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Category: space travel

That’s a lot of ships. 😃

To achieve that ambitious goal, SpaceX could build one hundred Starships per year over the course of ten years. –“Building 100 Starships per year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons per year or maybe around 100000 people per Earth-Mars orbital sync,” Musk said in January. SpaceX would launch a Starship fleet approximately every 26 months, which is when Earth and Mars orbits align closer to each other.

Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 172020

You can watch SpaceX operations as they work to develop the Starship spacecraft at the South Texas facility in the video below, courtesy of LabPadre via YouTube. In the weeks ahead, SpaceX plans to continue preflight preparations of the Starship SN9 prototype that is awaiting at the launchpad. Meanwhile, teams at the assembly facility are manufacturing multiple vehicles that will also undergo testing next year.

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Tesla will need a landing platform to catch the rocket as it lands. According to Elon Musk its to save mass/weight and speed up the rockets readiness for its next launch.

This is for Tesla’s reusable rocket program.

SpaceX aims to develop a fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle, capable of performing multiple flights per day. Musk shared that not adding landing legs to the Super Heavy rocket “Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour,” he said. When asked if the decision to eliminate the legs is due to the high stress the vehicle would experience upon landing Musk responded, “Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step,” he wrote via Twitter.

Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020

Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020

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Simulations rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts as the source of lunar magnetism, supporting the proposal that the ancient moon generated a core dynamo.

Today, the moon lacks a global magnetic field, but this wasn’t always the case. Spacecraft measurements of the moon’s crust and lunar rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions contain remnant magnetization that formed 4 to 3.5 billion years ago in a magnetic field comparable in strength to that of the Earth. Scientists have argued that the source of this was a dynamo — a magnetic field generated by the moon’s churning, molten, metal core. However, research indicates that the moon’s suspected small core may not have been able to generate enough energy to sustain the ancient magnetic field that planetary scientists have inferred from in its rocks.

In a recent Science Advances paper, research scientist Rona Oran and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences examined the plausibility of an alternative hypothesis that has been around since the 1980s that could produce the remnant magnetization in the lunar crust: transient plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, they describe some of their findings.

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Are you fed up with all the negativity?

Between Tesla, SpaceX (Starship & Starlink), 5G, mRNA vaccines and more, 2020 has been an eventful year full of breakthroughs all set to make our lives better, and ushering in a sci-fi future quicker than ever…so I brought them all together in one video to celebrate the great people working tirelessly to make our future better.

If you want a feel good boost, why not drop by and spend a few mins revelling in the positive stories of 2020.

Have an awesome New Year!!

In Looking Back At 2020 I want to review the year to show that for all the bad, there was still some amazing good and positive stories that refused to take a back seat.

Here I will look at Tesla and their battery technology breakthroughs, their full self driving (Level 5 autonomy) breakthroughs, the Starship by SpaceX and also their starlink technology, the roll out of 5G, the amazing mRNA vaccine and all the others, developed in with amazing speed, and fully tested to get us vaccinating already, and the breakthroughs in homeworking that show it can be done, a boon for those with mobility challenges and other commitments that mean all day, every day at a specific office location is not the only option.
What are your highlights?
Here’s to an amazing 2021.

And why not have a look at the amazing technology that will change this decade in ways most cannot even imagine yet…exciting time to be alive.

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Rookie NASA astronaut Raja Chari — a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot — veteran physician-astronaut Tom Marshburn, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer have been assigned to fly to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship in the fall of 2021.

A fourth crew member will be added to the mission at a later date, following a review by NASA and its international partners, the U.S. space agency said in a Dec. 14 announcement.

Chari, Marshburn, Maurer, and the fourth crew member will launch on the third operational flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. The mission, designated Crew-3, will launch in the fall of 2021 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and last into the spring of 2022.

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SpaceX’s fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rockets enabled it to conduct more missions in 2020 than ever before. SpaceX completed a record-breaking launch manifest this year, it conducted 26 rocket launches –the most annual launches it has performed in history. Rocket reusability has played a significant role in increasing launch cadence. Falcon 9 is capable of launching payload to orbit and returning from space to land vertically on landing pads and autonomous droneships at sea. To date, SpaceX has landed 70 orbital-class Falcon 9 boosters and reused 49. This year the company accomplished flying two particular rocket boosters 7 times. Engineers aim to reuse a first-stage booster at least 10 times to reduce the cost of spaceflight. The most reused Falcon 9 rockets that reached 7 reflights this year are two first-stage boosters identified as B1051 and B1049. SpaceX is just three flights away from achieving 10 reflights. SpaceX officials state Falcon 9 [Block 5] is designed to perform up to 100 reflights.

Stephen Marr, a spaceflight photographer who goes by the name @spacecoast_stve on Twitter, shared a photo collage of all the Falcon 9 boosters used in 2020, “SpaceX carried out a record-breaking 26 launches this year, but how many boosters did it take to get it done? The answer is 11. And here they are!” he wrote. SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to Marr’s tweet –“Falcon was 25% of successful orbital launches in 2020, but maybe a majority of payload to orbit. Anyone done the math?” he said.

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