Tag: space

USAF officially interested in SpaceX’s upcoming line of suborbital strategic transport shuttles.

Excuse me: ‘Starships.’

“The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity,” the document states.

Continue reading USAF officially interested in SpaceX’s upcoming line of suborbital strategic transport shuttles.

Much as I would like to believe in native Martian Death Fungus…

…I suspect that if that fungus actually exists there, it’s because it came along for the ride. And that ‘if’ is a big if. I don’t think we’d be able to really tell without sending somebody to actually look, preferably with a full biolab included.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I’m assuming that the fungus would try to kill us. I don’t trust fungus in the slightest. Not on Earth, and definitely not any hypothetical Martian equivalent. I’ve seen zombie flicks. My kid played The Last of Us. I know how this ends.

PRC’s Long March 5b incompetently put in orbit, likely to irresponsibly deorbit.

I understand that the People’s Republic of China labors under the limitation of a third-rate political and economic ideology, but really, orbital mechanics are hardly new: “China launched the first module for its space station into orbit late Wednesday, but the mission launcher also reached orbit and is slowly and unpredictably heading back to Earth.” One does hope that it doesn’t land on anything populated.

Continue reading PRC’s Long March 5b incompetently put in orbit, likely to irresponsibly deorbit.

Blue Origins lodges complaint with GAO over SpaceX.

It’s about NASA lunar lander contract: “The protest focuses on the decision to award only one company, SpaceX, the lunar lander contract from a three-way competition. Alabama-based Dynetics also had developed a lunar lander for the contest.” (Via Instapundit) …Look, I like Amazon just fine. Amazon Prime, affiliate revenue, it’s my publisher.

But… Blue Origins is a privately funded spaceflight research organization that brings payloads along for the ride, and SpaceX is an unmanned and manned orbital transport enterprise. I have no doubt (and some hopes) that Jeff Bezos will eventually have an extremely profitable company and a fleet of silver rocketships; it’s just that, in the meantime, we’re trying to get back to the moon before I die of old age. Well, that’s maybe not NASA’s specific rationale – but it absolutely should be. I’d have given SpaceX the contract, too: they’ve got direct experience at this point. That includes, again, manned missions.

Moe Lane

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.