Lifeboat Foundation

First, scientists will have to figure out if it’s even feasible.

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.

Continue reading “Watch Netflix’s 1st trailer for the Inspiration4 documentary on SpaceX’s private spaceflight” »

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.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that there is a “slight error” with the current design of Starship’s forward flaps, necessitating a few small but visible changes on future prototypes of the spacecraft.

Measuring 9m (30 ft) wide and approximately 50m (~165 ft) from tip to tail, Starship is the combined upper stage, spacecraft, tanker, and lander of a two-stage, fully-reusable rocket with the same name. While SpaceX has a long ways to go to achieve it, the company’s ambition is for Starship and its Super Heavy booster to be the most easily and quickly reusable spacecraft and rocket booster ever built, nominally enabling the same-day reuse of both.

Beyond a Space Shuttle-style heat shield of blankets and ceramic tiles, the Starship upper stage is meant to achieve that reusability by descending through the atmosphere and landing unlike any other spacecraft, plane, or rocket ever flown. Instead of flying, gliding, or knifing through the atmosphere nose or tail-first, Starship freefalls perpendicular to the ground for the last few dozen kilometers (~10–20 mi) before aggressively flipping into a vertical orientation at the last second and landing propulsively on its tail. Now, according to Elon Musk, two of the four ‘flaps’ that largely make that exotic maneuver possible are set for a small but significant redesign.