Lifeboat Foundation

Spaceflight is hard. Blasting heavy cargo, spacecraft, and maybe people to respectable speeds over interplanetary distances requires an amount of propellant too massive for current rockets to haul into the void. That is, unless you have an engine that can generate thrust without fuel.

It sounds impossible, but scientists at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories have been building and testing just such a thing. Called an EmDrive, the physics-defying contraption ostensibly produces thrust simply by bouncing microwaves around inside a closed, cone-shaped cavity, no fuel required.

The device last made headlines in late 2016 when a leaked study reported the results of the latest round of NASA testing. Now, independent researchers in Germany have built their own EmDrive, with the goal of testing innovative propulsion concepts and determining whether their seeming success is real or an artifact.

It’s been almost 42 years since NASA sent its two Voyager spacecraft on record-breaking missions, and both of the decades-old robots are still alive. Voyager 1 and 2 are 13.5 billion and 11.1 billion miles from Earth, respectively, and it’s up to NASA engineers to ensure they remain up and running for as long as possible.

As the agency reveals in a new update, mission managers recently decided to shut down one of the heaters on Voyager 2 which is designed to keep its cosmic ray subsystem (CRS) instrument at a comfortable temperature. This was done to conserve energy, but the CRS itself miraculously still works, despite dipping well below the temperatures it was tested at over four decades ago.

The cause of a SpaceX explosion that resulted in the destruction of a crew capsule and sent orange smoke into Space Coast skies has been pinpointed, the spaceflight company confirmed Monday.

Just 100 milliseconds before an uncrewed Crew Dragon capsule fired its eight SuperDraco thrusters during a test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on April 20, the capsule exploded, leaving Landing Zone 1 littered with fire, debris and chemicals. The cause, SpaceX said, was traced down in recent weeks to a reaction between a liquid oxidizer – nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO – and a titanium check valve, which caused an ignition and the subsequent explosion.

According to accident investigators, a component allowed nitrogen tetroxide to leak into the spacecraft’s pressurization system tubes well before testing began. When the pressurization system activated and attempted to simulate a firing of the SuperDraco thrusters, a “slug” of the NTO that had leaked into the tubes was blasted through at high speed, resulting in ignition with the titanium valve.

Tuesday marks 50 years since three men in space suits set off on the greatest scientific adventure of all time. As the astronauts of Apollo 11 headed to the moon, the women of NASA were blazing new trails on Earth. “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell has their story.

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Continue reading “Meet the women behind NASA’s historic Apollo 11 launch” »

Fifty years ago on July 16, 1969, a three-man crew launched into space from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

The idea of propelling rockets and spaceships using the power of the atom is nothing new: the Manhattan Project in the mid-1940s as well as countless endeavours by NASA in the following decades all explored the possibility of using fission-based reactions to provide lift-off thrust. Today, progress made in controlled nuclear fusion has opened a new world of possibilities.

Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, has “aspirational” plans to launch people to Mars in 2024 and ultimately colonize the red planet.

To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space.

SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019.

On the evening of July 12th, SpaceX technicians put Starhopper’s freshly-installed Raptor – serial number 06 (SN06) – through a simple but decidedly entertaining test, effectively wiggling the engine in circles.

Designed to verify that Raptor’s thrust vectoring capabilities are in order and ensure that Starhopper and the engine are properly communicating, the wiggle test is a small but critical part of pre-flight acceptance and a good indicator that the low-fidelity Starship prototype is nearing its first hover test(s). Roughly 48 hours after a successful series of wiggles, Starhopper and Raptor proceeded into the next stage of pre-flight acceptance, likely the final more step before a tethered static fire.

Routine for all Falcon rockets, SpaceX’s exceptionally rigorous practice of static firing all hardware at least once (and often several times) before launch has unsurprisingly held firm as the company proceeds towards integrated Starhopper and Starship flight tests. Despite the fact that Raptor SN06 completed a static fire as recently July 10th, SpaceX will very likely put Starhopper and its newly-installed Raptor through yet another pre-flight static fire, perhaps its fourth or fifth test this month.

We’ve come a long, long way since the U.S. first launched fruit flies into space in 1947. Since then, we’ve sent astronauts to the moon, installed an International Space Station in orbit and landed spacecraft on Mars. In the past couple of decades, private corporations such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have joined the fray and will likely play instrumental roles in aerospace engineering and space exploration. Here’s a look at some major advancements we’ve made in spacecraft technology and space exploration milestones over the past seven decades.