SpaceX has begun building a launchpad for its Starship rockets in Florida, CEO Elon Musk announced on Friday, as the company looks to add another location to launch the mammoth rocket that is in development.
“Construction of Starship orbital launch pad at the Cape has begun,” Musk said in a tweet.
Starship is the massive, next-generation rocket SpaceX is developing to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars.
Following October’s news that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight company planned to build its own commercial space station in low Earth orbit, NASA announced on Thursday it has selected the program for funding through a Space Act Agreement to further develop the station’s design. The funding is part of NASA’s Commercial LEO Development program, which aims to “develop a robust commercial space economy in LEO, including supporting the development of commercially owned and operated LEO destinations.”
“We are pleased that NASA supports the development of Orbital Reef, a revolutionary approach to making Earth orbit more accessible to diverse customers and industries,” Brent Sherwood, Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin, said in a prepared statement. The station would be an orbital “mixed-use space business park” that would offer any number of turnkey services as well as reduced operational costs for burgeoning low-g industries “in addition to meeting the ISS partners’ needs.”
Blue Origin is partnering with Sierra Space in this project with the former focusing on the architecture and infrastructure of the station — everything from its design and construction to managing lift logistics using the New Glenn heavy launch system — while the latter is tasked with developing the station’s LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment). Boeing is also helping out, designing the operations-maintenance-science module and leveraging its Starliner crew capsule. Genesis Engineering Solutions is involved as well. It’s working on a single person spacecraft that tourists and employees alike will be able to putter around in.
SpaceX launches, Tesla updates its terms and conditions, and Elon Musk sighs.
SpaceX launches NASA’s DART spacecraft with its Falcon 9 rocket, Tesla updates its terms and conditions for Full Self-Driving, and Elon Musk sighs about it.
NASA and the U.S. Dept. of Energy have come together to solicit design proposals for a nuclear reactor that will power Lunar and Martian exploration!
Over the next fifteen years, multiple space agencies and their commercial partners intend to mount crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. In addition to placing “footprints and flags” on these celestial bodies, there are plans to establish the infrastructure to allow for a long-term human presence. To meet these mission requirements and ensure astronaut safety, several technologies are currently being researched and developed.
At their core, these technologies are all about achieving self-sufficiency in terms of resources, materials, and energy. To ensure that these missions have all the energy they need to conduct operations, NASA is developing a Fission Surface Power (FSP) system that will provide a safe, efficient, and reliable electricity supply. In conjunction with solar cells, batteries, and fuel cells, this technology will allow for long-term missions to the Moon and Mars in the near future.
For NASA, having fission reactors for lunar surface operations is a vital part of the Artemis Program, which aims to create a program of “sustained lunar exploration.” This means infrastructure is required, like the Lunar Gateway (where spacecraft will dock and resupply) and the Artemis Base Camp on the surface, where astronauts will eat, exercise, and sleep when not conducting extravehicular activities (EVAs) – i.e., surface operations.
NASA’s Europa Clipper scientists are devising a variety of creative strategies to find active plumes when the spacecraft arrives at this moon of Jupiter in 2030, though they’re not relying on plumes to understand what’s going on inside Europa.
On Christmas Eve 1968, the first mission to the Moon changed how we view our home planet forever.
On Christmas Eve, three days after its launch, Apollo 8 reached its destination, successfully carrying humans closer to the Moon than ever before. Finally, the US had beaten the Soviets to a major lunar milestone.
It would have been possible for the crew to simply loop around the Moon and come straight back to Earth. But since the mission was running smoothly (bar a case of space sickness on the part of Commander Frank Borman), the order was given to enter lunar orbit.
The crew now had to fire the service module’s engine for exactly the right amount of time.
It will take a lot to get to Mars.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to send humans to Mars and beyond, but he may face a hurdle on Earth first.
Elon Musk thinks SpaceX needs to ramp up production of its next-generation Raptor engine soon or face potentially dire consequences, according to media reports.
Raptors will power Starship, the huge, fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Each Starship will need a lot of Raptors — 33 for the giant first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, and six for the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship.
Future predictions in 2019 are notoriously hard to make. What will life be like in 2050? Technology does not progress in a steady state, it accelerates.
And usually the technology advances faster than we can imagine it, let alone predict it. But still many predictions that were made in the past have turned out to be true, even though they were unimaginable at the time that the prediction was made.
In 1,865, Jules Verne, the author who wrote 20,000 leagues under the sea, and journey to the center of the earth, predicted that we would send people to the moon, and it would precisely 3 people, from of all places, Florida. And he even described weightlessness in space. He had no way to know 150 year ago how gravity would behave in space.
In 1909, Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the AC electrical system, predicted widespread use of personal wireless devices. This was over 100 years ago!
In 1987, the late Roger Ebert, famous movie critic, predicted video on demand dominating the entertainment industry. You have to remember, this was 30 years ago, a time when video cassette tapes were just getting popular.
What do these predictions have in common – they were all ridiculed at the time as foolish speculation. But of course, we now know that they were pretty much spot-on.
Let’s take a look at what I consider the top 10 most incredible predictions, from some of the world’s most renowned thinkers.
For scanning underground structures and caves. Maybe scanning buildings, and doing security stuff, but doors would be a problem. Also too loud, but would be a nice start point for an Ion Drive flight system.
By Jim Magill
Looking like a micro-sized version of the Death Star, the Dronut X1, which Boston-based start-up Cleo Robotics released for commercial use earlier this month, is the first professional-grade bi-rotor ducted-fan drone – a drone without exposed rotor blades – built to conduct inspections in close-quartered and hazardous environments.
Its unique design, featuring hidden propellers and rounded form, means the Dronut is collision-tolerant and can be operated near sensitive equipment, Cleo Robotics’ CEO and co-founder Omar Eleryan said in an interview.
