Tag: space

Blue Origin has successful New Shepard launch.

Meanwhile, in real engineering…

Blue Origin completed another test flight of its New Shepard vehicle April 14, putting the company on the verge of finally flying people.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle lifted off from the company’s West Texas test site, known as Launch Site One by the company, at 12:51 p.m. Eastern. The capsule, separating from its booster after the powered phase of flight, reached a peak altitude of about 106 kilometers before parachuting to a soft landing 10 and a half minutes after liftoff, three minutes after the booster made a powered landing.

Video here. New Shepard’s close enough to a rocketship to make me smile: as they say, it goes up on a pillar of fire and comes down on a pillar of fire, just like God and Bob Heinlein intended. If only they didn’t have to pop off the top every time… oh, well, it’s early days yet.

SpaceX grinds satellite deployment.

They launched Falcon 9 to put another sixty satellites in orbit for SpaceX’s full-coverage internet Starlink project. Fun fact: there’s a thousand up there by now (out of a projected forty thousand). Another fun fact: that’s the ninth time the company used that booster.

I may be happier about this than the ongoing work on a no-fooling rocketship. The tests of their heavy rockets are genuinely exciting and fascinating, yes. No argument there. But this stuff with the Falcons is what’s going to end up making space a hell of a lot cheaper to exploit. And I’m very happy that somebody’s doing the tedious work involved.

Tweet of the Day, On To The Next Informative Failure edition.

I say this approvingly. This is how you get to putting rockets in the air and getting them back safely and then put them into the air again.

Via Instapundit. I’ll say this: watching Musk’s space program is a lot of fun. We might get somebody back to the Moon in my lifetime, at that.

SpaceX continues on with space corvette tests.

Oops, did I type out that in the title? I meant ‘space tourist vessel.’ Silly me:

SpaceX just fired the engine of its latest Starship prototype, paving the way for a test flight in the near future.

The company conducted a “static fire” test of Starship SN5 today (July 30), letting its single Raptor engine blaze while the vehicle remained tethered to the ground at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, near the village of Boca Chica.

Continue reading SpaceX continues on with space corvette tests.

So, hey, asteroid spitting out rocks, no biggie, it’s no big dea BEWARE! BEWARE THE DEATH ROCK DESCENDING FROM THE DEEP BLACK! KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES! :dragged off:

I mean, we all know what’s happening here. That’s right: Attitude jets.

For the last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been circling a large asteroid named Bennu that regularly passes uncomfortably close to Earth. The spacecraft has been painstakingly mapping the asteroid’s rocky surface using a suite of cameras and other instruments that will help it determine where to land next year. Once NASA selects a final landing site, OSIRIS-REx will kiss Bennu just long enough to scoop up a sample to bring back to Earth in 2023.

Many scientists expect the Bennu sample to revolutionize our understanding of asteroids, especially those that are near Earth and pose the greatest threat from space to life as we know it. But as detailed in a paper published this week in Science, NASA has already started making surprising discoveries around this alien world. Earlier this year, the OSIRIS-REx team witnessed particles exploding from the asteroid’s surface—and the team’s not sure why.

Continue reading So, hey, asteroid spitting out rocks, no biggie, it’s no big dea BEWARE! BEWARE THE DEATH ROCK DESCENDING FROM THE DEEP BLACK! KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES! :dragged off:

Virgin Galactic gets them some astronauts.

Erm: “Virgin Galactic’s tourism spaceship climbed more than 50 miles high above California’s Mojave Desert on Thursday, reaching for the first time what the company considers the boundary of space.”  So does the USAF, dagnabbit.  Heck, the article itself noted that the FAA was going to give the pilots (Mark Stucky and Rick Sturckow) their commercial astronaut wings over this.  There’s been, like, only two of those handed out before now.

Still: this is awesome.  We are long overdue for manned commercial space travel. I want the future that was promised me.

I want to believe in derelict starships.

I want to believe.

Scientists have been puzzling over Oumuamua ever since the mysterious space object was observed tumbling past the sun in late 2017. Given its high speed and its unusual trajectory, the reddish, stadium-sized whatever-it-is had clearly come from outside our solar system. But its flattened, elongated shape and the way it accelerated on its way through the solar system set it apart from conventional asteroids and comets.

Now a pair of Harvard researchers are raising the possibility that Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft.

Continue reading I want to believe in derelict starships.

No, not that kind of Orion spaceship.

This is going to bug me for the rest of my life, I’m sure.

NASA and the U.S. Air Force recently tested astronaut survival systems for the first time since the space shuttles stopped flying in 2011.

Those tests were part of the agency’s preparations for the first crewed flights of its Orion module, which is designed to carry astronauts out of our immediate neighborhood and toward more exotic destinations like the moonand Mars.

Continue reading No, not that kind of Orion spaceship.

SpaceX announces passenger for 2023 moon orbital mission.

Whatever it takes, man.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Monday night that entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa would be the first private person to fly solo around the moon aboard the company’s Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) launch vehicle. Maezawa, a 42-year-old from Japan, is a billionaire who founded Zozotown, an online retail shop. The excited future space traveler exclaimed at the event, “I choose to go to the moon.”

Continue reading SpaceX announces passenger for 2023 moon orbital mission.