All posts tagged: lunar surface

We’re One Step Closer to Gas Stations in Space

We’re One Step Closer to Gas Stations in Space

Published by skeptic

SpaceX’s latest Starship mission flew further than before—and tested technology that could elevate humankind’s spacefaring status. Brandon Bell / Getty March 14, 2024, 11:50 AM ET SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth’s atmosphere. The flight was the third try in an ambitious testing campaign that began less than a year ago. The other attempts started with beautiful liftoffs, but stopped short of completing test objectives and ended in explosions. For today’s test, SpaceX changed up its designs and applied them to freshly made Starship prototypes, which are manufactured at a pace that, compared with the rest of rocket history, evokes chocolates coming down the conveyor belt toward Lucille Ball. …

Everyone Wants a Piece of the Moon

Everyone Wants a Piece of the Moon

Published by skeptic

For the past few days, mission control in Houston has been talking to the moon. It’s a throwback to an earlier space age, with a few tweaks. Mission control is not NASA, but a private American company called Intuitive Machines, sending instructions to an uncrewed lander about the size of a telephone booth. The spacecraft made a nail-biting descent to the lunar surface on Thursday, with a last-minute software patch to make up for malfunctioning navigation sensors. One of the spacecraft’s legs snagged the surface and the whole thing tipped over, landing on its side. But still: It was the first time an American spacecraft had landed on the moon in more than 50 years. The mission is the latest event in what has quickly become the busiest decade in lunar exploration since the 1960s. Government agencies and private companies in the United States, China, India, Japan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates have all dispatched lunar landers in the past five years, with varying degrees of success. Many more missions, both uncrewed and crewed, …

SpaceX Is Holding Up America’s Lunar Ambitions

SpaceX Is Holding Up America’s Lunar Ambitions

Published by skeptic

The second liftoff of Starship, SpaceX’s giant new rocket-and-spaceship system, went beautifully this morning, the fire of the engines matching the orange glow of the sunrise in South Texas. The spaceship soared over the Gulf Coast, with all 33 engines in the rocket booster pulsing. High in the sky, the vehicles separated seamlessly—through a technique that SpaceX debuted during this flight—and employees let out wild cheers. The booster soon exploded, but the flight could survive that. What mattered was that Starship was still flying. It could still coast along the edge of space, and then plunge back to Earth, crashing into the Pacific Ocean off of the coast of Hawaii, as SpaceX planned. But then, as SpaceX mission control waited to hear a signal from Starship, there was only silence. Something had gone wrong after the ship shut off its engines in preparation to coast. The self-destruct system kicked in, and Starship blew itself up, according to SpaceX’s commentators, who were narrating the livestream. A “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as SpaceXers call it. SpaceX can certainly …

Space Tourism Is Getting More Secretive

Space Tourism Is Getting More Secretive

Published by skeptic

Of all the high-flying tourism ventures spawned by space-obsessed billionaires, Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, offers perhaps the most unconventional approach. It doesn’t use big rockets or gumdrop-shaped capsules. Instead, an airplane takes off with a spacecraft strapped to its wing. The spacecraft, shaped like a plane itself, holds the paying customers and more pilots. When the airplane reaches a certain altitude, it releases the spacecraft. The spacecraft’s pilots then ignite its engine, and the vehicle soars straight up, to the fuzzy boundary that separates us from the rest of the universe, before gliding back down and landing on a runway. The spaceplane experience is a stark contrast to Blue Origin’s suborbital jaunts and SpaceX’s orbital missions, but Virgin Galactic’s passengers still have a few surreal minutes of weightlessness, and they get to see the planet gleaming against the darkness of space. Those passengers have included the first former Olympian to reach space, as well as the first mother-daughter duo, and, most recently, the first Pakistani. In the midst of all that, Virgin Galactic …