A new nuclear fission project, called Kilopower, could fuel the future of spaceflight, manifesting a dream that’s been around since the beginning of the Space Age.
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Category: space travel
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.
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Only a lucky handful of artists and a Japanese billionaire will take a trip on a rocketship to the moon with SpaceX. But the moonshot won’t just be televised; you’ll get to experience it from Earth in virtual reality.
That’s the message from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on the upcoming private moon flight of entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, which Musk unveiled to the world Monday (Sept. 17). Maezawa will launch on a trip around the moon on SpaceX’s new Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), and he plans to take between six and eight artists along for the ride. The flight, called the Lunar BFR Mission, could launch as early as 2023, and we’ll all be able to watch it live and in VR, Musk said.
“Moon mission will be livestreamed in high def VR,” Musk announced on Twitter Tuesday (Sept. 18), “so it’ll feel like you’re there in real-time minus a few seconds for speed of light.” That speed-of-light reference is apparently a nod to the ever-so-slight time lag for a signal to cross the 238,000 miles (383,000 kilometers) between Earth and the moon. [How SpaceX’s Passenger Moon Flight Will Work].
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Following a detailed update to SpaceX’s BFR plans and the first privately contracted mission to the Moon, CEO Elon Musk has tweeted that the company intends to stream the entire six-day journey in “high def VR”, a plan that would demand unprecedented communications capabilities between the Moon and the Earth.
Musk further confirmed that “Starlink should be active by [2023]”, suggesting – at a minimum – that the SpaceX-built and SpaceX-launched internet satellite constellation will have reached what is known as ‘initial operating capability’, pegged for Starlink at roughly 800 satellites launched.
Moon mission will be livestreamed in high def VR, so it’ll feel like you’re there in real-time minus a few seconds for speed of light.
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By tapping robotic and sensor technologies, a small free-flying spacecraft is being demonstrated to autonomously investigate lava tubes on the Moon.
Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is partnering with scientists from the RIS4E node of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI), led by Stony Brook University.
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Elon Musk, the founder of the rocket company SpaceX, is about to reveal who the company’s first lunar space tourist will be.
“SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle – an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of travelling to space,” SpaceX said on its website.
“Only 24 humans have been to the Moon in history. No one has visited since the last Apollo mission in 1972.”
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This evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the company’s future massive rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). Maezawa plans to fly on the trip as early as 2023, and he wants to take artists with him to turn the entire ride into an art project called #dearMoon. A website for the mission went live after the announcement.
“Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the Moon! I choose to go to the moon with artists!” Maezawa said to announce his trip at a SpaceX event.
Maezawa, who is 42, reportedly has a current net worth of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. He is also an avid art collector, and he spent $110.5 million on a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat called Untitled last year. As an artist, he wants to invite other artists to come along with him on his ride. Maezawa says he has “bought all the seats” on the BFR and will be looking for others to join him on a week-long mission around the Moon.
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