first glimpse of the company’s famous tower that will not only launch SpaceX’s next rocket but also help in catching it as it returns back to Earth. He shared the drone footage of the tower with his followers on Twitter on Sunday.

SpaceX’s Starship is probably one of the company’s riskiest projects. While the success of the rocket can send humans to the Moon and beyond, its failure or even delays in its deployment might cause the company to go into bankruptcy. As Musk had told employees last year, Starship must get firing and launch commercial missions by 2022.

Helping it launch frequently is a nifty design trick that SpaceX is attempting and the launch and catch tower is critical to executing it. Unlike the Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX reuses by landing it back on Earth, Starship’s Heavy Booster rocket does not have landing legs.

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Continue reading “Elon Musk Shared the Drone Footage of Starship’s Launch and Catch Tower” | >

We’re moving past the bottleneck of available space launches.

The bottleneck nature of space launches is beginning to change.

In the last several years, the unprecedented growth of public-private partnerships has transformed space travel into an irresistible investment opportunity. “Since July last year we’ve had about a dozen millionaires take selfies in space,” said Tess Hatch, a partner with Bessemer Venture Partners (BvP), during a CES 2022 keynote attended by Interesting Engineering.

But there’s more to the budding space economy than tourism, alone. In fact, despite the outsized attention focused on billionaires and millionaires going to space, the vast majority is already going to support a much wider spectrum.

Continue reading “A New Wave of Space Companies Is Coming. Can It Help Life on Earth?” | >

NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, slated for take off as soon as this March, aims to send an Orion spacecraft around the moon. The cabin will be largely empty, save for an a interactive tablet that has been dubbed “Callisto,” which will sit propped up to face an astronaut mannequin. Callisto is essentially a touch-screen device that features reconfigured versions of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, and Cisco’s teleconferencing platform WebEx.

Among the many aspects that will be closely watched on the ground — at least by the group behind this Alexa experiment — is how the virtual assistant performs in space. And if nothing else, it’ll be some well-placed advertising.

It’s all part of a collaboration between Amazon, (AMZN) Cisco (CSCO) 0, and Lockheed Martin (LMT) 0, which built the Orion capsule for NASA. Lockheed approached the other two companies with the idea of developing a virtual assistant about three years ago, the companies said, and they are paying the full cost of including the virtual assistant on the Artemis 1 mission. Lockheed is also reimbursing NASA for any help the agency has lent on this project through an arrangement called a Space Act Agreement, which allows the space agency to be compensated for expertise or resources it gives to companies working on certain space-related projects.

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Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them.

About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier elements. While hydrogen remains the most pervasive element in the Universe, it can be difficult to detect individual clouds of hydrogen gas in the interstellar medium (ISM).

This makes it difficult to research the early phases of star formation, which would offer clues about the evolution of galaxies and the cosmos.

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Planet-spotting is all about perspective.

From where we stand in our orbit of the Sun the closest planet to us, Venus, will come to what astronomers call inferior conjunction on Sunday, January 9.

After over six months of shining brightly in the west in the post-sunset sky in its apparition as the “Evening Star,” on that day Venus will finally disappear from sight.… See more.

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It looks like Elon is putting more of his money into SpaceX. This makes sense as he has tons of money and SpaceX seems to have more growth potential than Tesla because his Starlink and Starship will both be very hard for other companies to compete against. (Just the amount of capital it would take to make competing products is staggering.)

I’m not saying that Tesla won’t be worth $10 trillion one day, I’m just saying SpaceX has more growth potential. Elon seems to agree.

What’s Elon Musk doing with the billions he’s collected in the past two months from selling shares in Tesla?

It seems possible, maybe even likely, that he’s put at least some of the money into SpaceX, the other company of which he is CEO and primary shareholder.

Continue reading “The curious story of Elon Musk’s Tesla stock sales and SpaceX’s fundraising” | >