Carnival of Space 351

The Carnival of Space 351 is up at Universe Today

Brownspaceman.com – What are white holes? It’s just a theory for now and possibly all it will ever be however, why is that? Here we take a look at the definition of a white hole and what we understand about them.

Nextbigfuture- After flying to the edge of space, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster successfully returned to Earth, deployed its landing legs, and hovered for a moment. The ability, known as a soft landing, could allow the company to dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight and one day land rockets on Mars.

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talks at the event last summer and discussed the price points for a reusable Falcon 9. “If we get this right, and we’re trying very hard to get this right, we’re looking at launches to be in the 5 to 7 million dollar range, which would really change things dramatically,” Shotwell said.

Nextbigfuture – All of the old space based solar power designs are not workable. They are too big and too heavy. Reusable rockets and the Spacex Heavy will help make launches cheaper, but it is robotic assembly in space that will have more impact. Spiderfab will use robots to assemble structures in space. Spiderfab on orbit assembly can reduce the mass of space structures by 30 times. Also, the space based power should be used in space and not sent back down to earth. Only space based mirrors to reflect light to large solar farms on earth make sense. See the end of this article for the space based mirror system. Space based mirror only launch ultra thin and light inflatable mirrors (no power conversion, no energy storage, no lasers or masers to transmit the power etc…) and have them redirect sunlight to ground based solar farms at night. Efficiency is the ground based systems efficiency. Can be done at lower orbit 600 miles up with 12 or more satellites. Helps ground based solar get around the storage issue at night. So it does not involve beaming power over large distances which has not been achieved.

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