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Category: space travel – Page 311

In a rare instance of some connection to reality, a European Union commissioner overseeing the space industry has acknowledged the elephant in the room, admitting that SpaceX has changed the game for commercial rockets and that the upcoming Ariane 6 rocket may already be outdated.

While slight, European Commissioner Thierry Breton expressed some level of urgency, stating that “SpaceX has redefined the standards for launchers.” “Ariane 6 is a necessary step, but not the ultimate aim: we must start thinking now about Ariane 7.” Ariane 6 is a new European Space Agency (ESA) rocket designed to replace the existing Ariane 5 workhorse and do some while cutting costs. However, the vehicle’s design and the strategy behind it were fixed in place before SpaceX began to routinely demonstrate Falcon 9 reusability, effectively creating a rocket optimized for a market that ceased to exist soon after.

Based on the economically infeasible design decision to build a hybrid first stage with a liquid core and add-on solid rocket boosters (SRBs), as well as the structurally inefficient use of hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant for the booster, Ariane 6 is designed to compete with the likes of the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Delta IV, Atlas V, and upcoming Vulcan rockets. Despite several years of halfhearted, half-baked attempts to even consider making parts of Ariane 6 reusable, the rocket will be 100% expendable come its first (and likely last) launches.

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NASA astronauts got a “pretty awesome” view of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle docked with the International Space Station during a spacewalk on Friday (June 29).

Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Bob Behnken got the view of a lifetime when they stepped outside the space station to replace the outpost’s old solar array batteries. The star of that view was Endeavour, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that delivered Behnken and his fellow NASA astronaut Doug Hurley to the station May 30 on their Demo-2 mission.

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Canada is marching forward with its international partners to establish a permanent research installation near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway.

As it did for the Shuttle and Station programs before, the Canadian Space Agency, via a partnership with MacDonald, Dettwiler, and Associates, Inc., will build the next-generation robotic system: Canadarm3.

This smart robotic system will be Canada’s contribution to the US-led Lunar Gateway station for the Artemis Program, the next major international collaboration in human space exploration — which forms the cornerstone of Canadian space strategy.

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NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy on Saturday tweeted a cool shot showing SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule, seen to the right of the picture, looks tiny alongside the enormous space station, but its interior is actually large enough for a human to perform something close to a somersault.

Cassidy captured the image during Friday’s spacewalk with fellow astronaut Bob Behnken. The outing involved ongoing work to upgrade power systems on the space station, swapping old nickel-hydrogen batteries for new lithium-ion batteries. The batteries store power gathered from the station’s main solar arrays and the new ones will provide an improved and more efficient power capacity for the orbiting outpost.

Cassidy later tweeted a couple of other shots from the spacewalk, one a “space selfie” and another taken shortly after the pair returned to the inside of the ISS.

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