Blue Origin was selected to perform a Mars mission for NASA.
The U.S. space agency announced in a statement that it had contracted billionaire Jeff Bezos’ private space firm to launch a mission next year to study the magnetic field around Mars.
SpaceX is a big step closer to sending its giant Starship spacecraft into orbit, completing an engine-firing test at the launch pad on Thursday.
Thirty-one of the 33 first-stage booster engines ignited simultaneously for about 10 seconds in south Texas. The team turned off one engine before sending the firing command and another engine shut down — “but still enough engines to reach orbit!” tweeted SpaceX’s Elon Musk.
Musk estimates Starship’s first orbital test flight could occur as soon as March, if the test analyses and remaining preparations go well.
IRAS is a sometimes forgotten spacecraft that proved that infrared astronomy had a bright future.
Researchers at Kyoto University have joined forces with contractor Kajima Corp. to develop gravity-defying habitats required for use on the Moon and Mars, complete with their own transportation system.
The researcher’s ambitious idea also comes with a space train that is set to function like trains on Earth while at the same time generating artificial gravity.
#SpaceHabitat #Space #Gravity #SpaceTravel #SpaceTrain
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that he will present the long-awaited and often teased Master Plan 3 during the company’s investor day March 1.
Tesla’s investor day will be held at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin. The event will be live streamed. Some of the company’s institutional and retail investors will be invited to attend in person, according to the company. Investors will be able to see its production line and discuss topics like the company’s long-term expansion plans, generation 3 platform and capital allocation with its leadership team, according to the company.
Musk first hinted about the Master Plan 3 last March with vague goals to scale operations at Tesla to “extreme size.” He also leaned into themes like AI and noted that this next stage in the plan would include his other companies SpaceX and The Boring Company. Later in the year, Musk revealed more details about his Master Plan part three. Per a companywide meeting, the plan’s raison d’etre is: “How do you get to enough scale to actually shift the entire energy infrastructure of earth?”
Claudiu Stan of Rutgers University—Newark, New Jersey, and his colleagues were watching moving drops of supercooled water spontaneously freeze when they noticed something unexpected: drops kept suddenly disappearing. Initially they thought that the lost drops had shattered as they froze. But, on closer inspection, they found that the icy drops were still there, they had just moved out of view. The team has now developed a quantitative model for this behavior, attributing it to a rocket-like propulsion mechanism induced by the freezing process [1]. Stan says that the finding could inspire scientists to design self-propelled systems powered by such phase transitions.
The team’s results add to a growing body of work on self-propelled drops. The mechanisms behind such motion vary wildly, but Stan notes that they all involve symmetry breaking. For the freezing drops, this symmetry breaking arises when the ice nucleation starts off-center. When ice nucleates, the change in structure releases latent heat, causing the local evaporation rate to suddenly increase, and if the nucleation is off-center, this enhanced evaporation occurs unevenly over the drop’s surface. Like a rocket ejecting a propellant heated by a chemical reaction, this asymmetrical evaporation increases the drop’s momentum, with the team’s model predicting peak velocities of nearly 1 m/s.
Stan says that this propulsion mechanism has a unique feature that could make it attractive for applications: unlike most self-propelled particles, it requires no surfaces and no surrounding fluid (the experiments were done under vacuum). But, for him, the findings have another bonus: “I am a fan of space exploration, so it was exciting to realize that [we could] draw an analogy between these tiny droplets and rockets,” he says.
What does the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor look like?
“It looks like the future,” Stuart White, head of communications at Tokamak Energy, told Newsweek. “A spaceship. It’s extremely striking, powerful and exciting. You can’t take your eyes off it.”
Nuclear fusion is a technology that creates energy in the same way as the sun: it occurs when two atoms are thrust together with such force that they combine into a single, larger atom and release huge amounts of energy in the process.
“Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed.”
We may be just one month from seeing SpaceX attempt to fly Starship to orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed the launch attempt is likely just around the corner over the weekend when he wrote on Twitter, “if remaining tests go well, we will attempt a Starship launch next month.”
SpaceX readies for massive Starship milestone.
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