Blue Origin successfully launched its 17th New Shepard suborbital spaceflight Thursday morning. The capsule flew to a peak altitude of 347,430 feet while carrying 20 payloads.
Silicon Valley’s most succesful incubator is doubling down on space tugs.
Backed by Y Combinator, the space company is developing solar thermal rockets.
This situation has become a logistical headache for SpaceX, which seeks road closures to move rocket hardware along the road and for tests and launches. It has also been unpleasant for nearby residents and those who enjoy the undeveloped beach.
Now, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has a potential solution. The Brownsville Herald reports that officials from Musk’s The Boring Company met with Cameron County officials in July to discuss digging a tunnel from the south end of South Padre Island to the north end of Boca Chica Beach, facilitating alternate access to the barrier island.
SpaceX appears to have more or less broken ground on a new, even bigger ‘high bay’ assembly facility at its Boca Chica, Texas Starship factory.
Barely one year ago, SpaceX erected the first prefabricated steel sections of what eventually become its Starship factory ‘high bay’ – a spartan 81m (~265 ft) tall designed at the most basic level to shield final Starship and Super Heavy booster assembly from the elements. Situated near the southernmost tip of Texas and just a few miles west of the Gulf of Mexico, those “elements” can be less than pleasant at SpaceX’s primary Starship factory, ranging from sauna-like heat and humidity and mosquitoes the size of quarters to regular downpours, thunderstorms, tropical conditions, and even hurricanes.
While a great deal of work at Starbase is still done out in the open with little more than an umbrella as protection, SpaceX has nevertheless worked to find a middle ground where the most sensitive work (mainly structural welding) can be mostly shielded from wind and rain. First, SpaceX built a (relatively) tiny ‘windbreak’ too small for much of anything. Two years later, the windbreak is partially used for Starship nose section assembly – when a nose cone is stacked on and welded to a separate stack of four steel rings.
Updated 11:45 p.m. to correct lunar orbit payload.
COLORADO SPRINGS — Japanese lunar space transportation company ispace is developing its design for a larger lunar lander that will be built in the United States.
The Tokyo-based company unveiled the design of the lander at the 36th Space Symposium Aug. 23. The lander, being developed by the company’s U.S. office in Denver, will fly as soon as2024on the company’s third mission to the moon.
Following the iconic first view of a fully integrated Starship stack during fit checks on the Orbital Launch Site (OLS) mount, both Ship 20 and Booster 4 are being prepared for testing ahead of the milestone orbital launch attempt. Ship 20 has returned to the launch site, taking up suborbital Pad B ahead of proof testing objectives, while Booster 4 is undergoing final closeout work inside the High Bay.
The pre-launch campaign is ongoing while SpaceX makes preemptive moves on the future, with modifications to future Starships designs and the preparations to increase production cadence with a second, much larger, High Bay.
In just one month, SpaceX will make history with Inspiration4 — the world’s first all-civilian spaceflight — the mission’s crew couldn’t be more excited.
The mission is described as the ‘next epic leap forward for civilians’.
Netflix’s first trailer for a documentary series on SpaceX’s Inspiration4 private astronaut mission is here. Check it out.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that it has successfully demonstrated the operation of a “rotating detonation engine” for the first time in space. The novelty of the technologies in question is that such systems obtain a large amount of thrust by using much less fuel compared to conventional rocket engines, which is quite advantageous for space exploration.
On July 27 the Japanese agency launched a pair of futuristic propulsion systems into space to carry out the first tests. They were launched from the Uchinoura Space Center aboard the S-520–31, a single-stage rocket capable of lofting a 220 lbs (100 kg) payload well above 186 miles (300 km). After recovering the rocket from the ocean, the JAXA team of engineers analyzed the data and confirmed the success of the mission, which put the new system at an estimated altitude of (146 miles) 234.9 km.
The rotating detonation engine uses a series of controlled explosions that travel around an annular channel in a continuous loop. This process generates a large amount of super-efficient thrust coming from a much smaller engine using significantly less fuel – which also means sending less weight on a space launch. According to JAXA, it has the potential to be a game-changer for deep space exploration.
