Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, has “aspirational” plans to launch people to Mars in 2024 and ultimately colonize the red planet.
To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space.
SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019.
On the evening of July 12th, SpaceX technicians put Starhopper’s freshly-installed Raptor – serial number 06 (SN06) – through a simple but decidedly entertaining test, effectively wiggling the engine in circles.
Designed to verify that Raptor’s thrust vectoring capabilities are in order and ensure that Starhopper and the engine are properly communicating, the wiggle test is a small but critical part of pre-flight acceptance and a good indicator that the low-fidelity Starship prototype is nearing its first hover test(s). Roughly 48 hours after a successful series of wiggles, Starhopper and Raptor proceeded into the next stage of pre-flight acceptance, likely the final more step before a tethered static fire.
Routine for all Falcon rockets, SpaceX’s exceptionally rigorous practice of static firing all hardware at least once (and often several times) before launch has unsurprisingly held firm as the company proceeds towards integrated Starhopper and Starship flight tests. Despite the fact that Raptor SN06 completed a static fire as recently July 10th, SpaceX will very likely put Starhopper and its newly-installed Raptor through yet another pre-flight static fire, perhaps its fourth or fifth test this month.
We’ve come a long, long way since the U.S. first launched fruit flies into space in 1947. Since then, we’ve sent astronauts to the moon, installed an International Space Station in orbit and landed spacecraft on Mars. In the past couple of decades, private corporations such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have joined the fray and will likely play instrumental roles in aerospace engineering and space exploration. Here’s a look at some major advancements we’ve made in spacecraft technology and space exploration milestones over the past seven decades.
The small, fast-moving New Horizons spacecraft is likely to be the only Pluto mission in the lifetimes of many of us. It changed forever the way we on Earth perceive this outermost world and its moons.
Washington | Australian resources industry giants such as BHP and Rio Tinto could soon play a crucial role in NASA’s Mars mission, building and operating mines on the moon to extract rocket fuel for interplanetary travel.
In an interview with The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), NASA’s top boss, administrator Jim Bridenstine, urged Australian mining companies to grasp the opportunity and challenge of applying the industry’s expertise in remote resource extraction to the moon.
Known inside NASA as Artemis (the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology) the lunar missions will rely on turning hundreds of millions of tons of mined water ice recently discovered on the moon into liquid forms of hydrogen and oxygen to power spacecraft.
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The Apollo Lunar Module was the part of the Apollo Spacecraft that landed on the moon. The LM was split up into two parts — the ascent stage and descent stage. For the landing, both parts went to the surface of the moon. When it’s time the leave only the ascent stage leaves the surface. The descent stage has fuel and oxidizer tanks in the center compartments. Equipment was also stored in the outer corners — these were called quadrants. They stored items such as the Lunar Roving Vehicle, scientific experiments, a camera, and water and oxygen tanks. The ascent stage was where the astronauts lived. It had the controls, two windows, more equipment, a docking hatch, and the engine to leave the lunar surface.
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