The launch was expected to encounter many technical and engineering challenges, including simplified procedures for pre-launch testing, the rocking motion of the ship and heat dissipation in a confined space.
China has become the first nation to fully own and operate a floating launch platform for its space missions.
The most remote location on Earth has many names: It’s called Point Nemo (Latin for ‘no one’) and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.
The spot is about 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from any spot of land — and the perfect place to dump dead or dying spacecraft, which is why it’s home to what NASA calls its “spacecraft cemetery.”
“It’s in the Pacific Ocean and is pretty much the farthest place from any human civilisation you can find,” NASA said.
Continue reading “There’s a Hidden Spacecraft Dump Deep in The Ocean — Here’s What’s Down There” »
The idea of traveling to another star system has been the dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a dream. While theoretical concepts have been proposed, the issues of cost, travel time and fuel remain highly problematic.
A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University’s Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.
Continue reading “Using black holes to conquer space: The halo drive” »
What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” — to propel ships to the stars.
It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.
Continue reading “Black Hole Drive Could Power Future Starships” »
Over the years NASA have conducted a huge number of highly ambitious projects with the goal of the perfection of space travel but their latest project may be the most extraordinary yet.
In a seismically isolated room in the Johnson Space Center, researchers from the space agency are working with an electric field that they are trying to manipulate in such a way that it could literally bend the fabric of space and time. The researchers believe that if they are successful then they could theoretically begin work on interstellar space travel that would allow craft to fly faster than the speed of light. But is this really possible?
Continue reading “NASA’s Warp Drive Changes Everything… Including Time And Space” »
At its re: Mars conference, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage today to be “interviewed” by Jenny Freshwater, Amazon’s director of forecasting. As any AWS machine learning tool could have forecasted, having an employee interview her boss didn’t lead to any challenging questions or especially illuminating answers, but Bezos did get a chance to talk about a variety of topics, ranging from business advice to his plans for Blue Origin.
We can safely ignore the business advice, given that Amazon’s principle of “disagree and commit” is about as well known as it could be, but his comments about Blue Origin, his plans for moon exploration and its relationship to startups were quite interesting.
He noted that we now know so much more about the moon than ever before, including that it does provide a number of resources that make it a good base for further space exploration. “The reason we need to go to space is to save the Earth,” he said. “We are going to grow this civilization — and I’m talking about something that our grandchildren will work on — and their grandchildren. This isn’t something that this generation is able to accomplish. But we need to move heavy industry off Earth.”
Continue reading “Jeff Bezos wants to build the infrastructure for space startups” »
Those padded walls will help in low gravity, no doubt, and in the crew capsule, all six people get a window seat. “You’ll listen to the countdown and then feel the engine ignite and rumble under you as you climb through the atmosphere,” reads a description from Blue Origin. The capsule is 530 cubic feet.
The first crewed Blue Origin flight will simply reach the edge of space — a landmark called the Kármán Line — and then return. This the company’s reusable suborbital flight system, will launch the crew capsule to its destination before it descends to Earth, landing softly in the Texas dirt, thanks to parachutes. Blue Origin is also working on a heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to reach Earth orbit, called New Glenn, but that’s unlikely to fly before 2020.
The video — seen above — was shot by an Amazon representative and sent to Inverse. There’s no denying, it looks remarkably comfortable.
Continue reading “Jeff Bezos’ Space Firm Debuts Video of Cushy Space Tourist Capsule” »
