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.
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.
Most of the proceeds from his $16.4 billion in Tesla stock sales since November 8 will go to pay an estimated $11 billion federal tax bill, leaving him with more than $5 billion to do whatever he sees fit.
Lockheed’s Star Clipper was a proposed Earth-to-orbit spaceplane based on a large lifting body spacecraft and a wrap-around drop tank. Originally proposed during a USAF program in 1966, the basic Star Clipper concept lived on during the early years of the NASA Space Shuttle program, and as that project evolved, in a variety of new versions like the LS-200.
The LS-200 was very similar to the earlier version, it was smaller overall, The M-1 engines were replaced with the Space Shuttle Main Engines.
As we approach the new year, there’s always talk of new trends. One such trend that finally kicked off in 2021 and will undoubtedly gain momentum in 2022 is space tourism. By mid-2021, two private companies — Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin — launched paying customers to space.
While we haven’t yet gotten commercial space stations or moon vacations, space tourism is definitely here to stay — and will have some exciting developments in 2022.
One of the great criticisms of space tourism is its cost; it’s prohibitively expensive for most people and thus feels inaccessible. In fact, there are ways to bring space into your life in 2022 — even if you’re not taking yourself to space (or the edge of it). Here are five ways to experience space tourism in the coming year, from budget-friendly to budget blow-out.
For a low-cost, accessible, outdoors, and distance-friendly way to bring more space into your life in 2022, consider attending a dark sky festival. Many of these events were canceled in 2020 and/or 2021, but some great dark sky destinations have figured out how to have safe outdoor under-the-star experiences.
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British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has become the first spaceline to get the go-ahead from the FAA to take up space tourists — a huge milestone in recreational spaceflight.
Space tourists: For decades, only governments could afford to launch people into space, but thanks to reusable rockets and other advances, spaceflight is now cheaper than ever.
That’s led to a burgeoning space tourism industry, with dozens of companies looking to take people on recreational trips into space — or at least the edge of it.
It’s hard to overemphasize how far computers have come and how they have transformed just about every aspect of our lives. From rudimentary devices like toasters to cutting-edge devices like spacecrafts, you’ll be hard pressed not to find these devices making use of some form of computing capability.
Having launched 31 orbital Falcon 9 missions and four suborbital Starship tests, 2021 was the most active year for SpaceX to date. These launches included a number of new reuse records, including flying a booster for the eleventh time, flying the same booster twice in under a month, flying a fairing half for the fifth time, and setting a turnaround record for Dragon.
Falcon 9 Boosters
2021 brought only two new Falcon 9s into the fleet: B1067 and B1069, which first flew on the CRS-22 and CRS-24 missions, respectively. All of the other 29 Falcon 9 missions were flown on flight-proven boosters. These flights included the first eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh flight of a first stage, meeting and surpassing CEO Elon Musk’s stated goal to fly a Falcon 9 first stage 10 times without major refurbishment.
NASA announced that James Webb telescope course corrections used less fuel than expected, which means Webb can expect to work for more than 10 years.
And as NASA announced Wednesday morning, Webb may get to peer deep into the universe for even longer than expected: Webb used less of its limited supply of propellant during two course-correction thruster burns after launch than expected, and the space agency says it should have enough left over to enable operations “significantly” longer than the expected 10-year mission.
The James Webb just deployed another important instrument — the aft momentum flap — that will keep the telescope steady as it makes its groundbreaking observations.
On December 25th, 2021, astronomers and space exploration enthusiasts got the greatest Christmas present of all! After years of delays, cost overruns, and additional testing, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. In what was a real nail-biter, the Ariane 5 rocket and its precious payload reached orbit without a hitch. But as is so often the case, the deployment of the JWST was just the first in a series of “hurry up and wait” episodes.
Typically, periods of waiting are seeing are accompanied by plenty of worry and doubt. Luckily, there have been several positive developments since the JWST launched that could help alleviate these anxieties. The latest is how the telescope successfully deployed its aft momentum flap, an instrument that will keep the telescope oriented during its mission. The news was announced yesterday (December 30th) via @NASAWebb, NASA’s official Twitter account for the Webb telescope, and the JWST page at NASA Blogs.
According to NASA Blogs, the deployment of the aft momentum flap began at 09:00 AM EST (06:00 AM PST) and lasted about eight minutes. During this time, the mission team released the flap’s hold-down devices while a spring brought the flap into its final position. The purpose of this flap is to maintain the observatory’s orientation to minimize the fuel engineers will need to make corrective adjustments throughout the mission.
