Archive for the ‘space travel’ category: Page 378
Oct 13, 2018
NASA Releases 4K Video Of The Moon Ending The Moon Landing Conspiracy
Posted by Mary Jain in category: space travel
A 4K video tour of the Earth’s moon has been released by NASA, showing off the surface in an extraordinary detail. The footage explores the features of the moon and it is stunning… collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft over a period of nine years, the footage is dubbed as “virtual tour of the moon” in a fascinating 4K detail.
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Oct 12, 2018
Air Force awards contracts for new rocket prototypes to United Launch Alliance, Northrup Grumman and Blue Origin
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: Elon Musk, military, space travel
United Launch Alliance, Northrup Grumman and Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, were awarded major Air Force contracts Wednesday totaling more than $2 billion to develop next-generation rockets capable of boosting high-value national security payloads into orbit.
Two of the new rockets will be selected in a second competition, providing assured access to space through the next decade and beyond. In a surprise to some observers, SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company founded by Elon Musk, was not among the latest winners in the Pentagon’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.
The Launch Service Agreements “will facilitate the development of three domestic launch system prototypes and enable the future competitive selection of two National Security Space launch service providers for future procurements, planned for no earlier than fiscal year 2020,” the Air Force said in a statement.
Oct 10, 2018
SpaceX Falcon9 Rocket Launch from San Diego
Posted by Alberto Lao in category: space travel
Oct 10, 2018
Air Force awards launch vehicle development contracts to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, ULA
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: security, space travel
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force announced on Wednesday it is awarding three contracts collectively worth about $2 billion to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and United Launch Alliance to develop launch system prototypes.
The funding is for the development of competing launch system prototypes geared toward launching national security payloads. Each company will receive an initial award of $181 million.
The Launch Service Agreements are for the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Northrop Grumman’s Omega and ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rockets. The awards are part of cost-sharing arrangements — known as Other Transaction Agreements — that the Air Force is signing with the three companies to ensure it has multiple competitors. The Air Force has committed through 2024 a total of $500 million in OTA funds for Blue Origin, $792 million for Northrop Grumman and $967 million for ULA. SpaceX previously received an LSA award but did not make the cut this time.
Oct 9, 2018
Bezos’s Blue Origin Will Build America’s Next Great Rocket Engine
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: space travel
Oct 9, 2018
Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will be in space ‘within weeks, not months’
Posted by Michael Lance in category: space travel
‘We will be in space with people not too long after that’
“We should be in space within weeks, not months. And then we will be in space with myself in months and not years,” the Virgin founder and CEO told CNBC on Tuesday.
“We will be in space with people not too long after that so we have got a very, very exciting couple of months ahead.”
Oct 7, 2018
Watch SpaceX attempt to land its Falcon 9 rocket on the California coast for the first time
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: drones, space travel
This evening, SpaceX is set to launch a used Falcon 9 rocket from California, a flight that will be followed by one of the company’s signature rocket landings. But this time around, SpaceX will attempt to land the vehicle on a concrete landing pad near the launch site — not a drone ship in the ocean. If successful, it’ll be the first time that the company does a ground landing on the West Coast.
Up until now, all of SpaceX’s ground landings have occurred out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the company’s busiest launch site. SpaceX has two landing pads there, and has managed to touch down 11 Falcon 9 rockets on them. And each time the company has attempted to land on land, it’s been a success.
Oct 7, 2018
AI Is Kicking Space Exploration into Hyperdrive—Here’s How
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: robotics/AI, space travel
Artificial intelligence in space exploration is gathering momentum. Over the coming years, new missions look likely to be turbo-charged by AI as we voyage to comets, moons, and planets and explore the possibilities of mining asteroids.
“AI is already a game-changer that has made scientific research and exploration much more efficient. We are not just talking about a doubling but about a multiple of ten,” Leopold Summerer, Head of the Advanced Concepts and Studies Office at ESA, said in an interview with Singularity Hub.
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Oct 6, 2018
New Horizons sets up for New Year’s flyby of Ultima Thule
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: space travel
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short engine burn on Oct. 3 to home in on the location and timing of its New Year’s flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule.
Word from the spacecraft that it had successfully performed the 3½-minute maneuver reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at around 10:20 p.m. EDThe maneuver slightly tweaked the spacecraft’s trajectory and bumped its speed by 2.1 meters per second – just about 4.6 miles per hour – keeping it on track to fly past Ultima (officially named 2014 MU69) at 12:33 am EST on Jan. 1, 2019.
“Thanks to this maneuver, we’re right down the middle of the pike and on time for the farthest exploration of worlds in history – more than a billion miles beyond Pluto,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. “It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Go New Horizons!”
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