Collaborate Disseminate
It’s true that I’m not known for keeping particularly regular hours, but even I had my doubts about this plan. We’d go to sleep around midnight, wake up at 3 AM, drive up the coast aimlessly, then turn around and attend a full-day event where we’d have to maintain at …read more
Continue reading There and Back Again: A Falcon 9 Launch Story
You’ve got to admit, things have been going exceptionally well for SpaceX. In the sixteen years they’ve been in operation, they’ve managed to tick off enough space “firsts” to make even established aerospace players blush. They’re the first privately owned company to not only design and launch their own orbital-class …read more
Continue reading When New Space Loses Out to NASA Pragmatism
The Beresheet lander will attempt the first private Moon landing on April 11. Continue reading Watch the First Private Moon Lander Ride to Orbit on a SpaceX Rocket
The constellation of three satellites will surveil 90 percent of the Earth from orbit, but a 2015 Falcon 9 explosion has delayed the launch. Continue reading Canada’s $1B Surveillance Project Is Delayed Because a SpaceX Rocket Exploded
What is the “twilight phenomenon” and why does it produce spectacular light displays during SpaceX rocket launches? Continue reading Why Do Some Rocket Launches Look Like UFOs?
Joe Barnard has spent the last three years pioneering DIY landing technologies for amateur rockets and now the aerospace industry is paying attention. Continue reading Meet the Amateur Rocketeer Building Self-Landing Replicas of SpaceX Rockets
When word first broke that Elon Musk was designing a kid-sized submarine to help rescue the children stuck in Thailand’s Tham Luang cave, it seemed like a logical thing for Hackaday to cover. An eccentric builder of rockets and rocket-launched electric sports cars, pushing his engineering teams and not inconsiderable financial resources into action to save children? All of that talk about Elon being a real life Tony Stark was about to turn from meme into reality; if the gambit paid off, the world might have it’s first true superhero.
With human lives in the balance, and success of the …read more
With the successful launch of the Bangabandhu-1 satellite on May 11th, the final version of the Falcon 9 rocket has finally become operational. Referred to as the “Block 5”, this version of the rocket is geared specifically towards reuse. The lessons learned from the recovery and reflight of earlier builds of the F9 have culminated into rocket that SpaceX hopes can go from recovery to its next flight in as few as 24 hours. If any rocket will make good on the dream of spaceflight becoming as routine as air travel, it’s going to be the Falcon 9 Block 5. …read more
Continue reading SpaceX’s Next Giant Leap: Second Stage Recovery
On April 2nd, 2018 a Falcon 9 rocketed skywards towards the International Space Station. The launch itself went off without a hitch, and the Dragon spacecraft delivered its payload of supplies and spare parts. But alongside the usual deliveries, CRS-14 brought a particularly interesting experiment to the International Space Station.
Developed by the University of Surrey, RemoveDEBRIS is a demonstration mission that aims to test a number of techniques for tackling the increasingly serious problem of “space junk”. Earth orbit is filled with old spacecraft and bits of various man-made hardware that have turned some areas of space into a …read more
On February 22nd, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and successfully delivered into orbit an Earth-observation satellite operated by the Spanish company Hisdesat. Compared to the media coverage received by the launch of the Tesla-laden Falcon Heavy earlier in the month, this mission got very little attention. But that’s hardly surprising. With respect to Hisdesat, the payload this time around was not terribly exciting, and even the normally dramatic landing of the Falcon 9’s first stage was skipped in favor of simply allowing the booster to crash into the ocean.
As far as …read more
Continue reading SpaceX Joins in the Long History of Catching Stuff from Space