Live coverage of SpaceX’s preparations for the next Falcon 9 rocket launch from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will loft an unpiloted Crew Dragon spacecraft on a high-altitude test of the capsule’s launch abort system. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Now, DOD is leading a new charge, pouring more than $1 billion annually into hypersonic research. Competition from ambitious programs in China and Russia is a key motivator. Although hype and secrecy muddy the picture, all three nations appear to have made substantial progress in overcoming key obstacles, such as protecting hypersonic craft from savage frictional heating. Russia recently unveiled a weapon called the Kinzhal, said to reach Mach 10 under its own power, and another that is boosted by a rocket to an astonishing Mach 27. China showed off a rocket-boosted hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) of its own, the Dongfeng-17, in a recent military parade. The United States, meanwhile, is testing several hypersonic weapons. “It’s a race to the Moon sort of thing,” says Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “National pride is at stake.”
Despite hype and technological hurdles, a hypersonic arms race is accelerating.
The first launch of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket has pushed to April 2020 as the company prepares for a very busy year.
SpaceX’s newly redesigned prototype of its Mars-colonizing Starship craft could get off the ground for the first time just two or three months from now, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
SpaceX’s New Starship Prototype Could Fly in Just 3 Months, Elon Musk Says :
Using the Moon as a proving ground for living on Mars, this next chapter in exploration will forever establish our presence in the stars.
How we’re going http://go.nasa.gov/35Y6KFj
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is kicking off the new year with an ultra busy month of tests and missions, including a major test for the company’s first crewed mission to fly NASA astronauts to and back from the International Space Station (ISS).
To drum up hype ahead of the big day, Musk posted a simulated video on Monday showing how the eventual manned launch will look.
SEE ALSO: Why Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists Universally Oppose Moving to Mars.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of populating outer space. But in the nearly 18 years since – and even as the rocket company continues to disrupt the global launch industry – the most complex life-form SpaceX has flown is a mouse.
That should all change in early 2020, though, as SpaceX prepares to launch its first crewed mission aboard its new capsule-like spaceship, called Crew Dragon.
Scientists at the Faculty of Physics and Engineering, working with the Tomsk company Scientific and Production Center Chemical Technologies, have created and tested an improved model of a hybrid rocket engine. The team synthesized new fuel components that increased its calorie content, and therefore its efficiency.
The development emerged from a project to improve the design of a solid–fuel hybrid rocket engine and the fuel used in such engines. The scientists mathematically modeled an optimized engine and made fuel compositions based on aluminum diboride and dodecaboride. This is one of the most promising areas increasing fuel efficiency.
Rocket fuel with the addition of the components proposed by TSU specialists is distinguished by the highest calorific value, which characterizes fuel efficiency. Alexander Zhukov, professor at the Department of Mathematical Physics says that boron is the highest-energy solid component known today, but directly introducing it into the fuel is inefficient because a dense oxide film forms, leading to a high degree of burning out. But in combination with aluminum, boron burns well and increases energy.
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