Speaking in a September 7th interview with French newspaper Courrier International, Dr. Francis Rocard – director of French space agency CNES’ solar system exploration program – had little good to say about SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s long-term ambitions in space, going so far as to question the CEO’s driving ethics and label the company’s next-generation rocket and propulsion system “science-fiction”.
Just how valuable is that stretch of space between Earth and the moon’s orbit? Might this celestial real estate become hot property as an extension of military arenas in low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit?
Given forecasts of 21st-century activity on and around the moon by both private and government entities, could this be an economic area of development that needs protection in sthe years and decades to come? [In Photos: President Donald Trump and NASA].
Ivanka’s visit to NASA.
Great day at @nasa’s Johnson Space Center with Administrator @jimbridenstine checking out new tech + innovations and meeting with students, our future scientists and astronauts, who will bring us back to the moon 🌙 🚀.
At the same time as the hardware for SpaceX’s first BFR spaceship is entering the early stages of manufacturing, the company’s South Texas test facility is slowly taking shape after more than 18 months of what can be fairly described as hibernation.
The likeliest location for a near-future spaceship test stand or pad has also experienced a comparatively vast influx of construction workers and general activity that began earlier this month September, nearly two and half years after SpaceX began preparing the unstable coastal wetland with the addition of several hundred tons of soil.
Elon Musk has provided several new, rare, and telling glimpses into how his rocket company, SpaceX, is building a spacecraft to reach Mars.
On September 17, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon on the company’s Big Falcon Rocket or BFR. During that event, Musk showed off new renderings of the launch system, along with a few photos of the work going on inside SpaceX’s spaceship-building tent at the Port of Los Angeles.
These were the first new details about SpaceX’s rocket construction we’d gotten since April, when Musk posted a photo that revealed SpaceX was building the spacecraft using a 40-foot-long, 30-foot-wide cylindrical tool.
Hayabusa-2:! Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has made history by successfully landing two robotic explorers on the surface of an asteroid. The two small “rovers”, which were despatched from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Friday, will move around the 1km-wide space rock known as Ryugu. The asteroid’s low gravity means they can hop across it, capturing temperatures and images of the surface. “Both rovers are in good condition,” the agency confirmed on Saturday…here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156
Pictures have emerged from the surface of an asteroid after Japan landed two robotic rovers on it.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk has tweeted two photos that give us a peek into the company’s Martian dreams. One of the images shows the BFR, the massive rocket SpaceX is developing for deep space missions, while the other shows the BFR and what he called “Mars Base Alpha.” It’s no secret that the private space corporation wants to build a human settlement on the red planet. Back in 2017, it announced its plans to launch two BFR cargo missions to Mars by 2022 to prepare for the arrival of the first Martian settlers by 2024. Before any of that can happen, though, SpaceX has to be able to start testing its BFR system in the first half of 2019.
Blue Origin is making the final preparations for crewed spaceflight in West Texas. Meanwhile, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the company is continuing to push towards achieving orbit and entering the commercial launch market. During a speech this week, Jeff Bezos confirmed the company has already invested $1 Billion in space coast facilities and another $1 billion will be fed into the New Glenn rocket next year.
The New Shepard rocket, named after the first American in space Alan Shepard, is designed for suborbital space tourism. Passengers can experience a few minutes of weightless as the spacecraft flies up to 107 km, 7 km above the officially recognized Karman Line between Earth’s atmosphere and space. New Shepard first reached this altitude on Flight 8 in April.
The New Shepard 3 vehicle completed the most recent test flight in July, demonstrating the crew capsule’s escape system at the edge of the flight envelope. Flight 9 was the latest in a line of flights designed to demonstrate the safety of the crew vehicle, including another in-flight abort test in 2016, a pad abort test back in 2012, and a parachute redundancy test in 2016 where the capsule descended under only 2 of the 3 parachutes.