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Category: space travel – Page 406

Can Tesla survive without Elon Musk? If he is banned from CEO or director positions or being a board member what will the impact to SpaceX be?

Tesla without Elon Musk at the wheel? To many of the electric car maker’s customers and investors that would be unthinkable. But that’s what government securities regulators now want to see.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked a federal court to oust Musk as Tesla’s chairman and CEO, alleging he committed securities fraud with false statements about plans to take the company private.

The agency says in a complaint filed Thursday that Musk falsely claimed in an Aug. 7 statement on Twitter that funding had been secured for Tesla Inc. to go private at $420 per share, a substantial premium over the stock price at the time.

Continue reading “Tesla without Musk at the wheel? That’s what the SEC wants” | >

Welcome to Edition 1.19 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news this week about the development of rocket engines in the United States, South Korea, and elsewhere. There are also milestones for the Ariane 5 rocket and an anniversary for SpaceX.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and, if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

SpaceX hits 10 years since the Falcon 1. In an in-depth feature, Ars recounts the harrowing eight weeks following the failed third flight of the Falcon 1 rocket and the finally successful fourth flight. “If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist,” Elon Musk recalled. “That was a very tough launch emotionally.” Shortly after the Falcon 1 launch, SpaceX intensified work on developing its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

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Humanity could have an outpost on Mars just a decade from now, Elon Musk said.

Musk’s company SpaceX is building a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship duo called the BFR to help our species explore and settle Earth’s moon, Mars and other worlds throughout the solar system.

The billionaire entrepreneur’s long-term vision involves the establishment of a million-person city on the Red Planet in the next 50 to 100 years. But we could get the founding infrastructure of such a settlement — an outpost Musk calls Mars Base Alpha — up and running much sooner than that, he said. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond].

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A Japanese startup called Ispace is shooting for the moon, and SpaceX is going to help. The company wants to lead the charge in the search for large water ice deposits on the lunar surface, and it has two missions planned to make it happen. Both missions, currently slated for 2020 and 2021, will fly on SpaceX rockets.

Ispace was among the companies competing for the Google-backed Lunar Xprize — it funded the Japanese “Hakuto” team. That challenge to land a rover on the moon dragged on for years as the list of competitors dwindled until the last team failed to secure a place aboard an Indian rocket. Ispace didn’t make it that far, but it was in the final five. Google declined to extend the cash prizes (totaling $25 million) in March of this year after pushing back the deadline several times as teams struggled to get their robots launched.

Ispace isn’t letting that failure bog it down. The first of its two planned lunar missions will consist of an orbital module. The second will be more ambitious with a pair of rovers going all the way to the surface. These are mainly technology demonstration missions rather than true ice scavengers, though.

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Speaking in a September 7th interview with French newspaper Courrier International, Dr. Francis Rocard – director of French space agency CNES’ solar system exploration program – had little good to say about SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s long-term ambitions in space, going so far as to question the CEO’s driving ethics and label the company’s next-generation rocket and propulsion system “science-fiction”.

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Just how valuable is that stretch of space between Earth and the moon’s orbit? Might this celestial real estate become hot property as an extension of military arenas in low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit?

Given forecasts of 21st-century activity on and around the moon by both private and government entities, could this be an economic area of development that needs protection in sthe years and decades to come? [In Photos: President Donald Trump and NASA].

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At the same time as the hardware for SpaceX’s first BFR spaceship is entering the early stages of manufacturing, the company’s South Texas test facility is slowly taking shape after more than 18 months of what can be fairly described as hibernation.

The likeliest location for a near-future spaceship test stand or pad has also experienced a comparatively vast influx of construction workers and general activity that began earlier this month September, nearly two and half years after SpaceX began preparing the unstable coastal wetland with the addition of several hundred tons of soil.

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Elon Musk has provided several new, rare, and telling glimpses into how his rocket company, SpaceX, is building a spacecraft to reach Mars.

On September 17, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon on the company’s Big Falcon Rocket or BFR. During that event, Musk showed off new renderings of the launch system, along with a few photos of the work going on inside SpaceX’s spaceship-building tent at the Port of Los Angeles.

These were the first new details about SpaceX’s rocket construction we’d gotten since April, when Musk posted a photo that revealed SpaceX was building the spacecraft using a 40-foot-long, 30-foot-wide cylindrical tool.

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