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spacex

SPACE: Musk’s Firm Wins Contract for New Lunar Lander

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Moon Landing - Deposit Photos

NASA said on Friday it has awarded billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a spacecraft to fly astronauts to the moon, picking it over Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics Inc. The bid by Tesla Inc chief Musk beat one from Amazon.com Inc’s founder Jeff Bezos, who had partnered with Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper. Bezos also owns the Washington Post. The U.S. space agency made the announcement in a videoconference. “We should accomplish the next landing as soon as possible,” said Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s acting administrator. … Read more

SPACE: “Starman” Just Zipped Past Mars

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Starman - SpaceX

Starman — the dummy riding a cherry-red Tesla Roadster through space — has made his closest approach ever to Mars. That electric convertible with its mannequin passenger bolted to the top of a Falcon Heavy rocket as a stunt during the SpaceX rocket’s first test launch Feb, 6, 2018. (It’s common for test launches to include heavy payloads, but they’re usually more boring than cherry-red sportscars.) Two years later, the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the vehicle at its tip are making their second trip around the sun. Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks space objects as a side … Read more

SPACE: SpaceX Could Launch Unmanned Mission to Mars in 2024

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SpaceX Starship

SpaceX is almost ready to start building a permanent human settlement on Mars with its massive Starship rocket. The private spaceflight company is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in as little as four years from now, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk said Friday (Oct. 16) at the International Mars Society Convention. “I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window,” Musk said in a discussion with Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin. You can watch a replay of the talk here. That window Musk referred to is a launch opportunity … Read more

SpaceX to Test “Mars Colonizing Spaceship”

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SpaceX Mars Spaceship - SpaceX

The next big leap for SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing Starship spacecraft appears to be right around the corner. Two full-size Starship prototypes, known as SN5 and SN6, recently performed 500-foot-high (150 meters) test hops at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, near the village of Boca Chica. And the next vehicle in line is nearly ready to soar much higher, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. “SN8 Starship with flaps & nosecone should be done in about a week. Then static fire, checkouts, static fire, fly to 60,000 ft [18,300 m] & back,” Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Sept. 12). Full Story … Read more

They’re Baaack – SpaceX Astronauts Splash Down (Video)

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SpaceX Splashdown

Update 2:50 pm EDT: Everything went as planned, with SpaceX and NASA reporting a successful splashdown. The astronauts radioed in from inside the capsule that they were feeling good. A recovery team has begun the process of extracting the crew from the capsule, while the astronauts run some final checks. The SpaceX Crew Dragon “Endeavour” is on its way back to Earth with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. If all goes well, the splashdown will mark the completion of a successful first flight of the commercial crew era. The vehicle is scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of … Read more

A New Era of Human Spaceflight?

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We’ve gotten our hopes up before. The success of NASA’s Apollo moon missions half a century ago, for example, made Mars seem very much within reach for human explorers. Indeed, the space agency drew up plans to put boots on the Red Planet by the early 1980s, but shifting political and societal winds killed that idea in the cradle. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, which aimed to send astronauts back to the moon by the end of the 1990s and get people to Mars in the 2010s. His son, President George W. Bush, also … Read more

SpaceX’s 12,000 Starlink Satellites to Get Glare-Reducing ‘Sunshades’

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SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites

SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites will soon sport an accessory to tamp down their surprising brightness. That brightness worries many astronomers, who say that the huge Starlink constellation could seriously disrupt a variety of scientific observations. And Starlink will indeed be huge, if all goes according to SpaceX’s plan: The company has approval to launch 12,000 craft to low Earth orbit (LEO) and has applied for permission to loft 30,000 more. (For perspective, humanity has launched just 9,400 objects to orbit since the dawn of the space age in 1957). SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that the company … Read more

SPACE: NASA is Mad at Elon Musk

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Starship MK1 - SpaceX

SpaceX has never flown a person into space in its Crew Dragon, its first crew-capable spacecraft. But already the company is showing off its much bigger, much shinier cousin: the Starship, built in Boca Chica, a coastal village at the southeastern tip of Texas, as part of a plan to carry giant crews into deep space. And NASA’s administrator is bristling. That’s because, even though the Crew Dragon — which consists of a capsule for carrying cargo and crew into space on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket — is still very much in the works, it’s well behind schedule. … Read more

SPACE: Fly Me to the Moon

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Moon - pixabay

Well, here’s a bit of space news we weren’t expecting: Today, future Martian overlord and SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced that in 2018, the company will fly two private citizens around the Moon in its Dragon 2 spacecraft, carried by its extremely powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. While the voyagers’ names have not been disclosed, according to SpaceX, a “significant deposit” has already been made. “This is a really thing that’s happened,” Elon Musk told reporters at a press conference. “We’ve been approached to do a crewed mission beyond the Moon…[and these passengers] are very serious about it. We plan to … Read more

SpaceX Rocket Explodes On Launch Pad

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SpaceX

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, meant to launch a satellite this weekend, exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Reports suggest the explosion occurred during a static fire test of the rocket’s engines. The Falcon 9 was getting ready to launch the Amos 6 satellite, a communications probe for the Israeli satellite operator Spacecom. The mission was scheduled for 3AM ET Saturday morning. Prior to all launches, SpaceX conducts a static fire test, in which the rocket’s engines are turned on while the vehicle is constrained. It’s a routine procedure the company has done many times before. Full Story … Read more