Collaborate Disseminate
While early prototypes for SpaceX’s Starship have been exploding fairly regularly at the company’s Texas test facility, the overall program has been moving forward at a terrific pace. The towering spacecraft, which CEO Elon Musk believes will be the key to building a sustainable human colony on Mars, has gone …read more
SpaceX’s rocket landings have now become so routine that it’s easy to forget such a thing had never been accomplished five years ago. Its engineers’ recycling methods were in full swing again today, with the company sending up and welcoming back the sa… Continue reading SpaceX sends up the same recycled rocket for a record sixth time
The dust has barely settled on SpaceX’s history-making Demo-2 mission, in which a commercial spacecraft carried NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time, but already plans are underway for the vehicle’s next … Continue reading NASA and SpaceX set date for Crew Dragon’s first routine ISS trip
While its feats flying astronauts to and from the International Space Station rightly generate a lot of the headlines, the SpaceX team has been busily working on the vehicle that could take humans well past this point in low-Earth orbit. Development of… Continue reading Watch SpaceX’s shimmering Starship prototype fly to 500 feet
History was made today as two NASA astronauts returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a privately built and operated spacecraft. At 2:48 pm EDT, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico of… Continue reading SpaceX Demo-2 mission ends with first splashdown in 45 years
Put simply, the goal of any reusable booster is to reduce the cost of getting a payload into space. The comparison is often made to commercial aviation: if you had to throw away the airliner after every flight, nobody could afford the tickets. The fact that the plane can be …read more
Continue reading Falcon 9 Beats Shuttle’s Reflight Record, But Still Has a Long Way to Go
Using a ship out at sea to catch pieces of falling pieces of rocket might not be the most sophisticated of SpaceX’s recovery techniques, but it is a key part of its mission to recycle as many materials as possible. The company has today ticked off this… Continue reading SpaceX uses ships to catch both Falcon 9 fairings for the first time
Another couple of weeks, and a fresh crop of space news to run through as a quick briefing of the latest in the skies above us.
The global positioning orbits are getting pretty crowded, with GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, the EU’s Galileo, Japan’s QZSS, and now with the launch of the …read more
Continue reading Spacing Out; OneWeb Rescue, Starlink Base Stations, And Rocket Tests
SpaceX’s plans for deep-space travel get a lot of the headlines, but amid all the reusable rocketry and plans for Mars colonization, the company harbors ambitions that are a little closer to the home. After first floating the idea of using a massive sp… Continue reading SpaceX pursues ocean spaceports for hypersonic Earth-to-Earth travel
Orbiting over our heads right now are two human beings who flew to the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle on top of a Falcon 9. The majority of coverage focused on the years since human spaceflight last launched from Florida, but [Eric Berger] at Ars Technica …read more
Continue reading Blow Dryers And Metal Shears: Hacks of Early Falcon 9 Flights