Tag: commercial-space
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SpaceX just took a big step toward reusing Starship’s Super Heavy booster
SpaceX is having trouble with Starship’s upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket’s enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship’s first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company’s Starbase launch site in South…
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Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire. The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm…
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Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire. The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm…
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Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire. The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm…
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The first flight of Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket lasted just 40 seconds
The first flight of Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket didn’t last long on Sunday. The booster’s nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, punctuating the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular fiery crash into the sea. If officials at Isar Aerospace were…
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ESA finally has a commercial launch strategy, but will member states pay?
The European Space Agency is inviting proposals to inject competition into the European launch market, an important step toward fostering a dynamic multiplayer industry officials hope, one day, will mimic that of the United States. The near-term plan for the European Launcher Challenge is for ESA to select companies for service contracts to transport ESA…
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This launcher is about to displace the V-2 as Germany’s largest rocket
Seven years ago, three classmates at the Technical University of Munich believed their student engineering project might hold some promise in the private sector. At the time, Daniel Metzler led a team of 40 students working on rocket engines and launching sounding rockets. Josef Fleischmann was on the team that won the first SpaceX Hyperloop…
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Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon’s surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface. These are all important achievements, gathering data…
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The Starship program hits another speed bump with second consecutive failure
SpaceX’s Starship launcher spun out of control minutes after liftoff Thursday, showering fiery debris over the Bahamas and dealing another setback to Elon Musk’s rocket program after a failure under similar circumstances less than two months ago. Starship and its Super Heavy booster, loaded with millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants, lumbered…
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Firefly’s picture-perfect Moon landing shows the way for lunar exploration
Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make a picture-perfect landing on the Moon early Sunday, touching down on an ancient basaltic plain, named Mare Crisium, to fulfill a $101 million contract with NASA. The lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, settled onto the Moon’s surface at 2:34 am CST (3:34 am EST; 08:34 UTC). A…