For decades, Jim Woodward dreamed of a propellantless engine to take humans to the stars. Now he thinks he’s got it. But is it revolutionary—or illusory?
Category: space travel
SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and others are launching more rockets than ever. But the environmental impact and carbon emissions are poorly understood.
If we knew that a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) was headed for Earth could we deflect it?
Seeking to find out is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a mission from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to smash a 500kg spacecraft into binary asteroid 65,803 Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos (also called, rather cutely, “Didymoon.”)
The idea is that by creating a “kinetic deflection” on Dimorphos it will ever so slightly change the trajectory of both objects.
And it could halve the transit time to Mars.
Pulsar Fusion Ltd., a nuclear fusion company based in the United Kingdom, has recently designed and successfully tested its first launch-capable, high-power chemical rocket engine.
From launching people and payloads into space, this engine could have numerous applications, but the company’s ultimate goal is to develop a hyper-speed propulsion engine using nuclear fusion technologies for interplanetary travel, with the first prototype expected in 2025.
And when this dream comes into fruition, it could cut the journey time to Mars in half.
The goal: Nuclear fusion-powered engines The company is one of just a few in the world aiming to develop hyper-speed propulsion engines based on nuclear fusion technology. The static test which saw the engine fired into full thrust to measure performance took place on November 17 and 18, 2021 at the Ministry of Defence military base in Salisbury, as seen in the video below, which was released on Sunday.
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After raising $1.4 billion.
Long ago, the writer Edward Albee wrote: “Good, better, best, bested.”
On a long enough timeline, this might reflect the experience of every major space firm.
Since the federal government ruled in favor of NASA’s decision to opt for SpaceX’s bid to design and deploy a Human Landing System (HLS) to the moon, it’s seemed like Elon Musk and his firm will have the lion’s share of public-private collaborations for lunar missions, and beyond. But in the coming decade, contestants for this role are lining up.
Beyond Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which lost a lawsuit against NASA regarding Musk’s contract with the agency, there are other aerospace firms with their eyes on the prize. And one of them, called Sierra Space, just took a major leap toward a rivaling position in Space Race 2.0, raising $1.4 billion to, among other things, modify its Dream Catcher space vehicle for human crews, with aims to land on Mars, and “enable humanity to build and sustain thriving civilizations beyond Earth,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice, in a press release from his company.
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The feat drew the attention of Musk.
On Saturday, Astra announced via Twitter that its LV0007 mission reached orbit from the Astra Spaceport in Kodiak, Alaska. The rocket, which carried a payload for the United States Space Force, took off at 1:16 a.m. Eastern time. The feat earned the praise of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who wrote on Twitter: “Congrats! Orbit is not easy.”
The milestone means Astra is one of a handful of private companies to successfully develop an orbital rocket. Following the launch Astra declared itself “the first rocket company to reach orbit in less than five years.”
The company was founded in 2016 and launched its first two rockets to suborbital space in 2018. Astra didn’t exit stealth mode until February 2020, and TechCrunch noted that it was referred to as “Stealth Space Company” before its big reveal.
SpaceX is making good progress on Starship’s first two Super Heavy boosters, both of which could potentially be ready for their first major test campaigns before the end of the year.
On November 19th, some ten weeks after the process began, SpaceX craned Super Heavy B5’s methane (LCH4) tank on top of its oxygen (LOx) tank, marking the end of major structural assembly for the 69m (~225′) tall booster. A team of welders has since been working around the clock to weld the two tanks together and complete a transfer tube that routes methane propellant down through B5’s oxygen tank.
Two days prior, CEO Elon Musk shared a photo of SpaceX’s other Super Heavy booster (B4) which has been slowly progressing towards test readiness for more than three months. It’s unclear why SpaceX has been so sluggish to prepare Super Heavy B4 for testing but with B5 finally approaching the finish line, the company will soon find itself in a position where it will need to decide which booster to proceed with towards the program’s near-term end goal: the first orbital Starship test flight.
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You’re on the PRO Robots channel and in this episode we’re going to talk about a vacation in space. When will this cherished dream come true? How will such a trip take place, what will the preparation consist of, how much does a trip and service in space cost, what will be the food for the space tourists and what are the living conditions and dangers awaiting them — watch this video! Watch this episode to the end and write in the comments: would you dare to go on a space vacation?
0:00 In this video.
0:25 Our Everything.
1:19 Space Perspective.
1:52 SpaceX
3:17 Roscosmos and Space Adventures.
3:46 Orbital Assembly Corporation.
5:00 Astronaut Menu.
5:46 weightlessness and the human body.
6:37 Rest on the Moon.
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Chapters.
0:00 — You are a time traveler.
2:32 — Spacetime & light cone review.
6:15 — Flat Spacetime equations.
7:03 — Schwarzschild radius, metric.
8:42 — Light cone near a black hole.
10:15 — How to escape black hole.
10:39 — Kerr-Newman metric.
11:34 — How to remove the event horizon.
11:50 — What is a naked singularity.
12:20 — How to travel back in time.
13:26 — Problems.
Summary.
Time travel is nothing special. You’re time traveling right now into the future. Relativity theory shows higher gravity and higher speed can slow time down enough to allow you to potentially travel far into the future. But can you travel back in time to the past?
In this video I first do a quick review of light cones, world lines, events, light like curves, time-like curves, and space-like curves in this video so that you can understand the rest of the video.
A space like-world line means that the object has to travel faster than light. But moving anything to the speed of light requires an infinite amount of energy to accelerate. So this is not possible.
Going faster than the speed of light can create scenarios that allow you to travel back in time. But since this is not physically possible, we need to figure out a clever manipulation of space time. This means we have to solve Einstein’s equations of General relativity.
Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully “sail on sunbeams” demonstrating solar sail technology in Earth orbit. The mission is providing hard data for future missions that hope to employ solar sails to explore the cosmos.
LightSail 2, a small cubesat, launched in June 2019 on a SpaceX
Commonly known as SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company that was founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Headquartered in Hawthorne, California, the company designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.