Lifeboat Foundation

The first commercial flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy ended with two boosters touching down on land while a third alighted on its drone ship out at sea.

On April 13, the crew had already traveled 200,000 miles away from Earth when one of the oxygen tanks exploded, forcing them to abort the mission and head back, fighting for their own survival.

You may be familiar with the immortal line “Houston, we have a problem,” which was supposedly uttered by Lovell in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.” Actually, the real quote was “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and it was Swigert who said it.

#FlipFacts

Continue reading “Today in Science History: The third manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 13, kicked off with the launch of the Odyssey spacecraft” »

It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018.

End analysis: No long term or irreversible damage due to long term space exposure.

Here’s what happens on long-duration space missions.

Scientists have taken a major step towards creating an aircraft of the future, one powered by an ion drive rather than using moving parts and fuel like conventional aircraft.

In a paper published today in Nature, a team led by Steven Barrett from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described how they created a so-called electroaerodynamic-powered plane, one that uses solid-state propulsion, meaning no propellers or jet engines with expendable fuel.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Created A Star Trek-Like Plane That Flies Using ‘Ion Thrusters’ And No Fuel” »

If Beresheet succeeds, Israel will become just the fourth nation to land a spacecraft softly on the moon, following the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Beresheet is currently orbiting the moon and remains on an “excellent” track, said its operators, the nonprofit group SpaceIL and the company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

Engineers are testing ion propulsion systems for the next generation of aircraft now, writes Paul Willis.

Reaction Engines, which is based in Oxfordshire, has tested their new pre-cooler’ technology — which allows aircraft to travel faster than ever with a Sabre engine designed to take planes into orbit.

Japan’s space agency wants to create a moon base with the help of robots that can work autonomously, with little human supervision.

The project, which has racked up three years of research so far, is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the construction company Kajima Corp., and three Japanese universities: Shibaura Institute of Technology, The University of Electro-Communications and Kyoto University.

Recently, the collaboration did an experiment on automated construction at the Kajima Seisho Experiment Site in Odawara (central Japan).

Continue reading “Can Robots Build a Moon Base for Astronauts? Japan Hopes to Find Out” »