Space tourism will take-off in 2018. As the race between spaceflight companies Virgin Galactic and SpaceX heats up, those who can afford it will be able to travel to low Earth orbit and possibly even around the moon.
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Elon Musk is racing to land SpaceX on Mars in five years, a vision he unveiled late last month at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress.
One man not among Musk’s critics is Scott Kelly, a retired astronaut who set the record in 2015 for total accumulated days in space, during the single longest mission by an American.
“When Elon Musk said he was going to launch his rocket and then land the first stage on a barge, I thought he was crazy,” Kelly told “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “And then he did it. I’m not going to ever doubt what he says, ever again.”
Continue reading “Don’t doubt Elon Musk, says astronaut who spent a year in space” »
Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA’s efforts to reach the same goal.
With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA — while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds — a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy.
Read: Before Elon Musk can get SpaceX to Mars, he must overcome these nontechnical hurdles.
Continue reading “New space race to Mars pits NASA vs. SpaceX” »
On Friday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the company was halfway done building the battery bank that will become the world’s biggest battery once it’s complete. Musk made the announcement at a party overlooking the project’s construction, ABC News Australia reported.
Tesla is building the 129-MWh battery with French energy company Neoen. The battery will be draw energy from Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm that’s 142 miles north of Adelaide. The electricity will be delivered to South Australians during peak grid times to reduce the number of blackouts in the area, which are frequent in summer months.
“The system is a big battery, a battery big enough to power 50,000 houses — the biggest in the world,” Neoen global COO Romain Desrousseaux previously told Business Insider.
Continue reading “Tesla says it’s halfway done building the world’s biggest battery” »
Daimler, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, announced last week a $1 billion investment in electric car and battery production in the US.
As with any new EV investment from a legacy automaker, the media painted it as an “attack on Tesla”, but Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and largest shareholder, doesn’t seem too worried about it.
