NASA recently announced the astronauts who will be taking part in the Artemis missions, and among them is Anne McClain, who has spent 203 days in orbit and conducted two spacewalks on the ISS. With the space industry looking nothing like it did 10 years ago and new spacecraft and technologies on the rise, McClain share her thoughts about how she and other astronauts would be embracing the future.
Lt. Col. McClain’s time aboard the ISS spanned from December 2018 to June of 2019, meaning her ascent and descent were both aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsules, as astronauts have gotten to and from space since the Shuttle days. The Artemis missions, however, will use a variety of new launch vehicles and spacecraft. And while she didn’t get to fly a Dragon capsule, she did get to check one out while it was docked at the station.
“I was so happy to have flown the Soyuz, because it is such a reliable, basic spacecraft — it’s almost like flying a piece of history — knowing I was going to be able to compare that to other vehicles to in the future,” she said. “I had the opportunity when I was on Space Station when DM-1 flew. And so, being able to float into that and look at their screens, their monitors, you notice right away that the technology has advanced to where it looks like the inside of a commercial airliner.”
NASA 2021: Let’s Go To The Moon
Posted in space travel
In 2020, we persevered. Now with the blistering energy of the most powerful rocket ever built we step fearlessly into 2021. We will:
🌖🚀 Send the first NASA’s Artemis Program mission to the Moon.
🛰️🌌 Launch NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into space.
🔴🤖 Achieve a #CountdownToMars landing.
Let’s go: youtu.be/_fRSaLAEW2s
That’s a lot of ships. 😃
To achieve that ambitious goal, SpaceX could build one hundred Starships per year over the course of ten years. –“Building 100 Starships per year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons per year or maybe around 100000 people per Earth-Mars orbital sync,” Musk said in January. SpaceX would launch a Starship fleet approximately every 26 months, which is when Earth and Mars orbits align closer to each other.
Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 172020
You can watch SpaceX operations as they work to develop the Starship spacecraft at the South Texas facility in the video below, courtesy of LabPadre via YouTube. In the weeks ahead, SpaceX plans to continue preflight preparations of the Starship SN9 prototype that is awaiting at the launchpad. Meanwhile, teams at the assembly facility are manufacturing multiple vehicles that will also undergo testing next year.
Tesla will need a landing platform to catch the rocket as it lands. According to Elon Musk its to save mass/weight and speed up the rockets readiness for its next launch.
This is for Tesla’s reusable rocket program.
SpaceX aims to develop a fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle, capable of performing multiple flights per day. Musk shared that not adding landing legs to the Super Heavy rocket “Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour,” he said. When asked if the decision to eliminate the legs is due to the high stress the vehicle would experience upon landing Musk responded, “Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step,” he wrote via Twitter.
Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020
This is some real sci-fi stuff.
Beaming solar power from outer space sounds like a Marvel movie plot, but space could remove barriers to solar acceptance that dominate the Earthbound discourse.
Simulations rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts as the source of lunar magnetism, supporting the proposal that the ancient moon generated a core dynamo.
Today, the moon lacks a global magnetic field, but this wasn’t always the case. Spacecraft measurements of the moon’s crust and lunar rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions contain remnant magnetization that formed 4 to 3.5 billion years ago in a magnetic field comparable in strength to that of the Earth. Scientists have argued that the source of this was a dynamo — a magnetic field generated by the moon’s churning, molten, metal core. However, research indicates that the moon’s suspected small core may not have been able to generate enough energy to sustain the ancient magnetic field that planetary scientists have inferred from in its rocks.
In a recent Science Advances paper, research scientist Rona Oran and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences examined the plausibility of an alternative hypothesis that has been around since the 1980s that could produce the remnant magnetization in the lunar crust: transient plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, they describe some of their findings.
Like.
Rookie NASA astronaut Raja Chari — a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot — veteran physician-astronaut Tom Marshburn, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer have been assigned to fly to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship in the fall of 2021.
A fourth crew member will be added to the mission at a later date, following a review by NASA and its international partners, the U.S. space agency said in a Dec. 14 announcement.
Chari, Marshburn, Maurer, and the fourth crew member will launch on the third operational flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. The mission, designated Crew-3, will launch in the fall of 2021 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and last into the spring of 2022.
As astronauts get ready to go back to the moon and spend more time in space, they’ll need better gear to help them survive.