Elon Musk had a phone interview for the Human to Mars Conference. He mentioned that there will be improvements for the Super Heavy Starship. SpaceX is spending $5 billion on the Super Heavy Starship development program. NASA is providing $100-150 million of support for a lunar version of Starship. A recent ArsTechnica article mentioned Starship …
NASA is targeting a July 30 launch for its Perserverance Mars mission. The Mars rover Perseverance was stacked atop its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on July 7. The Mars Perseverance rover will drill and collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside in a “cache” on the …
China Tianwen-1 spacecraft is ready to launch on a Long March 5. It could launch on July 23, 2020. China’s national strategy set Mars as the next target for planetary exploration after successful lunar mission. China’s first Mars mission is named Tianwen-1, and aims to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission. The Tianwen-1 …
People know that computers became a multi-trillion dollar industry because it rode the exponential growth in power of Moore’s Law. Aviation also experienced decades of exponential growth and Space has had ten years of exponential growth and is looking at 40 years of exponential growth. Air passenger travel had decades of exponential growth in passengers. …
SpaceX is still targeting 2022 for an unmanned Mars cargo mission and 2024 for a Mars manned mission. Is 2022 still the target for the first cargo mission to Mars with 2024 being the first crewed mission? — Wīłł (@Martian_Will) June 5, 2020 Yes — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2020 One dozen fleets of …
Direct comparisons were made between aerocapture and competing orbit insertion techniques based on state-of-the-art and advanced chemical propulsion, solar electric propulsion, and aerobraking. Aerocapture is enabling for three missions: delivery of spacecraft into elliptical orbits at Neptune and circular orbits at Jupiter or Saturn. Aerocapture significantly enhances five other missions by putting larger, and usually …
NASA NIAC fund work to use bioorganisms to perform atmospheric in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Utilizing 100% ISRU for propellant production, they aim to reduce the Entry Descent Landing (EDL) mass of a crewed mission to Mars by approximately 7 tons. This technology will enable long-term human presence on Mars and beyond because costly propellant deliveries …
Felix Schlang at What about It? has covered key news from Elon Musk’s Starship conversation with Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society. Elon Musk says currently there are 300 employees working on Starships in Boca Chica. Elon said by next year there will be 3,000 employees working on building a factory for mass-producing two …
The new House NASA funding bill is full of cost-plus contracts for Boeing. The new bill talks about Mars in 2033 but does not dedicate funds towards that goal. The White House Artemis Program pushed for the Moon as a cornerstone of human exploration for the next decade or two and to develop a lunar …
Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX is targeting for each fully reusable Starship to fly 3 flights per day. This will be 1000 flights per year. A fleet of ten Super Heavy starship would be able to take up to 1 million tons to orbit every year. They plan to build 100 Starships every year so …
The Carnival of Space 643 is up at the Urban Astronomer. Universe Today -NASA Maps Out the Water On Mars. Some Will Be So Easy to Get, You Could Dig it Out With a Shovel. This rainbow-colored map shows underground water ice on Mars. Cool colors represent less than one foot (30 centimeters) below the …
