Lifeboat Foundation

I will illustrate the massive game-changer that the SpaceX BFR will be. I will show this by describing how we can have millions of people in space by the 2040s.

Virgin Galactic is celebrating a successful second test flight of SpaceShipTwo, the rocket-powered passenger spacecraft that may someday take tourists to the edge of space. Today’s test took the VSS Unity, the second craft built in this class, up to 114,500 feet and Mach 1.9, or nearly 1,300 miles per hour.

Unity’s first powered flight was less than two months ago, which was itself the first powered flight Virgin Galactic had attempted since the fatal breakup of the company’s previous SpaceShipTwo-class spacecraft, Enterprise, in 2014.

Much has been redone since then but the basics of the Virgin Galactic flight style are the same. A relatively traditional jet-powered plane, a WhiteKnightTwo class plane (in this case the VMS Eve), carries the SpaceShipTwo craft (Unity) up to somewhere around 45,000 feet. There the latter detaches and fires up its rocket engine, accelerating to high speed and high altitude, after which it glides to the surface and lands more or less like any other plane.

Continue reading “Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo hits Mach 1.9 in second successful test flight” »

In a recent interview, Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos outlined his plan to conquer the moon.

“The ‘thrust’ is not coming from the EmDrive, but from some electromagnetic interaction,” the team reports in a proceeding for a recent conference on space propulsion.

The first independent tests of the EmDrive suggest there’s a mundane explanation for the wildly controversial device.

LOS ANGELES — Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon.

And even if Blue Origin can’t strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin space venture go all in on moon settlements” »

Planetary Resources plans to begin dispatching spaceships in just two years.

Staying on Earth “is not necessarily extinction, but the alternative is stasis,” Bezos said during an onstage discussion Friday night with Geekwire journalist Alan Boyle at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles.

The Virgin boss wants to break the final frontier and journey into the heavens.

One of the great things about space exploration is how it can shift your perspective. And you don’t even need to leave home. Here we all are in our spaceship Earth, approaching planet Mars, the planet slowly looming larger in our forward view.