Items tagged with SpaceX
SpaceX was hoping that it’s third attempt at a controlled Falcon 9 landing on a floating barge would be a charm, but those hopes went up in smoke this morning. In fact, SpaceX didn’t even get a chance to get close to landing on the barge, as the Falcon 9 launch vehicle exploded during ascent. The SpaceX Falcon 9, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral promptly at 10:21am EST for its seventh Commercial Resupply Services flight (CRS-7), broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean just minutes after liftoff. Onboard were over two and a half tons of supplies for the crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS), a much ballyhooed Boeing-built docking adapter that would “give Boeing’s CST-100 and...
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Since it unveiled HoloLens in January, Microsoft has wanted us all to believe that its AR product can deliver an out-of-this-world experience. Now, it's proven that it's willing to go to great lengths to prove it. In a partnership with NASA for a project called Sidekick, Microsoft is going to be sending two HoloLens units up to the International Space Station, with transit provided by SpaceX, during its seventh resupply mission to the station. With astronauts equipped with HoloLens, NASA hopes that it will help both improve the work they're able to do, as well as make things easier for the engineers back on Earth. "The goal of Sidekick is to enable station crews with assistance when and where...
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This spring has been an important one for SpaceX. Elon Musk’s space flight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a barge (though a little too hard) and then completed a successful abort test for the Dragon capsule. So far, the spotlight has generally been on what SpaceX can do for our astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS). Today, the U.S. Air Force announced that it has certified SpaceX for “national security space launch missions.”The announcement was made by Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, Commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC). “The SpaceX and SMC teams have worked hard to achieve certification,” Greaves said in a statement. “And we’re also maintaining...
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We’ve been following SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon rocket development with the giddiness of millions of children decades ago during the lead up to NASA landing a man on the moon. With the Space Shuttle out of commission and the U.S. relying on Russia to blast our astronauts into space, it’s up to companies like SpaceX to help take over the heavy lifting when it comes to ferrying crew to and from the International Space Station (ISS). When we last left SpaceX, the company successfully launched an unmanned Dragon capsule (making its sixth successful resupply mission) to the ISS, but had less success with its planned vertical landing of the Falcon 9 rocket on a barge platform. Close, but no...
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The good news for SpaceX is that its Dragon resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was a resounding success. This was the sixth Commercial Resupply Services flight (CRS-6) of fifteen planned. Falcon 9 rocket approaches the barge platform (Source: SpaceX) The Dragon capsule blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 4:10 pm EST this afternoon atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Dragon was successfully placed into orbit and will rendezvous with the ISS on Friday morning. The Dragon is loaded with just over 4,000 pounds of cargo including 1,103 pounds of supplies for the ISS crew and over 1,200 pounds of hardware and equipment. The remainder of the payload is occupied by equipment and hardware for...
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If the latest report from The Information is accurate, SpaceX is heading towards a valuation north of $10 billion. Google is reportedly looking to invest heavily into SpaceX and would help to fund the company’s effort to create a “Space Internet” via micro-satellites that would not only bring low-cost Internet to the masses, but also provide a space-based network to enable communications with future colonies on Mars. Google would of course be the primary investor, but there are a number of additional smaller investors that would also get in on this round of funding for the company.Virgin is investing in OneWeb, which will provide a similar "satellite constellation" around Earth. SpaceX would...
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You have to hand it to Tony Stark, err, I mean Elon Musk. The man helped to co-found PayPal and he’s the CEO of Tesla Motors, which has brought us wonderful electric vehicles like the Roadster and the outrageous Model S P85D. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the “successful failure” of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event. And let’s not forget that Musk is also the chairman of SolarCity, which produces commercial- and consumer-grade solar panels. You would think...
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If anyone can make failure look like a magnificent achievement in rocket design, launch, and recovery, then it’s definitely Elon Musk. On Saturday, SpaceX launched a Dragon capsule into space via its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. The Dragon went on to make its fifth successful cargo run to the International Space Station, while the Falcon 9 was scheduled to make history by landing vertically on a 300 ft. by 100 ft. target under power… at sea… in the dark.SpaceX's floating barge, docked just days before the Falcon 9's attempted landing SpaceX was nearly able to successfully accomplish its mission with Dragon 9, but Musk tweeted Saturday morning: Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard....
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a dreamer, but he also has a lot of money, some serious brain power of his own, and now he also has the support of the crowdsourced JumpStartFund and two engineers with impressive resumes that are going to help him create his Hyperloop transportation system. The project will be headed up by Drs. Marco Villa and Patricia Galloway. Villa was the former director of SpaceX mission operations, and Galloway was the first woman President of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), among numerous other achievements. Hyperloop passenger capsule Musk’s proposed Hyperloop system would be solar powered and would use a linear induction motor with a compressor to accelerate...
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We've covered Elon Musk's proposed Hyperloop before, including some speculation on what kind of system he might propose. The mass transit concept unveiled today is similar, in some respects, to the evacuated vacuum tube first proposed by the Rand Corporation in 1972, but varies in a number of key areas. It doesn't rely on maintaining a full vacuum, but instead offers an atmosphere roughly 1/6 pressure found on Mars, or equivalent to cruising Earth at 150,000 feet. As expected, the initial LA - SF proposed run would accelerate passengers to trans-sonic velocities, but they wouldn't do it using maglev. Instead, a linear induction motor is used to provide the necessary acceleration and deceleration,...
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If space truly is the final frontier, then one company just took another small step toward the eventual giant leap toward reaching space. SpaceX, (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), a privately-held space-transportation company, just conducted a successful test of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle's first-stage rocket booster. This comes less than two months after SpaceX successfully launched its two-stage, Falcon 1 rocket to become "the first privately-developed liquid fuel rocket to achieve Earth orbit." Where Falcon 1 is designed to launch small payloads into low-earth orbit, the Falcon 9 is designed to carry heavier payloads and travel further above the Earth, such as into geostationary...
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What do you know? The fourth time is the charm, at least for the Falcon 1 two-stage SpaceX rocket. This was the fourth flight of the rocket, and it became the first commercial space vehicle to reach earth orbit. Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX, who made his fortune as co-founder of PayPal prior to starting this space venture, said: "This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team. The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull's-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake."Of course, the saddest part about the failure of flight 3 was the loss of not just...
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