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Category: space travel

Refueling in orbit is a crucial step for SpaceX to allow its Starship spacecraft to make the journey to faraway places, including the Moon and Mars. The idea is to launch multiple Starships, some destined to top up others while in orbit.

“Combining Starship’s rapid reusability with orbital refilling is critical to economically transporting large numbers of crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars,” SpaceX wrote in a tweet celebrating the news.

NASA is contracting SpaceX to demonstrate the transfer of ten metric tons of liquid oxygen propellant between one Starship and another, a collaboration with NASA’s Glenn Research Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center.

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UK firm Reaction Engines hopes to revolutionize space access with a new class of propulsion system for reusable vehicles, as Oliver Nailard explains.

Reusable vehicles are vital to make access to space more affordable, but conventional rocket engines have their limits. Oliver Nailard describes how UK firm Reaction Engines hopes to revolutionize space access with a new class of propulsion system, the Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE)

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Seven performers selected to pursue novel USV concepts and enabling technologies.

DARPA has awarded seven contracts for work on Phase 1 of the NOMARS program, which seeks to simultaneously explore two competing objectives related to unmanned surface vessels (USV) ship design: the maximization of seaframe performance when human constraints are removed; and achieving sufficient vessel maintenance and logistics functionality for long endurance operations with no human crew onboard. NOMARS aims to disrupt conventional naval architecture designs through creative trade space explorations that optimize useable onboard room considering a variety of constraints. This should pave the way for more capable, affordable small warships that can be procured and maintained in large numbers.

Autonomous Surface Vehicles, LLC, Gibbs & Cox Inc., and Serco Inc. received Phase 1 Track A awards, and will work toward developing novel NOMARS demonstrator conceptual designs. These awards will focus on maximizing vessel performance gain across new design criteria, with potential considerations to include: unusual hull forms, low freeboard, minimizing air-filled volumes, innovative materials, repurposing or eliminating “human space” exploring distributed system designs, and developing architectures optimized for depot-maintenance.

Barnstorm Research Corporation and TDI Technologies, Inc. received Phase 1 Track B awards, and will develop robust approaches to ship health-monitoring via novel Self-Adaptive Health Management (SAHM) architectures, which will be pivotal to achieving NOMARS at-sea endurance and reliability objectives. InMar Technologies and Siemens Corporation also received Phase 1 Track B awards; the former will develop new techniques for morphing hull structures to maximize performance, while the latter will implement toolsets previously developed through the DARPA TRADES program to design optimized material structures for novel NOMARS ship concepts.

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NASA developed the Artemis Accords to partner with other nations to set basic principles to guide robotic and crewed lunar exploration.

Eight nations have signed on to become founding members of NASA’s Artemis Accords, an international agreement that establishes how countries can cooperate to peacefully and responsibly conduct exploration of the moon.

NASA announced Tuesday that the United States signed the accords, together with Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agreement would establish a “singular global coalition” to guide future expeditions to the moon.

“With today’s signing, we are uniting with our partners to explore the moon and are establishing vital principles that will create a safe, peaceful and prosperous future in space for all of humanity to enjoy,” Bridenstine said in a statement released Tuesday.

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Hugely informative and surprisingly candid new Cosmic Controversy episode on why the Moon is so crucial to our collective space future with Notre Dame Planetary Geologist Clive Neal. Well worth a listen.

Notre Dame Planetary Geologist Clive Neal stops by the podcast for a terrifically candid discussion of why the Moon has to be the first stop en route to Mars. We talk about why the Moon holds the key to the new Space Economy; the prospects for NASA making its 2024 Artemis mission deadline; and, why lunar samples are still being analyzed 50 years hence. Why more lunar samples and lunar seismometers are keys to understanding our inner solar system. And why it’s imperative that we revisit the Moon in a permanent way if we are ever to make Mars our own. We also mull over the politics of all of this three weeks away from a pivotal presidential election.

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SpaceX’s Starship program has won $53 million from NASA to perform a full-scale test of orbital propellant transfer, taking the company and space agency’s relationship on the crucial technology to the next level.

NASA revealed the results of its fifth round of “Tipping Point” solicitations on October 14th, announcing awards of more than $370 million total to 14 separate companies. This year’s investments focused on three main categories: “cryogenic fluid management, lunar surface [operations], and closed-loop [i.e. autonomous] descent and landing capability demonstrations.”

In a fairly predictable outcome, the bulk (~$176 million) went to Lockheed Martin and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), while the other half (~$189 million) was split among the twelve remaining companies. In an upset, however, SpaceX was awarded a substantial contract for a crucial aspect of Starship development.

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