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Blue Origin’s human lunar lander all-star space team completes first key milestone for moon mission

Blue Origin’s human lunar lander all-star space team completes first key milestone for moon mission – TechCrunch.


Blue Origin, along with it partners Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, was one of three companies to be awarded contracts by NASA to develop human lunar landers for future moon missions. Blue Origin’s so-called “National Team” is focused on developing a Human Landing System (HLS) for NASA to support its efforts to return human astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2024, and today it announced that along with its partners, it has achieved the first crucial step of defining the requirements of the mission, including any space and ground vehicles used.

This is a key first step, which amounts to having established a checklist of thousands of items that will make up the parameters of the National Team’s HLS mission. It means that the company can now move ahead to further NASA reviews (it has already agreed with the agency on a number of the proposed design and build standards) and ultimately, the preliminary design phase.

Blue Origin and its partners won’t be starting from scratch with their design, which is one advantage to the Bezos –founded space company working with established industry partners like Lockheed, Northrop and Draper. They’re “evolving” much of their landing system design from existing spacecraft including Orion, the reusable spacecraft that will take NASA’s astronauts from Earth back to the moon via the Artemis program, which was built in part by Lockheed Martin.

#SpaceWatchGL Opinion: New Space – Overview and investment Trends

Historically, human space exploration was initiated by the Soviet Union with the Sputnik launch into the Earth orbit in 1957. Humankind’s space endeavors grew with more determination after the first animal’s launch, a dog called “Laika”. Marked by the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin trip in the Vostok 1 in 1961 and his compatriot Valentina Tereshkiva’s three-day space orbiting mission in the Vostok 6 in 1963, humankind succeeded to make the giant leap beyond Earth’s boundaries.

Nonetheless, the Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon remain the spark to ignite ambitious human prospects on space travel, which unleashed unlimited possibilities on the humankind’s expansion into outer space. The achieved milestones in space endeavors created a shift from a mere inspirational driver and curiosity feeder on existential questions [3] to a space race which grew from a bipolar race between the United States and the former Soviet Union to a different space race in which new actors, particularly private actors, have become essential players [4].

The most prominent ongoing transformation of the global space sector is the race to commercialize space driven by private enterprises and induced by governmental agencies who rewarded these enterprises billions of dollars in governmental space contracts. The evolution of space commercialization could be illustrated through the U.S. space economic emergence from the National Aeronautics and Space administration’s (NASA) monopoly to a more liberalized space sector. Such an emergence came as a consequence of NASA’s struggle to improve its military-based technologies to achieve cost-effective and safe space access [5] in addition to budget reductions and various costly accidents, which led NASA to outsource its spaceship manufacturing.

NASA’s outsourcing mechanisms were organized through public procurement contracts accorded through bidding mechanisms to a few private space giants. Under these procurement contracts, private entities undertook rockets and spaceships manufacturing supervised by NASA, who provided the launching facility. From 1982, private actors’ access to the space sector became less costly due to reduced entry barriers to the space sector [6].

Sparked by President Barak Obama’s policy in 2010, the space industry witnessed an unprecedented disruption characterized by decentralizing space activities from governmental entities to private sectors. As a consequence, the U.S. space sector has undergone a shift that impacted the global space sector. This shift was propelled by complex dynamics due to the interaction between various forces beyond simple market forces and driven by various factors. The combination of these factors, including the reduction of public entities’ involvement and the substantial private investment injection into the global space sector, created a diverse space sector [7]. The global space sector’s evolution created a revolutionary New Space market structure; thanks to its related complex geopolitics and complex forces, a new race started: the race to commercialize space.

#SpaceWatchGL

References

[1] Cousins, Norman, Philip Morrison, James Michener, Jacques Cousteau, Ray Bradbury, Why Man Explores, California Institute of Technology Symposium, Pasadena, July 2, 1976, California, NASA Educational Publication 123, Government Printing Office: Washington D. C., 1977.

Elon Musk says Starship SN8 prototype will have a nosecone and attempt a 60,000-foot return flight

– TechCrunch


Elon Musk has shared some details about future testing of Starship, the SpaceX launch vehicle currently being developed by the company at its Boca Chica, Texas facility. Recently, SpaceX has completed short, 150 meter (just under 500 feet) test flights of two earlier Starship prototypes, SN5 and SN6 – and SN8, which is currently set to be done construction “in about a week” according to Musk will have “flaps & nosecone” and ultimately is intended for a much higher altitude test launch.

The prototypes that SpaceX has flown and landed for its so-called ‘short-hop’ tests over the past few weeks have been full-sized, but with a simulated weight installed on the top in place of the actual domed nosecone that will perch atop the final production Starship and protect any cargo on board. SN5 and SN6, which are often compared to grain silos, are also lacking the large control flaps on either side of the nosecone that will help control its flight. SN8 will have both, according to Musk.

This version of the prototype will also undergo the same early testing and its precursors, including a static fire and other ground checkouts, followed by another static fire before ultimately attempting to fly to an altitude of 60,000 feet – and then returning back to the ground for a controlled landing.

Humanity’s Babel Tower: Space Elevator

In the book of Genesis, the Bible recounts the Babel tower that, once built, would allow humanity to do whatever it wishes. In this video, I will go over how humanity’s first space elevator will revolutionize human progress in space exploration and colonization. I will also go over the risks of a possible space elevator.

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39% of The World’s Rich Would Take a Space Flight – But Then What?

The modern space race is getting closer to making astronauts out of tourists – and a new survey finds that there is already pent-up demand, even as questions linger over the industry.

About 39 per cent of people with a net worth of more than $5 million (Dh18.3m), a total addressable market of about 2.4m, are interested in paying at least $250,000 (the current price) for a Virgin Galactic flight to the edge of space, according to financial services firm Cowen.

These findings come as Virgin Galactic takes another step towards offering commercial space flights, which will one day provide paying customers about six minutes of weightlessness as the spacecraft hurtles through Earth’s atmosphere.


A third of people with a net worth of more than $5m are interested in paying at least $250,000 for six minutes of weightlessness and a chance to take in a view of Earth.

Physicists create exotic electron liquid

The achievement opens a pathway for development of the first practical and efficient devices to generate and detect light at terahertz wavelengths—between and microwaves. Such devices could be used in applications as diverse as communications in outer space, cancer detection, and scanning for concealed weapons.

The research could also enable exploration of the basic physics of matter at infinitesimally small scales and help usher in an era of quantum metamaterials, whose structures are engineered at atomic dimensions.