"On Artemis III, we anticipate using at least two of the launch sites: one at KSC and one at Starbase."
Beautiful launch, gorgeous jellyfish, perfect landing :)
Omnispace says it is seeing interference from direct-to-device payloads on recently launched SpaceX Starlink satellites.
SpaceX is gearing up for Flight 4. The start of full stack testing on Thursday…
I can't wait to see this lift off! I've been following closely, but I'm still not sure what was their main hold-up. I really thought they could make early May before, but now late May or early June seem like the closest NET dates.
Either way I hope we're just a week or two away!
So far disruptions from the geomagnetic storm appear to be manageable.
The Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to start an environmental review of SpaceX Starship launches from a pad at the Kennedy Space Center.
I understand the sentiment, but I'm sorry to say I have seen absolutely no data that supports this. Perhaps you'd like to share a source?
Starlink soars: SpaceX's satellite internet surprises analysts with $6.6 billion revenue projection
Right? That's kind-of the weird thing, this milestone is very much attributable to Musk (and of course the countless engineers that make it happen) despite his... eccentricity, shall we say.
>SpaceX will hit 83 orbital launches from its KSC pad. That’s one more than the 82 shuttle launches that took place over the 30-year history of that program.
How cool!!
Polaris Dawn will be the first time that SpaceX employees have actually gone to space.
>Although government astronauts have conducted hundreds of spacewalks over the last 60 years, no private citizen has ever undertaken one. > >"This is important because we are going to get to the Moon and Mars one day, and we're going to have to get out of our vehicles, and out of the safety of the habitat to explore and build and repair things," Isaacman said. SpaceX has already said it is working on a second generation of the suit for operations on the Moon and Mars.
SpaceX has rolled out Ship 30 to complete its engine testing campaign and has completed…
Some photos:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMvd5rMW0AAYdrO?format=jpg&name=large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMvYxi4WoAAFum_?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMvYxi4WsAARFW9?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMvYxi4XsAAZljT?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMvYxi4WQAEnMwP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
Polaris Dawn page also features an update: https://polarisprogram.com/dawn/
More info on the suit on SpaceX's Human Spaceflight page: https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/
>In February 2022, Jared Isaacman and SpaceX announced the Polaris Program, an effort designed to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while also supporting important causes here on Earth. > >Polaris Dawn, the first of the program’s three human spaceflight missions, is targeted to launch to orbit no earlier than summer 2024. During the five-day mission, the crew will perform SpaceX’s first-ever Extravehicular Activity (more commonly known as an EVA or spacewalk) from Dragon, which will also be the first-ever commercial astronaut spacewalk. This historic milestone will also be the first time four astronauts will be exposed to the vacuum of space at the same time. > >Supporting the crew throughout the spacewalk will be SpaceX’s newly-developed EVA suit, an evolution of the Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit crews currently wear aboard Dragon human spaceflight missions. Developed with mobility in mind, SpaceX teams incorporated new materials, fabrication processes, and novel joint designs to provide greater flexibility to astronauts in pressurized scenarios while retaining comfort for unpressurized scenarios. The 3D-printed helmet incorporates a new visor to reduce glare during the EVA in addition to the new Heads-Up Display (HUD) and camera that provide information on the suit’s pressure, temperature, and relative humidity. The suit also incorporates enhancements for reliability and redundancy during a spacewalk, adding seals and pressure valves to help ensure the suit remains pressurized and the crew remains safe. > >All of these enhancements to the EVA suit are part of a scalable design, allowing teams to produce and scale to different body types as SpaceX seeks to create greater accessibility to space for all of humanity. > >While Polaris Dawn will be the first time the SpaceX EVA suit is used in low-Earth orbit, the suit’s ultimate destiny lies much farther from our home planet. Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require the development of a scalable design for the millions of spacesuits required to help make life multiplanetary.
You'd think so! Alas, it's nice to have a concise explanation for people who are not in the know.
The words may be similar, but astronomy (a science) and astrology (a divinatory practice) are very different things.
Bro! The feeling is mutual!
Just trying to keep adding interesting content to the community, in the hopes that other reddit migrators find a place full of good stuff and discover what a breath of fresh air we have here.
"I left SpaceX knowing the width of the Starship door."
Can the Falcon 9 eventually challenge Soyuz for launch totals?
>Landing 300 rockets means SpaceX has preserved 2,700 Merlin rocket engines. In round numbers, the dry mass of a Falcon 9 first stage is about 50 metric tons, so the landing of all these rockets has prevented 15,000 metric tons of metal and other materials from being dumped into the oceans—the equivalent, in mass, of about 100 residential homes.
Under NASA’s Artemis campaign, the agency and its partners will send large pieces of equipment to the lunar surface to enable long-term scientific exploration
After the historic IFT-3 launch in March, the Starship program is proceeding with plans to…
If it were to happen, a revised Artemis III mission could echo Apollo 9.
First launch of these operational vehicles may occur next month from California.
"It looked like a giant smoke monster."
I think I may have an idea of why this has been down-voted?
How much you buy into this vision will undoubtedly depend on your predilection toward Musk and your sense of the difficulty of forging habitable communities on an uninhabitable world like Mars.
I wonder who didn't click the article /s
With SLC-40 now ready for crew launches, there are four launch pads at Cape Canaveral designed to support astronaut flights, alongside crew-rated pads for NASA's Space Launch System and ULA's Atlas V rocket. A decade ago, there were none, and during the heyday of NASA's Apollo and shuttle programs, there were two.
If Gwynne Shotwell says six weeks, that means they're pretty damn confident!
Idk why you're being down-voted. It really is a breath of fresh air not to have people calling Musk a god (twitter is heckin WEIRD).
That being said, saying that SpaceX shouldn't have gotten the contract is an unusual take. Care to explain?
As for the funding, not only is it milestone-based (so they absolutely have not used it all up), but it's pretty easy to see that the majority of the investment is coming from SpaceX itself. Honestly NASA got a pretty sweet deal if you ask me!
A lot wrong here, I'm sorry to say, and I'm really not a fan of Musk. He is absolutely not selling Starlink to be used by Russia. That would be shut down real quick. (They may be using black-market terminals, but that's a different question.) And this new constellation will, as I understand it, be owned and operated by the US govt. Think like every single spy satellite ever: govt finds a contractor and asks them to do a thing.
Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.
This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Bluntly, this is absurd.
For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight.
That's right! Matches almost exactly what we saw in IFT-2. It was also cool to see that when stage 2 acceleration flattens out isn't an anomaly (as I thought after IFT-2) but rather a purposeful throttling to keep loads at ~3.5g's. And then you can see the step down as they cut off vacuum raptors first and then SECO!
Norminal is one of my favorite space-isms! I think nominal is just tradition at this point