Four is the point Max Faget and Paul Pursur were trying to make in their quest to prove that harnessing that many modified Sergeant engines would make a $200,000 vehicle that would perform as well and with more flexibility, and would less cost than a $2.5 million Atlas or $1 million Redstone rocket.
Faget and Purser were two NASA space pioneers, whose aim was testing some of the Mercury components that would evolve into Apollo, including the escape and parachute systems and recovery methods, plus the performance of the space capsule under pressure at altitude.
Little Joe got off to an ignominious start when it blew its top one day at Wallops Island.
Over the past few months, I was part of a study funded by the United Launch Alliance and supported by a large group of technologists to determine if we can mine water on the Moon and turn it into rocket fuel, and to do it economically. The final report can be downloaded here.
Why Mine Water on the Moon?
The lunar water would be launched off the Moon and delivered to a “gas station” in Earth orbit. This propellant depot will use solar energy to turn the water into rocket fuel. Then, space tugs can refill their tanks so they can repeatedly boost spacecraft from Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) (where the launch rocket throws them) into Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) where they can begin operating.
The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.
LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti
THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.
