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Category: space travel – Page 197

It’s a cool concept; the blades cant get caught, or stuck, or broken. but, it’s pretty loud, there’s no audio in the demo videos. Still, i think a flying drone would be superior for exploring underground structurers and caves, til it hit a door or something anyways. Anyhow, i think the flight system should focus on some kind of a total silence ion drive.

It was three years ago that we first heard about the Cleo, a robust, donut-shaped prototype drone made by Cleo Robotics. Well, its successor is now commercially available, under the new (and apt) name of the Dronut X1.

Like its predecessor, the Dronut X1 features just two counter-rotating rotors stacked one above the other. While we have seen other drones that take this approach, Cleo Robotics goes the extra step of enclosing those rotors within a composite ducted body. This means that they can’t harm bystanders, nor can they be harmed when bumping into obstacles such as walls.

According to the company, the X1 is designed for applications such as inspection and reconnaissance within cramped and/or GPS-denied environments. It’s Wi-Fi-controlled via a joystick remote and an Android app, although it can autonomously hold its position, and it can avoid obstacles with some help from an onboard 3D LiDAR sensor. Steering is managed through a proprietary thrust vectoring system.

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SpaceX is determined to send people to Mars by 2024. But what will they do after reaching Mars? What’s their plan for the red planet? It’s quite normal for us to ask such questions. In this article, we will find the answers to these inquiries.

Billionaire Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the vision of colonizing Mars. SpaceX is already building the next-generation spacecraft Starship to make his dream real. This company has a plan to send uncrewed missions to Mars within 2022 by the Starship and crewed missions within 2024.

But landing on Mars is not the ultimate goal of SpaceX. They aim to build a permanent settlement for humans on the planet. We can understand that living on Mars is not going to be easy for us because it’s not our natural habitat.

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SpaceX has aced its first operational interplanetary launch, sending NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft on its way out of the Earth-Moon system as part of the world’s first planetary defense mission.

Right on time, SpaceX’s flight-proven Falcon 9 booster lifted off at 10:21 pm PST with an expendable upper stage, new fairing, and the ~630 kg (~1400 lb) DART spacecraft in tow, reaching a nominal low Earth parking orbit about eight minutes later. A few seconds after the second stage’s first engine cutoff (SECO-1), booster B1063 safely landed on drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY), wrapping up its third orbital-class launch and spaceflight in twelve months.

Around 28 minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9’s orbital second stage fired up for the second and final time. In just 53 seconds, Falcon 9’s upper stage accelerated from a stable velocity (relative to Earth’s surface) of 7.5 kilometers per second (4.7 mi/s) to almost 11.1 km/s (6.9 mi/s), sending DART (and itself) from low Earth orbit (LEO) to an Earth escape trajectory that will ultimately leave them in orbit around the sun.

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If we knew that a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) was headed for Earth could we deflect it?

Seeking to find out is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a mission from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to smash a 500kg spacecraft into binary asteroid 65,803 Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos (also called, rather cutely, “Didymoon.”)

The idea is that by creating a “kinetic deflection” on Dimorphos it will ever so slightly change the trajectory of both objects.

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And it could halve the transit time to Mars.

Pulsar Fusion Ltd., a nuclear fusion company based in the United Kingdom, has recently designed and successfully tested its first launch-capable, high-power chemical rocket engine.

From launching people and payloads into space, this engine could have numerous applications, but the company’s ultimate goal is to develop a hyper-speed propulsion engine using nuclear fusion technologies for interplanetary travel, with the first prototype expected in 2025.

And when this dream comes into fruition, it could cut the journey time to Mars in half.

The goal: Nuclear fusion-powered engines The company is one of just a few in the world aiming to develop hyper-speed propulsion engines based on nuclear fusion technology. The static test which saw the engine fired into full thrust to measure performance took place on November 17 and 18, 2021 at the Ministry of Defence military base in Salisbury, as seen in the video below, which was released on Sunday.

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After raising $1.4 billion.

Long ago, the writer Edward Albee wrote: “Good, better, best, bested.”

On a long enough timeline, this might reflect the experience of every major space firm.

Since the federal government ruled in favor of NASA’s decision to opt for SpaceX’s bid to design and deploy a Human Landing System (HLS) to the moon, it’s seemed like Elon Musk and his firm will have the lion’s share of public-private collaborations for lunar missions, and beyond. But in the coming decade, contestants for this role are lining up.

Beyond Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which lost a lawsuit against NASA regarding Musk’s contract with the agency, there are other aerospace firms with their eyes on the prize. And one of them, called Sierra Space, just took a major leap toward a rivaling position in Space Race 2.0, raising $1.4 billion to, among other things, modify its Dream Catcher space vehicle for human crews, with aims to land on Mars, and “enable humanity to build and sustain thriving civilizations beyond Earth,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice, in a press release from his company.

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Continue reading “A New Challenger for Elon Musk? Another Company Plans to Settle Humans on Mars” | >

The feat drew the attention of Musk.

On Saturday, Astra announced via Twitter that its LV0007 mission reached orbit from the Astra Spaceport in Kodiak, Alaska. The rocket, which carried a payload for the United States Space Force, took off at 1:16 a.m. Eastern time. The feat earned the praise of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who wrote on Twitter: “Congrats! Orbit is not easy.”

The milestone means Astra is one of a handful of private companies to successfully develop an orbital rocket. Following the launch Astra declared itself “the first rocket company to reach orbit in less than five years.”

The company was founded in 2016 and launched its first two rockets to suborbital space in 2018. Astra didn’t exit stealth mode until February 2020, and TechCrunch noted that it was referred to as “Stealth Space Company” before its big reveal.

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