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Space Travel – Lifeboat News: The Blog – Page 191
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Category: space travel – Page 191

SpaceX Embarrassed NASA With Their High Tech SpaceSuit: Whether it’s science fiction or science fact with space as the backdrop, there is one thing that always catches the eye; the spacesuit. Indeed, we’re all familiar with the sense of excitement and inspiration when we see astronauts decked out in advanced spacesuits.

SpaceX being who they are has dropped a bomb in the form of a new spacesuit design, and it’s nothing like what NASA has ever done. What makes this advanced space suit so unique, that it’s obliterating what NASA has ever done? Join us as we explore every detail of the spacesuit.

The futuristic flight suits worn by Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken during last year’s Crew Dragon are a far cry from the bulky orange shuttle flight suits worn by astronauts when they last launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as well as any other spacesuit worn by astronauts from other countries.

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If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.

NASA and the nation’s top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a surface power system.

NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the by the end of the decade.

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But it might not be a success, warns Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s launch vehicle scheduled to take humans back to the Moon is expected to make its first orbital flight as early as January 2022.

Speaking in a video call at the fall meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceX is scheduled to carry out some tests in December, ahead of Starship’s first orbital flight in January, Business Insider reported.

The biggest launch vehicle built to date, SpaceX’s Starship consists of two parts, a first stage booster called Super Heavy and the actual spacecraft that gives it the name, Starship. Both these components are powered by SpaceX’s Raptor engines but differ in capacities. When finally ready, the Super Heavy is expected to have 33 Raptor engines while the spacecraft will have just six. Both components are designed to be reusable and are expected to play an important role in taking humankind to Moon, Mars, and even beyond, Space reported.

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For the first time, SpaceX has teamed up with researchers from NASA and several other US institutions to publicly discuss how it plans to use Starship to build Mars Base Alpha.

Save for a handful of comments spread around the periphery of SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s main focus, Starship itself, the company and its executives have almost never specifically discussed how the next-generation fully-reusable rocket will be used to create a permanent human presence on Mars. For the most part, that clear focus on near-term hurdles is hard to fault. Half a century of mostly theoretical analysis has made it abundantly clear that a permanent and sustainable extraterrestrial human outpost is impossible without a radical reduction in the cost of access to space. For decades, NASA has studied and studied and studied slight variations of a plan that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to send a few astronauts to Mars for a few months at a time.

Put simply, without a revolution in space transport, even a temporary presence on Mars where inhabitants are mostly dependent on imported goods is infeasible unless Mars exploration is made a national or international priority on the order of tens of billions of dollars per year. Over the 80–90 years that spaceflight has been seriously pondered, dozens of groups and papers and studies and space agencies have imagined what that revolution might look like and SpaceX is not unique for proposing a solution to that longstanding problem. However, SpaceX is the first of that long list of contenders to propose a solution and both invest significant resources and put hammer to metal in an attempt to make that vision real.

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And just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion — desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy — within a decade. “There’s a very good shot to get there within less than ten years,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s.

An emerging industry of nuclear-fusion firms promises to have commercial reactors ready in the next decade.

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On Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk outlined how the company’s under-development rocket will deliver a “high fly rate” of a dozen launches in 2022. This will enable the ship to deliver actual payloads in 2023 before moving on to more ambitious goals like sending humans to the Moon and Mars.

The comments, made at the joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy, outline how the stainless steel rocket taking shape in Texas will move from prototype curiosity to working ship.

It’s a project that could enable some of SpaceX’s most significant goals. First outlined in 2017 under the name “BFR,” the Starship is a stainless steel rocket that measures around 400 feet tall when paired with its Super Heavy booster. It’s fully reusable, designed to fly up to three times per day. It’s capable of sending up to 150 tons or 100 people into space at a time.

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The arrival of the second Orion European Service Module (ESM) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in October signified the beginning of months of final assembly of the first crewed Orion spacecraft that will fly four people on the Artemis 2 mission. Following the delivery of the ESM from prime contractor Airbus Defence and Space to Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin, the two primary elements of the Artemis 2 Orion Service Module are now being bolted together.

Lockheed Martin is processing Orion flight hardware for Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 as a part of their Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) in the Armstrong Operations and Checkout (O&C) Building at KSC. As they process the Artemis 2 Orion Crew and Service Modules to be mated next year, the ATLO team also received the next Crew Module (CM) pressure vessel and is also simultaneously beginning build-up of the Crew Module and Crew Module Adapter (CMA) structures for Artemis 3.

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