ALBION, MI — Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last person to step foot on the Moon more than five decades ago. In 2025, someone new will take his place.
The NASA Artemis mission aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, as well as explore more of the lunar surface.
A pair of Albion College professors are participating in the mission’s research into the origins and evolution of the Moon, college officials said.
Being developed at NASA, the Chatbot will allow astronauts converse with their spacecraft, also allowing mission controllers to converse with AI robots.
Image credit: NASA
To mark International Women in Engineering Day (INWED), prime STEM employer Northrop Grumman celebrated some of its women engineers like Sally Richardson, Jill Eskew and Erica Sandoval who are Defining Possible for the next generation, and helping put the first woman on the Moon.
Musk says the Super Heavy/Starship rocket may be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit in about six weeks.
SpaceX will need another six weeks or so to finish implementing hundreds of changes to its Super Heavy-Starship rocket and the gargantuan booster’s Texas launch pad before it will be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit, company founder Elon Musk said Saturday.
That’s assuming Federal Aviation Administration clearance to fly in the wake of the Super Heavy’s dramatic maiden launch April 20 in which the rocket blew itself up after multiple engine failures and the Starship upper stage’s failure to separate from the first stage booster.
In a Twitter Spaces discussion with author Ashlee Vance, Musk said SpaceX is implementing “well over a thousand” changes,” and “I think the probability of this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60 percent. It depends on how well we do at stage separation.”
The European Space Agency said on Wednesday its space telescope Euclid is scheduled to launch on July 1, blasting off on a mission to shed light on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with the broadcast beginning at 1,430 GMT, the ESA said in a tweet.
Euclid was originally planned to ride into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but last year Moscow withdrew its launchers in response to sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.
If we connect SpaceX Starships for space stations and rotate them for artificial gravity then we have to make sure they are rotationally stable.
A Space Station with three SpaceX Starships with one in the center for docking is not rotationally stable. A two SpaceX Starship system is rotationally stable. The central structure for docking that is balanced when rotating.
There is some debate on how many people could fit inside SpaceX Starships that are converted into Space Stations. We can get a better maximum estimate by looking at the Apollo mission and German and American submarines.
Apollo’s Command Module had a diameter of 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) and a height of 11.4 feet (3.47 meters). Total dry weight was 12,787 pounds (5,800 kg) and its crew cabin volume was 218 cubic feet (6.17 cubic meters). This held three astronauts for about one week. If one were to pack Astronauts with Apollo standards then 400 could fit into the 1,000 cubic meters of the SpaceX Starship. Tripling the space given for each Starship Astronaut would still leave room for 150.
Type VII U-boats were the most common type of German World War II U-boat. They were notorious for being cramped. They had about 800 cubic meters of volume and a lot of the space was for torpedos, fuel and engines. They could hold a crew of about 52.
The company opened the first fundraiser August 4, saying at the time that the funds “would be used for general corporate purposes, including working capital, general and administrative matters, development of its spaceship fleet and other infrastructure to scale its commercial operations.”
Virgin Galactic had cash and securities totaling $874 million at the end of the first quarter, it reported in May.
The company has a single carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, and one spacecraft, VSS Unity, which it has said can conduct flights as frequently as once a month.
Four volunteers are about to enter a simulated Mars habitat where they’ll spend the next 378 days as part of ongoing preparations for the first crewed mission to the faraway planet.
The specially designed, enclosed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will host Alyssa Shannon, Ross Brockwell, Kelly Haston, and Nathan Jones from Sunday, June 25. The team’s experience spans science, engineering, and health, and each member will use their specific skills during their stay.
The mission will be the first of three one-year Mars surface simulations, called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog).
