The Carnival of Space 588 is up at Cosmoquest. We will look at the highlights of two featured articles and then list the other articles in the survey of the week in space news. Featured – SpaceX Starlink Satellite Network – Pushing Technology for Low Latency Universe Today – SpaceX Gives More Details on how …
Elon Musk has sent out an email to Tesla employees that states the current cost of a standard range Model 3 would be around $38,000. This seems to mean that with a 25% margin the car build cost is $30,400. In May, there was an Elon Musk tweet that building 10,000 units per week the …
Tesla opened its first Gigafactory on July 29, 2016 with only 14 percent of the factory operating. They had three out of twenty-one sections operating. They will reach full capacity and factory completion by 2020. The first Gigafactory is getting maxed out with the production of about 500,000 Tesla cars and charging battery products in …
The Lunar Gateway that NASA plans to build will end up costing about $40+ billion. It is being built to justify $60+ billion for the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule. The two together will be well over $100 billion. We have already spent about $30 billion on Space Launch System and the Orion …
The technology needed for mining water ice on the moon and converting it into fuel is pretty straight forward. Various groups are already making the actual needed hardware. Paragon Space Development and Giner are already making key pieces of what is needed. If we are making large amounts of fuel on the moon then we …
I noticed a couple of days ago a video by Peter Zeihan that made predictions about the US withdrawing as the global cop which would trigger World disorder, wars of the frequency seen between 1800-1945 and collapse in global trade. It also predicted that from this disorder than Japan would emerge as the dominant power …
Daily Galaxy and Physics-Astronomy are talking again about a September 2017 video that has an english title that says China is testing the controversial EMDrive in space. The video talks about China putting up a communication satellite. The English language title talks about EMdrive being tested and propellentless propulsion. EMdrive is a claimed propellentless propulsion …
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that are exploring a trade deal in which Washington would hold off on further tariffs through the spring in exchange for new talks looking at big changes in Chinese economic policy, said officials from the USA and China. It is possible this could be announced shortly after President Trump …
There was a prediction from Peter Zeihan that Japan, Argentina and Turkey would emerge as regionally dominant powers. Japan would dominate Asia, Argentina would dominate South America and Turkey would dominate the area of Europe and the Middle East near it. I will first look at Argentina versus Brazil and Argentina by itself. I will …
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says the U.S. is within 10 years of having a continuous manned presence on the moon, which will lay the groundwork for expanding space exploration to Mars. A Moon Direct plan (created by Robert Zubrin) could get continuously manned moon bases in four years. This is all better than nothing, but …
As regular commenters are aware, there was a recent switch from Vuukle to Spot.IM. If at all possible this will be the last comment system switch. Apologies for not providing enough specific callouts about the comment switch before the move. There was a mention I made in Vuukle comments but I should have provided more …