Lifeboat Foundation

As 3D printing evolves and changes manufacturing, no sector will be left untouched—including rocket-building. Using the world’s largest 3D metal printer and Dell technology, Relativity Space will streamline the rocket-building process and make space exploration faster and more accessible. Watch how this revolutionary startup is partnering with Dell to take a leading spot in the race to space.

Reading today’s headlines you may think that billionaire entrepreneurs are new to the space race — they’re not. It all started with them. Here’s the brief history of private space travel.

Video by Gloria Kurnik.

Science fiction met space fact this week in the Seattle area when the cast of “The Expanse,” the science-fiction jewel in Amazon’s streaming-video crown, got a look at Blue Origin’s spaceship.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the common denominator in the meetup: He personally engineered the sci-fi series’ shift from SyFy to Prime Video, and announced it onstage at a space conference last May while I was sitting beside him. Bezos is also the founder of Blue Origin, the space venture that is testing its New Shepard suborbital spaceship and gearing up to build its orbital-class New Glenn rocket.

During last May’s sit-down with Bezos, I joked that cast of “The Expanse” might want to take a ride on New Shepard, just to get some real-life experience behind their portrayal of space travel. And Bezos played along.

Rocket Lab has successfully launched its first rocket of 2019, a mission for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that will test a novel method to deploy a satellite antenna in orbit.

The Electron rocket carrying the single satellite lifted off today, Thursday, March 28 from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand, where all of the company’s previous four rockets have also launched from. As per tradition, the rocket was given a nickname, this time being “Two Thumbs Up” – in honor of a team member who tragically died in a motorbike accident recently.

Inside the rocket is DARPA’s Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration (R3D2) satellite. Weighing in at 150 kilograms (330 pounds), it is the largest single satellite Rocket Lab has ever launched. Indeed, 150 kilograms is the upper limit of what the Electron can lift.

Continue reading “Rocket Lab Launches Experimental Satellite For DARPA On Its First Mission Of 2019” »

Rocket Lab’s first launch of 2019 is in the books.

The spaceflight startup’s Electron rocket rose off a pad on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula today (March 28) at 7:27 p.m. EDT (2327 GMT; 12:27 p.m. local New Zealand time on March 29).

What exactly would it take to create our very own Swartzchild Kugelblitz?

Could a Dyson Sphere Harness the Full Power of the Sun? — https://youtu.be/jOHMQbffrt4

Continue reading “Could Black Holes Made Of Light Power Our Spaceships?” »

Astronaut spacesuits debuted in the 1960s but continue to evolve as NASA and companies like Boeing and SpaceX push to explore the moon and Mars.

SpaceX has silently published the first known detailed render of its new stainless steel Starship’s design on the cover of Popular Mechanic’s April 2019 issue, showing the next-generation orbital spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere in a blaze of glowing metal and plasma.

Despite the fact that the render seems to only be available in print and then only through one particular news outlet, Teslarati has acquired a partial-resolution copy of the image to share the latest official glimpse of SpaceX’s Starship with those who lack the means, access, or interest to purchase a magazine. Matters of accessibility aside, SpaceX’s updated render offers a spectacular view of Starship’s exotic metallic heat shield in action, superheating the atmosphere around it to form a veil of plasma around the spacecraft’s hull. According to CEO Elon Musk, the hottest parts of Starship’s skin will be reinforced with hexagonal tiles of steel and transpiration cooling, a largely unproven technology that SpaceX is already in the process of testing.

A source familiar with Russia’s aerospace industry recently informed state newspaper RIA Novosti that NASA has provided Russian space agency Roscosmos with an updated planning schedule for International Space Station (ISS) operations, including a preliminary target for SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon launch with astronauts aboard.

According to RIA’s source, NASA informed Roscosmos that the agency was tentatively planning for the launch of SpaceX’s Demonstration Mission 2 (DM-2) as early as July 25th, with the spacecraft departing the ISS, reentering the atmosphere, and safely returning astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to Earth on August 5th. In a bizarre turn of events, Russian news agency TASS published a separate article barely 12 hours later, in which – once again – an anonymous space agency source told the outlet that “the [DM-2] launch of Crew Dragon is likely to be postponed to November”. For the time being, the reality likely stands somewhere in the middle.