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Category: space travel

As part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch that will send a commercial Moon lander on its way to Earth’s nearest neighbor, rideshare organizer Spaceflight Inc and propellant depot startup OrbitFab have revealed plans for the first high Earth orbit propellant depot.

Known as “Tanker-002,” the co-developed spacecraft will technically be the first propellant depot – essentially a gas station in space – to reach a geostationary orbit ~36,000 km (~22,300 mi) above the Earth’s surface. Based around a variant of Spaceflight’s brand new Sherpa OTV space tug vehicles, OrbitFab hasn’t disclosed the planned capacity of its unique GEO depot but the public specifications of Sherpa suggest that the company will be able to deliver a few hundred kilograms (300−800 lb) of hydrazine accessible via several tiny docking ports.

However, Tanker-002 isn’t interesting solely for its unique position as a tanker in GEO. How Spaceflight and OrbitFab plan to get the small spacecraft into position will be a feat of engineering and trajectory design in its own right.

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Nelson thinks big things are coming, despite some notable challenges.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is confident the agency’s human spaceflight future is bright, despite the inherent difficulty of the endeavor and some challenging international issues.

“NASA is an agency of overcomers,” Nelson told Space.com at the 36th annual Space Symposium, which took place here last month.

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One of the most spectacular Einstein rings ever seen in space is enabling us to see what’s happening in a galaxy almost at the dawn of time.

The smears of light called the Molten Ring, stretched out and warped by gravitational fields, are magnifications and duplications of a galaxy whose light has traveled a whopping 9.4 billion light-years. This magnification has given us a rare insight into the stellar ‘baby boom’ when the Universe was still in its infancy.

The early evolution of the Universe is a difficult time to understand. It blinked into existence as we understand it roughly 13.8 billion years ago, with the first light emerging (we think) around 1 billion years later. Light traveling for that amount of time is faint, the sources of it small, and dust obscures much of it.

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Legendary Star Trek actor would become the oldest person EVER in space.

William Shatner will be following the footsteps of his Star Trek character Captain Kirk and boldly going…well, where more and more people have been as he is reportedly about to join the growing number of people who have ventured into space on board Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket. A report has revealed that Shatner is planning on becoming the oldest person to have ventured into space as part of Bezos’ “15 minute civilian flight”, which would be a rerun of the flight that Bezos took into the lower atmosphere earlier this year. The report also suggested that Shatner is looking to use the opportunity to make a documentary about the experience.

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