Tag: spacex

SpaceX Splashdown tonight.

Or early tomorrow morning? It’s complicated.

 SpaceX’s first long-duration astronaut mission is coming to an end, with a Crew Dragon capsule undocking from the International Space Station and headed for a splashdown off the coast of Florida early Sunday (May 2). 

Strapped inside the Dragon capsule, called Resilience, are four astronauts who will make the first U.S. night water landing in more than 50 years. The crew, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, is wrapping up a six-month mission to the station. 

Good luck and Godspeed, folks.

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

Tweet of the Day, I Have Comments about the SpaceX/NASA Moon Thing edition.

Mostly involving variants of Who else here thinks SpaceX will be ready for the Moon shot before NASA is? Hell, if SpaceX can get Starship into orbit, somebody might end up saying Why wait? But never mind me: I’m cranky when I haven’t had my dinner. This is cool news.

Via @IMAO_.

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.

DoD/SpaceX talks for suborbital cargo delivery.

I have had it explained to me that my first attempt to call this a backdoor way to get to an ‘assault shuttle‘ was, at absolute best, horribly optimistic. So be it. Still cool:

The U.S. military command that oversees logistics operations has signed an agreement with SpaceX and XArc to study the use of space launch vehicles to transport supplies in an emergency.

Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, announced the agreement Oct. 7 at a National Defense Transportation Association virtual conference. 

“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said. The C-17 is a very large military cargo plane capable of transporting a 70-ton main battle tank.

Why, yes. Yes, I have thought about the potentialities. …Which are going to remain potentialities, at least until they figure out how to launch missions where it doesn’t take months to plan everything out. Damn you, objective reality. Damn you.

Via Instapundit.

Tweet of the Day, The Dragon Has Landed edition.

Sometimes, the 21st Century has its moments.

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.