Collaborate Disseminate
In April the US House of Representatives passed an Act that says, “Outer space shall not be considered a global commons.” Continue reading American Capitalism Is Suffocating the Endless Possibilities of Space
The International Space Station is one of our leading frontiers of science and engineering, but it’s easy to forget that an exotic orbiting laboratory has basic needs shared with every terrestrial workplace. This includes humble office equipment like a printer. (The ink-on-paper kind.) And if you thought your office IT is slow to update their list of approved equipment, consider the standard issue NASA space printer draws from a stock of modified Epson Stylus 800s first flown on a space shuttle almost twenty years ago. HP signed on to provide a replacement, partnering with Simplexity who outlined their work as …read more
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
Watch “Mad” Mike Hughes beat his own previous record by launching himself to just under 1,900 feet in a homebrew rocket. Continue reading Flat Earther Survives Rocket Launch, Earth Still Round
Musk deleted SpaceX and Tesla’s Facebook pages on Friday in support of #deletefacebook. Continue reading A Brief History of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Publicly Beefing
The entrepreneur also said he would delete the official SpaceX Facebook page. Continue reading Elon Musk: ‘What’s Facebook?’
Derek Klingenberg’s “cow art” is a clever mix of math and cattle. Continue reading This Farmer Sent a Message to Tesla’s ‘Spaceman’ Using Cows
Hackaday readers are well aware of the problems caused by materials left exposed to the environment over time, whether that be oxidized contact pads on circuit boards or plastics made brittle from long exposure to the sun’s UV rays.
Now consider the perils faced by materials on the International Space Station (ISS), launched beginning in 1998 and planned to be used until 2028. That’s a total of 30 years in an environment of unfiltered sunlight, extreme temperatures, micrometeoroids, and even problems caused by oxygen. What about the exposure faced by the newly launched Tesla Roadster, an entirely non-space hardened vehicle …read more
Continue reading Lost In Space: How Materials Degrade In Space
“The load of bacteria on the Tesla could be considered a biothreat—or a backup copy of life on Earth.” Continue reading Elon Musk’s Bacteria-Covered Space Car May Be a ‘Biothreat’
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