We should be farther than this by now but it is a start.
It can soar at 4,000 mph—or five times the speed of sound.
Category: space travel – Page 348
This latest design has held to the present day; SpaceX is still shooting for a 387-foot-tall Starship-Super Heavy stack, with six Raptors on the spacecraft. The number of engines on Super Heavy could vary from flight to flight; Musk said the rocket has space for up to 37 Raptors, and each mission will probably require at least 24.
With the design nailed down, SpaceX plans to move fast. The company wants to reach Earth orbit with a Starship prototype in about six months. And people could start flying aboard the vehicle in the next year or so if the test program continues to go well, Musk said.
While Musk and SpaceX have been lauded by their ambitious push for a Starship capable of deep-space travel, the road has not always been smooth.
How Light Propulsion Will Work
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Like many new technologies, light propulsion was originally conceived as a tool of war and national defense. But the “Star Wars” missile defense system may eventually send rockets, rather than missile-destroying lasers, into space.
Elon Musk is doling out more and more details about SpaceX’s next Starship prototype ahead of his big presentation this weekend.
On Saturday (Sept. 28), Musk will reveal the latest design of Starship and Super Heavy, the reusable spaceship and rocket that SpaceX is developing to take people to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.
The case for a present-day ‘Starfleet Academy’ as a global, non-governmental hothouse incubator for space exploration.
SPACE agencies such as NASA and the ESA could theoretically one day travel the universe faster than the speed of light after one expert revealed that warp drive technology could be possible.
It’s hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device.
Push a button, press a petal, and that fancy drive system – whose workings no one can explain – will send us to another location in space-time.
However, in recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.
Tourists could fly from Britain to Australia in just four hours by the 2030s with a new hypersonic engine being developed by UK scientists, the head of the UK Space Agency has said.
Reaction Engines, who are based in Oxfordshire, are in the process of building a hybrid hydrogen air-breathing rocket that will allow a plane to fly at Mach 5.4 — more than twice the speed of Concorde — then speed up to to Mach 25 in space.
Not only would the new ‘Sabre’ engine allow speedier journeys — with a flight between London and New York slashed to just over an hour — but the hydrogen/oxygen engine would be far greener and cheaper than current air travel.
Into the deep
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There is never a dull day for participants of the CAVES campaign, ESA’s field training adventure that hones the communication, problem solving and teamwork skills an international crew will need to explore the tough, uncharted terrain of the Moon and Mars.
This week six astronauts turned ‘cavenauts’ from five space agencies headed underground in Slovenia, where they are currently living and working for the week. To keep the element of exploration, astronauts themselves do not know the exact location.
The goal is to run scientific experiments while managing the psychological toll of being in an extreme environment with a multinational crew.