Lifeboat Foundation

Look up into the night sky towards the end of October and you may catch sight of a brand new ‘star’ twinkling in the cosmos.

The tiny speck of light is not the offspring of a seething nebula, but the world’s first space sculpture, which will orbit the Earth for three weeks this autumn.

The length of a football field, and the shape of an elongated diamond, the ‘Orbital Reflector’ artwork is the brainchild of US artist Trevor Paglen and will be launched on board on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.

Continue reading “Heavens to shine with new ‘star’ as first space sculpture prepares for launch” »

Camden County, Ga., played a bit part in aerospace history as home to a 1960s plant that built and tested NASA rocket motors. Now, county leaders want to revive that heritage with a new commercial spaceport.

“We can be part of the new space race in the 21st Century,” said Steve Howard, project leader and the Camden County administrator.

Tomorrow, NASA aims to launch its first mission to touch the sun, on the fastest spacecraft ever built.

The Amazon.com founder is likely to meet a goal of having his Blue Origin space-travel company work with NASA to return to the moon.

A University of Manchester PhD student has developed a prototype flexible heat shield for spacecraft that could reduce the cost of space travel and even aid future space missions to Mars.

On September 29th, 2017, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled detailed plans of the Big Falcon Rocket at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. It was a follow-up speech to the prior year’s presentation when he first discussed the architecture of what was then called the Interplanetary Transport System. In his highly anticipated speech, Musk laid out the detailed plans for a two stage rocket to enable the colonization of Mars, a moon base, and hypersonic long-distance travel on Earth.

The design featured an enormous Booster that would be powered by 31 Raptor engines, planned to be the world’s most advanced and highest pressure chemical rocket engine. Following stage separation, the booster would return to Earth and land near or on the launch pad.

There were three variants of the rocket’s second stage planned: a Spaceship, Tanker and Cargo Lifter. The primary of which, the BFR Spaceship, was also the colonization vehicle and that could carry up to 100 passengers and a hundred tonnes of cargo. One possible use of the Spaceship was as the world’s first hypersonic passenger transport vehicle, which would enable travel between any two points on Earth in under an hour. Its primary envisioned mission, however, was to be a colonization vehicle for the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Demo test, abort test, finish COPVs, test fuel loading, and so on. It’s a long list.

Thirteen companies, including Boeing and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be doing studies for NASA on the future of commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit.

All of the studies are due in December, and are supposed to cost no more than $1 million each. NASA still has to negotiate the contract amounts with the study groups, but it expects the total cost of the effort to come in at around $11 million.

Continue reading “NASA picks 13 companies to envision the future of orbital human spaceflight” »

Don’t Miss This! We’re introducing you to the first astronauts who will launch from U.S. soil since the final Shuttle mission in 2011. Join us live starting at 11 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 3 to meet the Commercial Crew astronauts who will fly on The Boeing Company and SpaceX capsules to #LaunchAmerica to the International Space Station.