Carnival of Space 299

The Carnival of Space 299 is up at Tranquility Base

The Meridiani Journal – There’s a lot of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, thanks to comet impact

Nextbigfuture Contributions

Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, says his company is planning to fire up SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engine for the first time in flight on Monday — a “historic” blast that is expected to send the space plane supersonic.

The Harvard Business Review looks at Spacex’s process for cost innovation. The Spacex process — having a big goal,learning from the past, looking at the whole picture to find and prioritize opportunities, then refining key aspects of the space flight model to achieve their objective — is an approach that can make any organization more creative about cutting costs.

Is this the century we build starships ? Starship Century is a symposium (May 21-23, 2013 in San Diego) coordinated by the new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination in collaboration with Gregory and James Benford, presenting ideas from their anthology of science and science fiction.

SpaceX’s Grasshopper flew 250 meters (820 feet) straight up, tripling the height flown on its previous leap. The video provides a great overhead view from SpaceX’s hexacopter. Spacex will go higher and faster in each of a series of flights this year and they hope to reach hypersonic speed before 2013 is out.The maximum mission altitude would be increased from 670 feet incrementally up to 11,500 feet. The altitude test sequence likely would be 1,200 feet; 2,500 feet; 5,000 feet; 7,500 feet; and 11,500 feet. The maximum test duration would be approximately 160 seconds.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks