Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a “giant party balloon” to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.

If anyone else proposed this idea they would be ignored, but Elon Musk lately has a way of turning crazy ideas into reality.

It was just in 2012 that SpaceX launched and landed its first rocket and now the company is doing it with rockets significantly larger. And then early this year SpaceX made a surprise announcement that it would attempt to use a high-speed boat and large net to catch part of rocket. And it worked after a failed first attempt.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house” »

The NEXT-C ion propulsion engine has successfully completed a Critical Design Review conducted by NASA and is planned for use on the agency’s 2021 DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission. With the CDR finished, the next step in the process should be the production of actual flight units.

NEXT-C stands for NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster-Commercial and was developed by the space agency and commercialized by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

“Serving as the primary propulsion source for DART, NEXT-C will establish a precedent for future use of electric propulsion to enable ambitious future science missions,” said Eileen Drake, CEO and President of Aerojet Rocketdyne via a company-issued release. “Electric propulsion reduces overall mission cost without sacrificing reliability or mission success.”

Continue reading “NEXT-C electric propulsion engine poised for production” »

We’re so close to getting (back) to the Moon, we can practically taste it. Let’s face it, the Moon is really cool, from it’s highlands down to its massive crater basins. Even Donald Trump is entranced, and has directed NASA to get us back there.

Well today, NASA’s got a little something to wet our whistle. Its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission has been closely examining the Moon’s surface since June 2009, and has been beaming fascinating footage of our only natural satellite back to Earth since then.

Continue reading “Go On A 4K Joyride Around The Moon, Courtesy of NASA” »

A new look at the moon via 4-k video fly-throughs from LRO data and imaging. The finale is a drop down to Taurus-Littrow to see a highly magnified image of the…Apollo 17 LM descent stage. Stunning! #NASA #Apollo #LunarReconnaissanceOrbiter #moon https://www.space.com/40274-nasa-moon-in-4k-video-tour.html…

Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) are not only helping planners with future human missions to the moon, but they are also revealing new information about the moon’s evolution and structure.

A new NASA video, posted on YouTube, features more than half a dozen locations of interest in stunning 4K resolution, much of it courtesy of LRO data. NASA also highlighted the individual sites in a Tumblr post that delves deeper into their geology, morphology and significance.

Continue reading “This NASA Video Tour of the Moon in 4K Is Simply Breathtaking” »

Russia is actively implementing a lunar program through 2030, aiming to send astronauts to the moon, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, Russia’s Cosmonautics Day.

Putin said “yes” to the question “We are going to fly to the moon, right?” when he visited the Space Pavilion at the all-Russian Center of Achievements of the National Economy, according to the Kremlin.

The value of Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. keeps reaching new heights.

Very interesting.

Vostok (Russian for ‘East’) was a Soviet human spaceflight project that developed the Vostok spacecraft which was used to place the first human in space.

The first manned US spacecraft was Mercury, which was first launched in suborbital flights on Redstone rockets and then in orbital missions on Atlas launchers.

Continue reading “Timeline of early spaceflights” »

SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell says the company will put humans on Mars within a decade because we need a backup planet.

Texas-based NanoRacks is fine-tuning and rebranding its concept for turning upper-stage rocket boosters into orbital outposts, starting with a habitat called Independence-1.