The biggest of the billionaire’s rockets could launch before school lets out in North America.
Category: space travel – Page 179
Blue Origin’s plan to launch a giant new rocket is unlikely to unfold this year. It leaves the spaceflight firm sticking with New Shepard tourist launches for the coming year.
Mikhail Kokorich is the founder of Destinus. This serial entrepreneur has been dubbed Russia’s Elon Musk by his public relations team. The Russian businessman says his business, Destinus, is developing a hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions transcontinental delivery drone that can travel at speeds up to Mach 15.
Destinus plans to combine the technological advancements from a spaceplane with the ordinary and straightforward physics from a glider to create a hyperplane that will meet the many demands of a hyper-connected world.
This hyperplane will use clean hydrogen fuel to transport cargo between Europe and Australia in mere hours. The hyperplane will be fully autonomous; it will take off from ordinary runways, traveling leisurely to the coast before accelerating to supersonic speeds.
SpaceX plans to send the Starship to orbit.
SpaceX is gearing up to launch the Starship into orbit, the biggest test yet for the ship designed to send humans to Mars and beyond.
Research On Humans Adapting, Living & Working In Space — Colonel (ret) Dr. Samantha Weeks, Ph.D., Polaris Dawn, Science & Research Director
Colonel (ret) Dr. Samantha “Combo” Weeks, Ph.D. is the Science & Research Director, of the Polaris Dawn Program (https://polarisprogram.com/dawn/), a planned private human spaceflight mission, operated by SpaceX on behalf of Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, planned to launch using the Crew Dragon capsule.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions in the Polaris Program (https://polarisprogram.com/), which endeavors to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities by demonstrating new technologies and conducting extensive scientific research to expand our knowledge of humans adapting, living and working in space. Much of this research also has purpose and applicability to improve life here on Earth.
Colonel Dr. Weeks, is a retired United States Air Force Colonel, with over 2,200 hours flying the F-15C, F-16, and T-38, including 105 combat hours. She commanded at the squadron, group, and wing level in the Air Force, and today also serves a corporate Vice President at the Shift4 Payments company, focusing on transformation and change management. Her position as Science & Research Director with Polaris comes after two and a half decades of focus on human performance in aviation.
Colonel Dr. Weeks has a BS in Biology from the United States Air Force Academy, a Masters in Human Relations from University of Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. in Military Strategy / Leadership from the United States Air Force, Air University.
Here’s some interesting news
Posted in space travel
For about 9 months, Elon has been suggesting that Booster 4 with Starship 20 on top of it would do the first orbital test of Starship.
The big question was how safe would it be to launch with 29 Raptor engines at once? A lot of people were talking about Russia’s N1 rocket which failed in all four attempts with its 31 engines, causing one of the world’s largest nonnuclear explosions and killing over a hundred people in the process. The most Raptor engines that have ever been static fire tested at once is 6. It would be very difficult to rebuild the Starship tower if it was destroyed. Easily ten times as hard as building another Starship and booster.
Note that using so many engines is not impossible. For example, the Falcon Heavy launches with 27 engines and all its launches have been successful so far. The problem is that the Raptor is the world’s first full-flow staged-combustion-cycle engine and SpaceX has not perfected it yet. For example, the only Starship which successfully landed from a medium-height test almost missed the landing pad and was on fire when it landed. (All other medium-height test Starships exploded, one before it even hit the ground.)
Anyway, today Elon admitted that there will never be an orbital test with Raptor engines and instead plans on doing a test with Raptor 2 engines in two months. This test will be with 33 Raptor 2 engines at once but those engines are considered to be much more stable and also more powerful which matters when you wish to make orbit. The current deal with Raptor 2 engines is they often explode when pushed to 250 tons of force, but work quite well at 230 tons of force. The cranky Raptor engines could do 185 tons of force.
This orbital test will be with a Starship that has 6 engines although Elon has said that eventually Starship will have 9 engines while the booster will have 33 engines.
@thesheetztweetz @QuiltyAnalytics First Starship orbital flight will be with Raptor 2 engines, as they are much more capable & reliable. 230 ton or ~500k lb thrust at sea level.
That’s over double the original expected launch cost.
NASA’s Space Launch System is supposed to ferry astronauts to the Moon, but at an estimated $4.1 billion per launch, it may be doomed before it ever gets off the ground.
The path back to the moon is long and fraught with danger, both in the real, physical sense and also in the contractual, legal sense. NASA, the agency sponsoring the largest government-backed lunar program, Artemis, has already been feeling the pain on the contractual end. Legal battles have delayed the development of a critical component of the Artemis program – the Human Landing System (HLS). But now, the ball has started rolling again, and a NASA manager recently reported the progress and future vision of this vital part of the mission to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers at a conference.
Kent Chojnacki is the manager of NASA’s Systems Engineering & Integration Office. He recently gave a presentation entitled Human Landing System. While it only ran to six content slides, he provided some more details into how the agency is arranging its work with future contractors developing the part of the Artemis program that will take astronauts down to the lunar surface.
Not only will it take astronauts down to the lunar surface, but the HLS will also serve as their home there – at least at the beginning of the Artemis program. Eventually, the astronauts will build their own homes on the lunar surface. But at least at first, it will have to be capable of carrying all the tools, equipment, and supplies needed to complete any individual Artemis mission.
The action is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT).
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The first mission in NASA’s Artemis moon program is set to roll out to the launch pad today (March 17).
More than 50 years after NASA landed the first humans on the moon with Apollo 11, the agency is gearing up to launch its next human lunar missions as part of the Artemis program. And the program’s first mission, Artemis 1, will take a big step toward launch today, when the mission’s rocket and spacecraft will roll out to the launch pad.