NASA is prepping for a trip to the nearby three-star Alpha Centauri system—in 2069.
That’s my kind of advanced planning.
The mission, first announced by New Scientist, would include a 44-year-long expedition to an exoplanet in search of signs of life. Assuming NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) can figure out how to travel at a tenth of the speed of light.
SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket, made up of two previously-flown Falcon 9 boosters and a beefed up central core stage, made the trip to launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was raised vertical Thursday for testing ahead of its first liftoff next month.
The fully-assembled 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket will be the most powerful in the world when it blasts off, and Thursday’s arrival atop pad 39A marks a major step toward readying the Falcon Heavy for flight.
SpaceX engineers are expected to conduct a fit check and complete other tests at pad 39A this week, followed by a hold-down firing of all 27 first stage engines some time after New Year’s Day. The company has not set a target date for the Falcon Heavy’s first liftoff, but officials say the launch is targeted in January, some time after the hold-down hotfire test.
SpaceX plans to replace of all their current rockets by the early 2020s with the BFR. Tooling for the main tanks has been ordered and a facility to build the vehicles is under construction; construction of the first BFR is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2018. SpaceX has the aspirational goal for initial Mars-bound cargo flights of BFR launching as early as 2022, followed by the first crewed BFR flight one synodic period later, in 2024. Serious development of the BFR began in 2017.
Testing of the BFR is expected to begin with short suborbital hops of the full-scale ship, likely to just a few hundred kilometers altitude and lateral distance.
We were recently visited by a traveler from outside our solar system. This is the first time we’ve ever seen an object that came to us from interstellar space. It’s name is ‘Oumuamua. Check out http://curiositystream.com/spacetime
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Previous Episode:
Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series.
In this Space Time Journal Club we look into the origins of ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid visiting us from beyond our solar system! We’ll focus on the results of:
“The origin of interstellar asteroidal objects like 1I/2017 U1”
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has awarded $1.85M contract to the University of Waterloo for the Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat) mission.
The QEYSSat mission was one of two projects cited in the 2017 budget when it was unveiled in March of this year. In April, the government sent Innovation Science and Economic Development (ISED) Minister Navdeep Bains to the CSA’s headquarters to formally announce the funding for the QEYSSat mission along with funding for a radar instrument that will be developed for a future orbiter mission to Mars and to announce the Canadian CubeSat Project. The $80.9M of funding would be over five years.
A short history of the QEYSSat mission.
A bold plan to rev up off-Earth manufacturing is about to get a big test.
A small, privately built machine designed to make optical fiber is launching toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule tomorrow (Dec. 12).
If all goes according to plan, this little factory — which is owned by California-based startup Made In Space — will churn out stuff that’s good enough to sell here on Earth, opening up space to greater commercial use. [3D Printing: 10 Ways It Could Transform Space Travel].
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his space venture, Blue Origin, launched the latest version of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship today for the company’s first test flight in 14 months, with an instrumented test dummy seated aboard.
“He had a great ride,” Bezos said tonight in a tweet.
