SpaceX completed another monster equity funding round last week, sources said, sending the valuation of Elon Musk’s company to about $74 billion.
Gates wants to focus on fixing problems on earth instead of traveling into space.
Gates said he’d rather spend money on measles vaccines than traveling to space in a rocket.
The founder of a bootstrapped Seattle startup who launched his company on Kickstarter is looking to hitch a ride to space with a tech billionaire, and he’s using a video on Twitter to plead his case.
NASA, in collaboration with other leading space agencies, aims to send its first human missions to Mars in the early 2030s, while companies like SpaceX may do so even earlier. Astronauts on Mars will need oxygen, water, food, and other consumables. These will need to be sourced from Mars, because importing them from Earth would be impractical in the long term. In Frontiers in Microbiology, scientists show for the first time that Anabaena cyanobacteria can be grown with only local gases, water, and other nutrients and at low pressure. This makes it much easier to develop sustainable biological life support systems.
Thanks to the rise of commercial spaceflight, anyone with a little luck will be able to fly into space, all to serve a good cause.
After an aborted test in December, Richard Branson’s company will try again from New Mexico.
More Space news.
The Chinese Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully entered Mars orbit on February 102021, only one day after the United Arab Emirates mission Hope arrived at the red planet on February 9. They’ll be followed soon by NASA’s Perseverance mission which is set to arrive and land on February 18.
