On May 12th, SpaceX released an online simulator that allows internet users to try to dock the company’s newly developed Crew Dragon with the International Space Station.
Starlink’s transceiver gets pictured and Starship passes a key test. Tom Cruise in space? How can readers volunteer with the space community? It’s Musk Reads: SpaceX Edition #167.
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Star Trek fans get hyped as scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center have just unveiled a design for a warp drive ship. NASA scientist and Advanced Propulsion Team Lead Harold White revealed that he was investigating if a warp drive ship could travel faster than light and if so, how can we build one.
Continue reading “NASA releases design for a warp drive ship” »
Sometime in the next few hours, the body of a spent Chinese rocket will become the largest piece of space junk in decades to fall, uncontrolled, back towards Earth.
On May 5, a Long March 5B rocket launched a prototype crew capsule resembling a SpaceX Crew Dragon to orbit for a test. Now, after almost a week orbiting the Earth, the core stage of the large rocket is on a collision course with the upper atmosphere and whatever doesn’t burn up during its descent will impact the planet.
“It is the most massive object to make an uncontrolled reentry since the 39-tonne Salyut-7 in 1991,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, a prominent Harvard astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit, on Twitter.
Harold White left NASA in December to join a new nonprofit focused on building the technologies to bring humans to the outer solar system and beyond.
#MayTheFourthBeWithYou!
Perhaps they have what it takes to face the First Order, but do Kelly Marie Tran and Naomi Ackie have what it takes to train like astronauts?
The Star Wars duo spent the day at Johnson Space Center training like astronauts and learning about NASA’s plans to explore the Moon with the new #Artemis program, which includes landing the first woman and next man on the lunar surface by 2024. Follow Tran and Ackie – used to traveling through galaxies far, far away – through their training with NASA Astronauts Megan McArthur and Jessica Watkins!
NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed their final training sessions in Houston this week before their scheduled May 27 liftoff on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center, the first launch of humans from the Florida spaceport since 2011.
The two veteran space fliers participated in their final full-up launch simulation Monday, strapping into a Dragon simulator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and tying in with SpaceX and NASA teams at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Behnken tweeted Thursday that the crew’s formal training activities were complete. The astronauts were expected to have a few days of off-duty time before preparing to travel from their home base in Houston to the Kennedy Space Center on May 20.
The plan: launch a giant fleet of tiny spacecraft with powerful lasers and see where gravity drags them.
Circa 2016
Engineers are investigating whether living cells could be used to grow individual components of a ’bioship’
These solar sails could herald a new era of spaceflight in which spacecraft forgo the rocket motors they’ve relied on for decades.
Artist’s concept of LightSail 2 above Earth. Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society.
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