Collaborate Disseminate
When it comes to SpaceX, or perhaps more accurately its somewhat eccentric founder and CEO Elon Musk, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. For as many incredible successes SpaceX has had, there’s an equal number of projects or ideas which get quietly delayed or shelved entirely once …read more
Continue reading Everything We Know About SpaceX’s Starlink Network
There’s no shortage of ways a satellite in low Earth orbit can fail during the course of its mission. Even in the best case scenario, the craft needs to survive bombardment by cosmic rays and tremendous temperature variations. To have even a chance of surviving the worst, such as a …read more
Continue reading Why Satellites of the Future Will be Built to Burn
The world’s most powerful operational rocket is open for business. Continue reading Watch SpaceX Land Three Falcon Boosters for the First Time
Things aren’t looking good for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). Occasionally referred to as the “Senate Launch System”, or even less graciously, the “Rocket to Nowhere”, the super heavy-lift booster has long been a bone of contention for those in the industry. Designed as an evolution of core Space Shuttle …read more
On February 22nd, a Falcon rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying the Indonesian communications satellite Nusantara Satu. While the satellite was the primary payload for the mission, as is common on the Falcon 9, the rocket had a couple of stowaways. These secondary payloads are generally experiments or …read more
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
Followers of the Church of Elon will no doubt already be aware of SpaceX’s latest technical triumph: the test firing of the first full-scale Raptor engine. Of course, it was hardly a secret. As he often does, Elon has been “leaking” behind the scenes information, pictures, and even video of the event on his Twitter account. Combined with the relative transparency of SpaceX to begin with, this gives us an exceptionally clear look at how literal rocket science is performed at the Hawthorne, California based company.
This openness has been a key part of SpaceX’s popularity on the Internet (that, …read more
Continue reading The “Impossible” Tech Behind SpaceX’s New Engine
SpaceX launched a rocket this week, and things did not go as planned. The hydraulics on the grid fins were stuck when the first stage started its atmospheric recovery, and the booster became a fish. The booster landed about a mile or so offshore, which meant we got some great footage of a failed landing, and there are even better shots of the guts of a landed booster. [Scott Manley] whipped out a video showing the ‘new’ discoveries of what’s going on inside a Falcon 9 booster. Interestingly: the weight of the upper stage is carried through the thrust plate …read more
Joe Barnard founded a company with the aim of matching the technical achievements in the space industry at the hobby rocket scale. Motherboard went to visit him to see how his tests of self-landing rockets are coming along. Continue reading Watch a DIY Rocketeer Attempt to Land His Model Rocket Like SpaceX