SpaceX’s initial design for its $2.9 billion NASA Human Landing System (HLS) ship to land astronauts on the Moon is revealed.
Category: space travel – Page 27
SpaceX will attempt to transfer propellant from one orbiting Starship to another as early as next March, a technical milestone that will pave the way for an uncrewed landing demonstration of a Starship on the moon, a NASA official said this week.
Much has been made of Starship’s potential to transform the commercial space industry, but NASA is also hanging its hopes that the vehicle will return humans to the moon under the Artemis program. The space agency awarded the company a $4.05 billion contract for two human-rated Starship vehicles, with the upper stage (also called Starship) landing astronauts on the surface of the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. The crewed landing is currently scheduled for September 2026.
Kent Chojnacki, deputy manager of NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program, provided more detail on exactly how the agency is working with the space company as it looks toward that critical mission in an interview with Spaceflight Now. It will come as no surprise that NASA is paying close attention to Starship’s test campaign, which has notched five launches so far.
To prepare for NASAs 31st SpaceX commercial resupply mission, four crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will relocate the SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft to a new docking port on Sunday, November 3.
Live coverage will begin at 6:15 a.m. EST on NASA+ and continue through docking completion. NASA content can also be accessed through various platforms, including social media.
At 6:35 a.m., NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, will undock the spacecraft from the forward-facing port of the ISS Harmony module. By 7:18 a.m., they plan to redock it at the module’s space-facing port.
Coverage of the NASA/SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon Relocation from the forward port of the Harmony module at the International Space Station to the zenith port (Hague, Gorbunov, Williams, Wilmore; undocking scheduled at 6:35 a.m. EST, redocking scheduled at 7:18 a.m. EST)
NASA reconnected with Voyager 1, 15 billion miles away, after a sudden shutdown. Engineers face challenges maintaining this 47-year-old spacecraft’s interstellar mission.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 9:29 p.m. EST, Monday, Nov. 4, for the next launch to deliver science investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. This is the 31st SpaceX commercial resupply services mission to the orbital laboratory for the agency.
Filled with nearly 6,000 pounds of supplies, a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Live launch coverage will begin at 9:10 p.m. on NASA+ and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
BEIJING, Oct 29 — A Chinese aerospace company has completed a successful test flight of a prototype for a supersonic commercial transport plane that aims to travel at Mach 4, which is twice as fast as the retired Concorde.
Beijing-based Space Transportation, also known as Lingkong Tianxing Technology, announced on Sunday that its Yunxing prototype had flown successfully the day before.
In a report by South China Morning Post, the company said it plans to conduct an additional assessment of its engine technology in November.
Solar cells could be printed out like newspapers after Australia’s leading science organisation opened a $6.8 million facility dedicated to flexible solar technology.
The CSIRO launched its state-of-the-art Printed Photovoltaic Facility in south-east Melbourne on Wednesday, following more than 15 years of research into the renewable energy technology.
Researchers said printed, flexible photovoltaic cells could not only lower the cost of solar energy but could be used to deliver power in challenging areas such as space exploration, defence and disaster recovery.
NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade—but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip.
This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half the time.
Nuclear fission involves harvesting the incredible amount of energy released when an atom is split by a neutron. This reaction is known as a fission reaction. Fission technology is well established in power generation and nuclear-powered submarines, and its application to drive or power a rocket could one day give NASA a faster, more powerful alternative to chemically driven rockets.
A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved. In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.