The first commercial flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy ended with two boosters touching down on land while a third alighted on its drone ship out at sea.
Read more
Category: space travel – Page 388
On April 13, the crew had already traveled 200,000 miles away from Earth when one of the oxygen tanks exploded, forcing them to abort the mission and head back, fighting for their own survival.
You may be familiar with the immortal line “Houston, we have a problem,” which was supposedly uttered by Lovell in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.” Actually, the real quote was “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and it was Swigert who said it.
Read more
Scientists have taken a major step towards creating an aircraft of the future, one powered by an ion drive rather than using moving parts and fuel like conventional aircraft.
In a paper published today in Nature, a team led by Steven Barrett from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described how they created a so-called electroaerodynamic-powered plane, one that uses solid-state propulsion, meaning no propellers or jet engines with expendable fuel.
“The future of flight shouldn’t be things with propellers and turbines,” Barrett says in the video below. “[It] should be more like what you see in Star Trek, with a kind of blue glow and something that silently glides through the air.”
Read more
If Beresheet succeeds, Israel will become just the fourth nation to land a spacecraft softly on the moon, following the Soviet Union, the United States and China.
Beresheet is currently orbiting the moon and remains on an “excellent” track, said its operators, the nonprofit group SpaceIL and the company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Read more
Japan’s space agency wants to create a moon base with the help of robots that can work autonomously, with little human supervision.
The project, which has racked up three years of research so far, is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the construction company Kajima Corp., and three Japanese universities: Shibaura Institute of Technology, The University of Electro-Communications and Kyoto University.
Recently, the collaboration did an experiment on automated construction at the Kajima Seisho Experiment Site in Odawara (central Japan).
Read more
