It’s the holy grail of spaceflight, and it could come sooner than many expect.
This month, Washington-based Radian Aerospace announced that it’s building a spaceplane that takes off and lands horizontally. The reveal sparked excitement about what could be considered the holy grail of the decades-old industry.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket back in 2015, and its second stage is on course to hit the Moon. The DSCOVR craft stage could send up lunar regolith.
The European Space Agency is planning to use the Ariane 6 for a variety of missions.
Here’s what you need to know about how they compare.
Will your next camper van be an EV? Thor industries think so and their latest all-electric camper van could show us the very future of EV travel. Welcome to the Thor Vision Vehicle, an electric camper van ready to take your entire family on a camping adventure without the use of any fossil fuels. Does this EV concept have what it takes to beat out its gas-powered competition?
Much like the car and truck market, the camper van space is seeing a large shift towards electric power. Last week Winnebago unveiled their electric RV concept, and Airstream recently revealed their eStream electric trailer at the Tampa RV Show. Thor Industries is the parent company of Airstream further showing the brand’s commitment to the electric vehicle space. Based on what we know so far, the new Thor Vision Vehicle may be the best of the breed.
Could one of Earth’s most intelligent species be an alien, ‘seeded’ on the planet by an interstellar genetic code? Scientists speculate that the clue might be found in the ancient precursor to life: RNA. Image top of page: Shutterstock License Related Articles Octopus & the Origin of Consciousness (Planet Earth Report) Unfathomable […].
If all goes well, the telescope will remain in that six-month orbit for the rest of its operational life, firing its thruster periodically to remain on station.
Getting ready to capture “‘wow’ images”
A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway.
“We all understand how difficult this is,” said Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder, chief technology officer, and former head of the Future Space Transportation and X-33 program at Boeing.
On Wednesday, Radian announced that it had recently closed a $27.5 million round of seed funding, led by Fine Structure Ventures. To date, Radian has raised about $32 million and has 18 full-time employees at its Renton, Washington, headquarters.
Science fiction literature is filled with strange ideas about how to travel to space and in it. We’ve got anything from hyperloops to wormholes and space elevators, strings, FTL-capable ships, and even the crown jewel of instant transport, teleportation. I know this because I really, really enjoy sci-fi.
Goodyear’s airless tires are now being used by a fleet of Starship’s autonomous delivery robots on a college campus in the U.S.
The request: Starship recently asked Goodyear if it could design a smaller version of its airless tires for the company’s delivery robots, and the tire giant has now delivered.
Continue reading “Goodyear puts airless tires on Starship delivery robots” »
